Red Sea Stability Demands Ethiopia’s Seat at the Table – IFA
As a vital region of the world, the Red Sea is experiencing geopolitical and geo-economic shocks due to the changing international power dynamics and the erosion of the international order. These shifts present both strategic opportunities and risks. Investing in an inclusive and open regional dialogue and cooperation framework is crucial for the countries in this strategic region to navigate the intensifying global power competition, stabilize the Red Sea, and establish a shared economic and security zone.
However, Egypt's geostrategic vision for the Red Sea aims to perpetuate rivalry, further destabilizing the region. Egypt continues to divide the broader Red Sea region based on the concept of 'bordering' and 'non-bordering' countries. In collaboration with Eritrea, Egypt intensifies efforts to reshape the geography, governance, and future of the Red Sea without Ethiopia's involvement. Egypt defines the Red Sea as an extension of coastal states, advocating for a governance structure that excludes Ethiopia's historical presence, agency, autonomy, and interest in shaping the future of this vital water strip, which is crucial for its survival, security, and prosperity.
The notion of Red Sea governance for coastal states needs reevaluation, as it promotes monological closed regionalism, group politics, and unilateralism. This perspective omits the presence and core interests of riparian countries, including Ethiopia, South Sudan, Oman, Israel, and the UAE. It also denies all countries, including middle and major powers, their rights to this vital trade, energy, transportation, and security artery.
Egypt's Red Sea Vision: Decoupling Ethiopia from the Broader Red Sea
Egypt has been instrumental in shaping the Red Sea narrative through littoral-centrism, as evidenced by the formation of the Council of Arab and African States Bordering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in 2020 in Riyadh. Despite Saudi Arabia's efforts to restore normalization between Eritrea and Ethiopia and rehabilitate the Ports of Massawa and Assab, Eritrea, alongside Egypt, opposed the Council's expansion, which aimed to secure and develop the broader Red Sea. Egypt and Eritrea jointly rejected the idea of including Ethiopia, even as an observer, effectively excluding Ethiopia from the shared economic and security zone of the wider Red Sea.
This narrative is rooted in Egypt's domineering geopolitical discourse, characterized by hegemonism, expansionism, and a sphere of influence over the Nile and Red Sea basins, shaping its foreign and national security policies. The Council promotes bloc mentality, re-graphing the Red Sea as a divider between littoral and non-littoral states to ostracize Ethiopia's participation in the maritime space. Egypt's leadership addresses the Nile and Red Sea with monocentric norms, rules, and architecture, favoring a few over a pluricentric regionalism that fosters greater representation.
This approach suggests Egypt's intent to perpetuate Ethiopia's underdevelopment and insecurity, viewing it as a means to safeguard Egypt's security and prosperity. Through brinkmanship and local collaborators, Egypt has successfully delinked Ethiopia from the Red Sea for three decades.
For decades, Egypt has actively worked to marginalize the Horn of African states in its foreign policy and geostrategic zone of influence, attempting to isolate and weaken Ethiopia by leveraging the African side of the Red Sea. Egypt continues to push countries in this strategic region to align with its regional agenda, collectively strangling and decoupling Ethiopia from the seas.
In its pursuit of weakening Ethiopia, Egypt has maintained regional primacy over North East Africa, fostering division, antagonizing Ethiopia with its neighbors, and causing 'hot wars' in what was known as the cold war period. This strategy has persisted in the post-cold war era, turning the region into a geostrategic wasteland in international affairs.
Egypt's aggressive stance towards Ethiopia is aimed at excluding Ethiopia from its role in conflict resolution, mediation, peacekeeping, energy and power trade, green diplomacy, and integrated development efforts in the region.
Despite the challenges of weakening, fragmentation, and failure to capitalize on past opportunities, the Horn of Africa region, with its resilient, daring, and entrepreneurial people, has endured geopolitical maneuvers. The Horn of Africa cannot afford to lose momentum in a contested and fractured world order, as it must transform its strategic location, resources, demography, and markets into strategic advantages for growth and autonomy.
A Geopolitically Reawakened Ethiopia: Pivoting to the Broader Red Sea
Ethiopia, which has forgotten geography for the last three decades, is now reevaluating its physical realities. It views geography as the mother of history, defining threats and opportunities, as Professor Ali Mazrui once said. Ethiopia approaches international affairs with multiple partnerships and pragmatic humility, balancing and principled diplomacy, making autonomy central to its international policy and external relations, as Professor Mesfin Woldemariam suggests.
Ethiopia recognizes the importance of a coastline in the face of increasing disruption, militarization, and crises in the Red Sea, which threaten its survival. Ethiopia's exclusion from emerging political and security governance arrangements in the Red Sea is akin to its erasure from the geo-epistemic, geopolitical, and geo-economic climate of the broader Red Sea.
Ethiopia is now openly advocating for its sovereign access to the sea, adopting a strategic calm, patient diplomacy, dialogic partnership, and indivisible security posture. It is engaging constructively with the world to address its maritime vulnerability, work towards stabilization, and create a maritime space for collective security and prosperity. By addressing Ethiopia's access to the sea, there is an opportunity for all to participate in reshaping a new model of Red Sea governance based on reason, fairness, openness, and cooperation. Ethiopia's goal is not dominance but coexistence and the humanization of the Red Sea, transforming the wider region into a collective Red Sea community.
However, Egypt and Eritrea revert to the imaginary abstraction of framing the Red Sea through the lens of an 'Arab Lake,' contrary to the geopolitical, geo-economic, and geo-socio-cultural history and contemporary reality of the Red Sea as a bridge between Arabia and Africa. The Red Sea is now an Afro-Arab sea, making cooperation imperative for economic diversification and modernization in both regions. This has been evident in existing and emerging platforms of cooperation between Africa and Arabia, including the Africa-Arab Summit, IGAD-GCC Consultation, and Saudi-Arab Summit frameworks.
Beyond the Red Sea, Egypt clings to the imaginary 'rights' of the colonial past, refusing to adapt to a world that has fundamentally changed. Ethiopia, on the other hand, is a geopolitically reawakened nation with a strong resolve, regional vision, and resilient leadership, adjusting to the geopolitical rebalancing of the world and making breakthroughs in various domains of national life, from food and energy to connectivity, military modernization, smart green technology, and the digital economy.
Ethiopia has demonstrated to the region and Africa how to navigate perpetual geopolitical hostilities, develop independent thought and action, and stand as a beacon of independent development in Africa and beyond. With the recent inauguration of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Ethiopia has achieved an economic Adwa in Guba, aiming for shared prosperity and transforming the geopolitical reality of the continent. GERD and the Nile River are becoming regional connectors for African integration and modernization.
Furthermore, Ethiopia, along with Nile Basin countries, is making strides in liberating the Nile from colonial claims while reorganizing hydro-politics based on the principle of fair and reasonable utilization of Nile resources. Guided by Pan-Africanism, multilateralism, fairness, and reason, and supported by a promising future, the Nile Basin countries are making notable progress in the operationalization of the Nile River Basin Commission to govern the development and management of the Nile's waters.
Despite Egypt's observation of the region's paradigm shift, it continues to view obstacles and divides the Nile and Red Sea. This framing fails to reconcile with the evolving reality. Egypt's strategic coordination to decouple Ethiopia from the sea undermines regional peace and security with global implications. Similarly, the governance architecture of the Red Sea, taking a littoral character to corner Ethiopia from the seas, complicates the already troubled Red Sea region.
Ethiopia's Red Sea Vision: Building a Sea of Shared Afro-Arabian Community
Ethiopia views the Red Sea as a shared Afro-Arab trans-regional space, with political, security, and economic governance managed by bilateral mechanisms and inclusive, common multilateral arrangements to enhance regional peace, stability, and prosperity.
Ethiopia strives to ensure that regional political and security, governance, and socio-economic cooperation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is supported by inclusive multilateral arrangements, engaging all sides, including riparian and immediate shoreline states.
Moreover, Ethiopia emphasizes the transition of the multilateral maritime landscape of Red Sea security from the littoral phase to the wider Red Sea basin, with inclusivity as its organizing principle, to make these platforms sustainable and achieve sustainable peace and development.
The Council of Arab and African Coastal States of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can fulfill its strategic goal by including Ethiopia, making it relevant in the emergence of a new regional order and transforming the maritime region into a shared Afro-Arabian space, aligning the security and economic interests of all.
Ethiopia, alongside IGAD and the AU, is ready to explore synergies between the IGAD Red Sea Taskforce and the Red Sea Council for greater maritime security, connectivity, and commerce.
Additionally, Ethiopia is eager to strengthen IGAD-GCC consultation and deepen strategic cooperation with Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to enhance regional economic cooperation and safeguard regional peace and security in the wider Red Sea region. Ethiopia also aims to partner with Gulf Arab states to promote the representation, interest, and voice of Horn and Gulf countries in global governance institutions.
In conclusion, the Red Sea governance architecture should be forged with and grounded on the principle of inclusion rather than erasure, enabling both regions to leverage the potential for greater Afro-Arabian cooperation and building a Red Sea community.
