The Horn Is Being Rearranged. Tigray Must Not Remain Outside the Room.
The danger is not simply that the Horn is being rearranged without Tigray in the room. The deeper danger is that Tigray may fail to read that rearrangement in time to convert its institutional reconstitution into political leverage.
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Washington is helping rearrange the Horn of Africa around interests that are larger than Tigray, and in some cases larger than Ethiopia itself. Egypt is reading the Nile. Washington is reading the Red Sea. Addis Ababa is reading regime survival and regional repositioning. Asmara is reading the chance to end isolation.
Tigray must read all of them before the architecture hardens. This is not a statement of powerlessness. It is a warning against late recognition. The danger is not only that others are making arrangements without Tigray in the room. The deeper danger is that Tigray may understand the meaning of those arrangements only after they have already become structure.
I have been trying, as an ordinary Tigrayan professional who follows these things closely, to make sense of the diplomatic activity Washington has been engaged in across the Horn of Africa these past few weeks. The moves are coming fast. The US and Eritrea are apparently normalizing, with sanctions that were imposed for documented atrocities in Tigray now reportedly being reconsidered as Washington recalibrates around Red Sea priorities. The US and Ethiopia signed a Bilateral Structured Dialogue Framework on May 11, covering trade, security cooperation, and regional peace. Secretary Rubio met with Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister and praised Ethiopia’s role in de-escalation. Envoy Massad Boulos has been shuttling between Asmara and Cairo.
What follows is not a claim to know every private understanding behind these diplomatic moves. It is an attempt to read the direction of travel from the visible pattern of events. From a distance, this looks like active American diplomacy in a region that badly needs it. When I look more carefully at the architecture underneath these moves, I see something different. I see Washington managing the Horn through a framework that was not designed with Tigray in mind, and was not designed with the long-term interests of either Eritrea or Tigray as a serious consideration. That is not malicious. But it has consequences that both Eritrean and Tigrayan political leadership need to think through now, not after the arrangements harden.
Tigray was not in any of these rooms. It was not mentioned in any of these frameworks. That absence is not accidental.
When I try to understand what is actually driving US engagement in this region, I find that the answer is not the Horn of Africa itself. The anchor relationships that organize US foreign policy under the current administration are Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Everything else, including Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and by extension Tigray, is managed instrumentally through those three relationships.
Ethiopia matters to this framework because of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Nile. Egypt cannot consolidate its regional position while an unresolved water dispute generates domestic political pressure at home. Trump called Abiy Ahmed a strong leader and offered to mediate on GERD. What I read in that language is not a partnership offer. It is a set of conditions being communicated to Addis Ababa. Resolve the Nile question. Do not create Red Sea complications. Manage your internal problems without escalation that embarrasses Washington. In exchange, the bilateral relationship is restored, commercial engagement is normalized, and the Eritrea problem gets managed in a way that reduces one of Ethiopia’s external pressure points.
Eritrea matters because of Assab and the Bab el-Mandeb. The US-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have made the Red Sea the primary maritime corridor for global trade. Eritrea sits on more than 1,100 kilometers of Red Sea coastline directly opposite Saudi Arabia. The sanctions imposed in connection with documented atrocities in Tigray are now reportedly being reconsidered as Washington recalibrates around Red Sea priorities. The message to Asmara is the mirror image of the message to Addis Ababa. Cooperate on Red Sea access. Do not go to war with Ethiopia. Let Washington broker your relationship with your neighbor. In exchange, decades of isolation end.
I do not dispute that both of these offers are real and that both parties have something to gain from accepting them. What I want to examine is the shelf life of what is being offered, and what is being quietly set aside in the process of offering it.
What matters to me is not the protocol detail of who sat in which room. What I find significant is that Cairo appears to have become the passageway through which Washington and Asmara are being brought closer together. Egyptian diplomacy appears to have played a central role in facilitating the emerging US-Eritrea channel, with American engagement with Asmara reportedly taking place through a Cairo-centered diplomatic route. When I ask why Egypt would invest in arranging this, I do not think the answer lies primarily in Red Sea security. I think it lies in the Nile.
Egypt has spent the past two years constructing a pressure architecture around Ethiopia. It has deployed troops to Somalia, placing Egyptian forces on Ethiopia’s southeastern flank. It has aligned itself with the Sudanese Armed Forces in Sudan’s civil war. It has worked to deepen security ties between external actors and Eritrea. Egypt’s regional diplomacy appears increasingly shaped by a desire to strengthen its leverage over Ethiopia on the Nile question. Ethiopia completed GERD’s fifth and final filling in October 2024 and inaugurated full operations in September 2025, a fait accompli that Egypt still refuses to accept.
Washington may believe it is gaining a strategic partner on the Red Sea. The risk is that, in practice, it also lends American credibility to a regional pressure architecture shaped substantially by Cairo’s interests. I note that Isaias Afwerki has allied, in his political lifetime, with Israel, then Iran, the UAE, then Qatar, and now apparently the United States. His consistent pattern is to take what external patrons offer while preserving maximum freedom of action for himself. Confidence that he will reliably serve US interests on the Red Sea in exchange for sanctions relief requires a reading of his history that the record itself does not support.
What I want both Eritrean and Tigrayan political leadership to see clearly is this: the Horn of Africa is being rearranged partly by actors whose primary interest is a river, not the people who live between the Red Sea and the Ethiopian highlands.
The May 11 Bilateral Structured Dialogue Framework did not emerge only because Washington suddenly rediscovered Ethiopia. It came at a moment when Tigray’s institutional reconstitution and the impulsive federal reaction to it had forced external actors to recalibrate their management of Ethiopia before the situation widened into something harder to contain. The BSD Framework is, in part, a stabilization response to that pressure. But Tigray itself was still absent from the framework that followed. It institutionalizes Washington’s engagement with Addis Ababa across trade, security, and regional peace simultaneously, without any reference to Pretoria Agreement implementation, the return of displaced Tigrayans, Western Tigray’s territorial status, or accountability for what happened between 2020 and 2022.
The broader normalization pattern extends beyond Washington alone. In the same week the BSD Framework was signed, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva visited Addis Ababa and publicly praised Ethiopia’s reform trajectory, describing the country as entering current global challenges from a position of strength. Simultaneously, Ethiopia continued to attract major external investment commitments, including a large-scale renewable energy licence granted to a Chinese firm covering regions that include Afar — the region that shares a border with Tigray. The federal government is not entering this period as an isolated actor. It is being inserted into multiple international confidence frameworks at the same moment that Tigray’s unresolved political and humanitarian situation remains outside the core agenda of any of them.
I do not think this is an oversight. The Africa Report observed on the day the framework was signed that the new bilateral consultations place Ethiopia at the centre of Horn of Africa security diplomacy, despite unresolved tensions over Tigray. That phrase, “despite unresolved tensions over Tigray,” tells me what I need to know. Washington appears to have concluded that Tigray’s situation is a background condition to manage, not a problem to solve. The stability frame that now organizes international engagement with Ethiopia is one that Abiy Ahmed defines. When the EU expressed great concern about the Baito reconstitution, it appeared to be operating within that stability frame rather than foregrounding the prior question of Pretoria’s non-implementation.
Before Ethiopia’s June 2026 federal election, this means that the window for external pressure toward Pretoria implementation is at its narrowest since the agreement was signed. I believe that window is closing, not opening.
After June, the structural situation becomes harder to shift. A post-election federal government carries a renewed democratic mandate that the international community will recognize regardless of how the election is actually conducted. The BSD Framework will have survived an Ethiopian election cycle and become a feature of the bilateral relationship rather than a current negotiation. The US note on Eritrea sanctions also explicitly stated that Washington had warned both Ethiopia and Eritrea about the destabilizing roles they played in each other’s country. That framing erases Tigray as a political actor entirely. In the language of an official US communication, Tigray is the geography where two other actors misbehaved. It is not a party. It is a theater. The scale of voter registration for Ethiopia’s June 1 federal election is already being used to project national institutional momentum, even while Tigray’s constitutional and humanitarian questions remain unresolved.
That is not a description I accept. But I think it is important to name it clearly, because it describes the starting position from which Tigray currently has to operate.
Let me state directly what I think Eritrean and Tigrayan political leadership should conclude from this reading.
To Eritrean leadership, current and future: the US transaction offers something real in the short term. But it is conditional on a Red Sea calculus that will shift when US strategic priorities shift or when a new American administration recalibrates its Horn of Africa engagement. The sanctions that are being lifted were imposed because of documented atrocities in Tigray. Their removal without accountability sends a message not only about the past but about the future: that the same conduct can be repeated without permanent consequence. That is not a foundation that builds trust with Tigrayan society, and Eritrea will eventually need Tigrayan society.
I want to be precise about why I say this. Whatever form the Ethiopian state takes in the future, Eritrea will continue to face a difficult strategic environment to its south. It may be a more centralized Ethiopia, a fragmented Ethiopia, or an Ethiopia managing multiple armed and political centers at once. This is especially true at a time when Ethiopia itself is not a settled political unit, but a state managing armed insurgencies in Oromia, Amhara, and elsewhere, regional grievances, and growing anti-government sentiment beneath the surface of electoral and diplomatic normalization. But in every scenario, Eritrea’s long-term security cannot rest only on distant patrons or temporary understandings with whoever controls Addis Ababa. It will need regional depth. And the most natural source of that depth is a functional relationship with Tigrayan political society. External alignment through Washington is reversible. Tactical understandings with Addis Ababa are reversible. But regional depth through a functioning relationship with Tigray is structural. It was built over generations and destroyed in three years. Whoever leads Eritrea after Isaias will inherit that destruction. They will need to rebuild it in a regional environment shaped by the choices being made now.
To Tigrayan leadership: the current triangle between Washington, Addis Ababa, and Asmara is being built without Tigrayan participation. I do not think it is being built against Tigrayan interests by design. I think it is being built around Tigrayan interests by indifference, which is in some ways the harder condition to respond to. Hostility creates solidarity. Indifference creates drift. The Baito reconstitution was the right institutional move. But institutions alone do not generate leverage in a regional environment where the major external actors have, at least temporarily, agreed to treat Tigray as a background variable. Leverage requires connection to something the major actors already care about.
Tigray is connected to the Red Sea question whether Washington acknowledges it or not. The 2018 Abiy-Isaias agreement was built without Tigrayan participation. It produced the 2020 war. That pattern is not coincidence. It is the structural consequence of excluding the party whose territory sits at the intersection of every major regional tension. A regional architecture that excludes Tigray does not produce stability. It produces a countdown.
The argument that both Eritrean and Tigrayan leadership should be making, in whatever forums they have access to, is not a demand based on historical grievance. It is a strategic observation: arrangements built without Tigray do not hold. That observation is available to any serious analyst of the region. It needs to be made visible before the current arrangements are treated as settled.
I am not arguing that Washington’s engagement with Ethiopia and Eritrea is wrong. I am arguing that it is incomplete in a way that will become apparent when the arrangements it is producing encounter the structural realities it has chosen to ignore.
The June election will consolidate Ethiopian federal authority. The BSD Framework will institutionalize the US-Abiy relationship. The Eritrea sanctions relief will proceed. Each of these events narrows the space for a different outcome. None of them is irreversible in the long term. All of them make the long term harder to reach without cost.
The question for both Eritrean and Tigrayan peoples is not whether to accept what is being arranged above them. The question is whether their leadership will act on their shared strategic interest before the arrangement hardens, or inherit the consequences of it afterward.
ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！