The Next Mistake May Not Come From Weakness

Recovered leverage is not victory. It is a test of judgment: Tigray must turn its growing room to maneuver into durable gains without making the survival of its people depend on assumptions that may prove wrong.

Tigray is no longer where it was under the transitional arrangement. The endurance of our people, the sacrifices of those who defended Tigray, and the political decisions that moved us beyond that arrangement have given Tigray more room to shape events than it had before. That progress is real. It is also the reason I am writing. Recovered agency gives us choices we did not have before. It also gives us new ways to be wrong.

I have been making parts of this argument for months. In April I wrote in When War Is Not an Option, What Then? that refusing war is not by itself a strategy, only a boundary that tells us one thing we will not do. A few days later, in Tigray Cannot Survive the Status Quo, I argued that time is not neutral, that waiting quietly changes the choices still open to us, and usually changes them against us. In This Window Will Not Stay Open I warned that moments of possibility do not last, and that preparation has to come before the moment, not after it. For a long time our problem was that nothing moved. The occupation of the west held, the displaced could not return, and the pressure on our economy and our institutions did not relent. Today the picture is less fixed, and some of the leverage those essays called for may be starting to appear.

By leverage I mean something simple: more ability to make our own position matter, more room to say no, or to say yes on terms that better protect our interests. It is not victory, and it is not safety. It is only room to move, and what we do with that room is the whole question.

This is exactly the kind of moment when a people can make some of its most consequential mistakes. So here is the question I want to put. What do we do when the strategic environment itself begins to move? Not when we are being crushed, and not when we have won, but when the ground is shifting under our feet and we must choose before we know where it will settle.

Judge by the structure, not by the mood

The first danger is that we let our feelings follow the news. One week a hopeful sign appears and much of our public conversation speaks as if relief is near. The next week an alarming sign appears and the same voices speak as if all is lost. This is not analysis. It is mood, and a society whose mood swings with each rumor cannot hold a steady position long enough to protect its interests. This is a danger of the wider conversation, not a charge against those carrying the heaviest responsibility. They are the most engaged and the best informed among us, and they live these pressures daily. But precisely because they are human, independent reflection from outside can still be of use to them: not better information, but a little distance from the noise.

Whatever appears in front of us, we should test it against Tigray’s own interests, and not against the emotion of the day. If some opening comes, it is neither our salvation nor our trap until we have actually weighed it. We should treat it as a question to be examined, calmly, with our eyes open. After what our people have endured, calm judgment does not come easily. But calmness here is not weakness. It is the discipline that keeps us from being moved by others who understand our exhaustion and may try to use it.

Good judgment also depends on the machinery behind it. Years of war, siege and institutional disruption weakened Tigray’s ability to continuously monitor a changing environment, test assumptions, compare alternatives and measure whether decisions are producing the expected result. Rebuilding that capacity is not an administrative detail. It is part of strategy itself. Good judgment needs more than good instincts; it needs instruments. A sound decision can still fail if the institutions carrying it forward cannot detect quickly when conditions have changed.

We must also calculate the worst response

There is another danger I fear, and recent events should make us weigh it carefully. Tigray may make the right political calculation and still misjudge the response it could provoke.

We know our own military tradition. It values preparation, terrain, organization, maneuver, endurance, and the matching of means to ends. That history gives us confidence, and much of it is deserved. But it can mislead us if we quietly expect the other side to fight by the same logic.

Abiy Ahmed himself has argued many times that modern war is no longer only a contest of soldiers and terrain. On that narrow point he is right. A government that holds drones, aircraft, long-range weapons and other modern tools does not have to defeat an army in the old sense before it can cause enormous destruction. And holding advanced weapons is not the same as using them well. A force can fight poorly and still inflict terrible damage on civilians, on infrastructure, and on the economy that keeps a people alive.

We do not have to imagine what destructive capacity means for a civilian society. Tigray has already lived it: farms and irrigation damaged, religious sites violated, clinics and schools looted, factories stripped, businesses destroyed, communications and banking cut, and whole communities deprived of the systems that kept ordinary life functioning. The lesson is not simply that war is terrible. It is that an adversary does not have to defeat Tigray’s army in order to impose extraordinary costs on Tigray’s people.

This is why I would be careful about the lesson we draw from what we have heard of Shererina. If the reports broadly reflect what happened there, our forces showed something important about their ability to withstand and turn back a serious ground assault. That matters. It should strengthen our confidence in our soldiers and our commanders. But it must not become the wrong kind of confidence. Shererina can tell us something about one form of confrontation. It cannot tell us what would happen if Addis Ababa concluded that this form was not working and reached for a more destructive kind of war, one aimed less at our army than at our people, our towns, and the infrastructure they depend on.

We have lived through enough to know that we cannot assume restraint. Nothing in the recent past lets Tigray safely expect the other side to be held back by civilian suffering or international criticism, or to use force in a way that is proportionate or carefully aimed. This is not an argument for fear. It is an argument against strategic innocence.

The recent record is enough to make the point. A government that received a Nobel Peace Prize and later prosecuted the war Tigray endured has already shown how little reassurance can be drawn from public language about peace. The reason to remember that record is not to predict when another war will come. It is to refuse the assumption that past restraint, diplomatic language or international pressure will necessarily limit what happens next. The relevant question is therefore not whether we can confidently predict another escalation, but whether Tigray would be better prepared if one occurred.

So before any course is chosen that could open the door to a much larger confrontation, there is a question our leadership must be able to answer. Not in public, and not by revealing any military plan, but honestly, within our መኸተ (Mekhete) system, whose institutions collectively carry responsibility for Tigray’s survival. If the answer from the other side is not negotiation, not limited pressure, and not another Shererina, but the most destructive response it is able to mount, does our strategy still hold?

That question is far larger than whether the TDF can fight. Of course it can. The question is whether Tigray can absorb the first shock, protect its people, keep its command and institutions intact, hold its society together, and still preserve the political purpose for which the risk was taken.

We should never confuse the ability to defeat an army with the ability to survive everything the leadership commanding that army may be willing to unleash. Intentions can change quickly, and capabilities do not disappear because today’s calculation says they will not be used. So a responsible strategy cannot prepare only for what we believe Abiy is likely to do; it must also stand against what he is able to do, if our reading of his restraint proves wrong.

Courage is not what is missing. Our people have already shown it at enormous cost. The answer is preparation, judgment, and an honest measure of risk.

The question is not only Abiy. It is what comes after him

The danger I have just described is real and immediate. But there is an opposite mistake, just as costly: allowing Abiy to fill our whole horizon, as if removing him would by itself solve our problem.

For a long time the argument among us has been narrow. Should Abiy Ahmed stay or go? Should we negotiate or keep resisting? I now think both of these are the wrong question, or at least too small a question.

The individual matters, and I will not pretend otherwise. Power in Addis Ababa has become highly personalized, to the point where the man and the center are difficult to separate, and that makes succession itself a strategic uncertainty. Abiy’s departure may open a contest inside the center, produce a new coalition, or allow another arrangement to rebuild central power in a different form. But it may also produce something more dangerous than any of these: no orderly succession at all. A sudden rupture in a highly personalized system could intensify competition among those seeking to preserve parts of the existing order, those seeking to replace it, armed actors carrying unresolved grievances, and regional forces trying to protect their own interests. In a country already burdened by multiple conflicts, what begins as the departure of one leader could become a wider contest over the state itself, with violence no single actor is able to control. That is why “after Abiy” cannot be reduced to who succeeds him. Tigray must think about both succession and rupture. The deeper danger was never only one leader. It was a center strong enough to decide the fate of others by force, and to do it alone. So what we should watch is not only whether Abiy goes, but what happens to that center when he does: whether it reassembles under another name, gives way to a more negotiated order, fragments among competing centers, or enters a period of disorder whose outcome no one can confidently predict.

For Tigray, even that uncertainty has to be read through our own interests, not through hopes about Ethiopia’s fate. A rupture at the center would be dangerous for everyone around it, Tigray included. But it could also temporarily change the pressure under which Tigray operates. If such an interval ever emerged, despite us rather than because we sought it, the question would be whether our leadership and our መኸተ institutions were prepared to use that reduced pressure to advance the objectives we have already defined: the safe return of our displaced people, restoration of our territorial and political position, stronger institutions, a more stable internal order, and greater freedom to determine what comes next. A breathing space is not itself a strategic achievement. Its value depends on what remains after it closes. To spend such a moment celebrating an adversary’s weakness, rather than strengthening Tigray’s position and protecting our people against whatever follows, would be another way of wasting it.

Holding Ethiopia together is not Tigray’s first responsibility. Nor should we decide today that Ethiopia must either remain our permanent political framework or cease to be one. Our responsibility is clearer than either of those conclusions: to recover our territory, return our displaced people safely, rebuild legitimate institutions, restore our capacity to live and develop, and ensure that no outside power can again determine Tigray’s future by force. If those conditions can one day exist within a genuinely shared Ethiopian political order, that is one possible path. If they cannot, Tigray must retain the freedom to consider others. What we should not do is sacrifice our recovery merely to preserve a structure that refuses to reform.

One distinction must remain clear. When I speak about responsibility for what happened to Tigray, I mean the political leaders, the institutions and the armed actors that made or carried out those decisions, not entire peoples. Ethiopia’s problem is not the Oromo people, or any people. It is a form of power that concentrates in one place and imposes itself on everyone else. Political responsibility should remain political responsibility; once it becomes collective blame, we lose a distinction that Tigray itself has every reason to defend.

Every path has its own test

Suppose, then, that Tigray is one day offered a settlement. I am not reporting that this has happened, and I do not want us to argue about any particular rumor. I want us to be ready to think, whatever comes. Imagine an offer that returns Western Tigray, allows the displaced to go home, restores our budget and our legal standing, reopens economic life, and promises security. Such an offer would carry enormous value. It would touch the deepest wounds we carry. It could not be dismissed simply because it came from an adversary.

But before we reach for it, two questions must be asked.

The first: does this agreement actually solve Tigray’s core problem, or does it mainly pull Tigray out of a wider alignment at the very moment that alignment is beginning to give us leverage? An offer can be generous on the surface and still be designed to separate us from the position that made the offer necessary in the first place. If an arrangement asks us to exchange some of our present leverage for concrete gains, we should understand exactly what is being exchanged, and whether what we receive is durable enough to justify what we surrender.

The second: what exactly are we giving in return? Not only what we sign, but what we give up in practice. Are we surrendering leverage we spent years and lives building? Are we abandoning relationships we will need later? Are we helping rebuild a dominant center in Addis Ababa without real guarantees that it cannot turn on us again? And can any of these promises actually be enforced, or are they words that will dissolve the moment the pressure is off? I wrote in From Siege to Strategy that alliances are instruments and not destinations. The same discipline applies to agreements. An agreement is a tool. We must ask what it is a tool for.

Now, refusal must face the same discipline. It is not enough to say no because we do not trust Addis Ababa. Our distrust is earned, but distrust is not a plan. If Tigray rejects an opening, we owe our people an honest answer to a hard question: by what mechanism does saying no produce something better? Through what steps, over what time, and at what cost in human life? If we cannot answer that, then refusal is not principle. It is another gamble, and our people have paid for enough gambles.

This brings me to the hardest question of all, the one beneath the other two. Which mistake would be harder for Tigray to reverse: accepting too little too early, or rejecting an opening that may never come back? I do not think there is an easy answer. But it is the real decision in front of us, and we should discuss it honestly rather than hide behind slogans. In Between Resistance and Survival I argued that the loud fight between those who shout resistance and those who whisper survival often hides the fact that neither side has done the harder thinking. That is still true. Neither “never negotiate” nor “take peace whenever it is offered” is a strategy. Both are ways of avoiding the weight of judgment.

And one point I have made before still applies here. Success on the battlefield is not the same as success in strategy. If our resistance creates leverage, that leverage still has to be turned into a political result: land returned, people home, institutions secured, and our capacity to decide our own future restored. A military development that does not improve those things cannot be the final measure of anything. The measure is always the condition of our people, not the map.

Earlier I warned that pressing forward carries its own test: whether Tigray can survive the most destructive answer the adversary could plausibly give. Set that beside the two questions here, and the full shape of the decision appears. If we accept, what strategic position are we giving away? If we refuse, what credible path produces something better? And if we press, can we survive the worst the other side is able to do, should our reading of its restraint prove wrong? Each path carries its own hard test, and a course that cannot meet the one that belongs to it is not yet a strategy.

In Fixed Purpose, Open Destination, I argued that Tigray should keep its final political destination open while remaining firm about the conditions it must secure. The same discipline applies here: every choice should preserve enough room to correct course if our assumptions prove wrong.

Looking north without depending north

There is one relationship where the consequences of misjudgment could be especially serious. That is our relationship with Eritrea.

In Tigray Must Think North I argued that Tigray cannot build its future while imagining Addis Ababa as the permanent center of its whole world. Our geography does not only point south. Eritrea, the Red Sea, Sudan and the wider northern corridor are part of the map we will always live on. Governments come and go. Geography does not move. That argument still stands, and I want to build on it rather than repeat it.

Here is the harder problem that this moment forces on us. Looking north is a direction. It is not the same as depending north. Today Tigray and Eritrea can share an interest in limiting Abiy without sharing the same idea of what should come afterward. A government in Asmara may calculate that a weaker center in Addis Ababa serves its own interests. We cannot read into that calculation a preference for a strong, recovering, self-confident Tigray on its border. The two do not follow from each other, and we should not assume they do.

There is a further layer to this that deserves attention inside መኸተ itself. It is not enough for the political leadership to understand the tactical meaning and limits of ጽምዶ (Tsimdo). That understanding has to stay coherent throughout the institutions that act under it. A relationship understood one way at the top can acquire a different meaning as it travels down through administrative structures, political cadres and military commands. Cooperation can start to be read as dependence, a temporary convergence as permanent alignment, coordination as deference. A tactical relationship can remain tactical at the top while slowly becoming dependence further down the system, and Tigray could lose strategic autonomy without ever taking a formal decision to surrender it.

An external partner does not need a conspiracy to benefit from this. Ambiguity, unequal information, personal channels and inconsistent understanding are enough. Some critics already describe the relationship as one Asmara directs; whether or not that judgment is fair, the perception is itself a warning, because where a hierarchy cannot clearly explain who owns the strategy and where its limits lie, others will fill that space with their own interpretation. The responsibility of leadership is therefore not only to manage the relationship with Eritrea, but to make sure its purpose, its limits and its ownership are understood consistently enough throughout our own system that actions at every level remain within the political purpose for which ጽምዶ exists.

So the danger runs in two directions at once. On one side, Tigray could correctly see the value of the present understanding with Eritrea, and then overestimate how permanent that understanding is. We could begin treating a temporary convergence of interests as a durable relationship, and be unprepared when those interests diverge. On the other side, and this worries me just as much, Tigray could be persuaded to give up the northern relationship too cheaply. If an arrangement with Addis asks Tigray to exchange its present room to maneuver for renewed hostility toward Eritrea before our core questions are secured, the cost of that exchange would need exceptionally careful examination. We would be helping to rebuild the same trap that once left us surrounded on every side.

This is why the northern question is the real test of the strategic autonomy I keep arguing for. It is easy to argue for strategic autonomy in principle. It is hard to manage a relationship that is useful today, uncertain tomorrow, and shaped by a history none of us can forget. But that is exactly the skill this moment demands. We cannot afford the simplistic position that Eritrea is our eternal enemy, and we cannot afford the equally simplistic position that Eritrea is now our permanent friend. Both replace thinking with feeling. What Tigray needs is a steady way of managing the north based on our interests, whoever governs in Asmara and whoever governs in Addis Ababa.

So to those questions I would add one more that speaks directly to the north, and it runs through all of them. Does a proposed arrangement leave Tigray free to build the outside relationships its long-term future will require, or does it once again place our security, our economy and our access to the world entirely in the hands of the center in Addis Ababa? Western Tigray, the return of the displaced, our budget and our legal recognition are enormous questions. Our freedom to act in the world matters because it helps determine whether gains on those questions can endure.

What this asks of us

I do not want to end, as so many of us do, with a call for unity. We have all heard that word until it has almost stopped meaning anything. Everyone calls for unity. Few explain what kind of unity, and for what.

What this moment requires is more difficult than the usual call for unity. It is not uniformity. It is not silence. It is not loyalty to one party or one leader or one grievance. What we need is enough shared purpose to allow serious disagreement without letting that disagreement destroy our ability to protect ourselves. That is a much harder thing than simply telling Tigrayans to stand together.

I have said before, and I still believe, that our administration seems to be functioning better than it did during the worst of the past years, and that deserves to be acknowledged. But working better is not the same as working well. It cannot excuse the things our people still live with every day: the lack of transparency, the failures of justice, the kidnappings, the fear on the roads, the corruption, and the absence of work for the young. Nor should we overlook the deeper conditions threatening Tigray’s future: continuing out-migration, food insecurity, child malnutrition, and serious pressures on reproductive health. These are not secondary social problems. They affect whether Tigray will have the human capacity to recover and sustain itself over the long term. A leadership that asks society for patience and cohesion must also give society reasons to trust it in ordinary life. Tigray cannot be secure simply because it can defend itself from external threats. A society weakened from within by insecurity, hunger, corruption, unemployment, poor health and the loss of its young people is also becoming less able to protect its future.

So when I ask for cohesion, I am not asking anyone to stop criticizing. I am asking almost the opposite. Debate Eritrea. Debate ጽምዶ. Debate whether and how to negotiate. Debate our constitutional future. Argue hard, because competing ideas are how we catch our own mistakes before they become disasters. But do not let those arguments turn into enmity between us, and do not let loyalty to a faction become more important than the survival of the whole. Plurality of thought makes us stronger. Factionalism, where the party matters more than the people, is what makes us weak.

There is a particular responsibility here for those of us who carry deep grievances against the TPLF. Those grievances should not be silenced, and criticism should not stop. But anger can also become a form of strategic blindness if it leads us to weaken capacities Tigray may still need in a dangerous moment. None of us stands outside the limitations we attribute to the TPLF. We too can misread events, overestimate our judgment, become trapped by our own loyalties, and mistake conviction for evidence. The TPLF is not beyond criticism, but neither is its endurance meaningless: it still carries structures, experience and organizational capacity built over many years. Where those capacities can contribute to መኸተ and to the protection of our people and their livelihoods, wisdom requires engagement, improvement and accountability, not rejection simply because our grievances are real.

Our own intellectual life should meet the same standard. Too much disagreement among us is reduced to insult, accusation and the quick rhetoric of social media. Serious political disagreement requires more: ideas, alternatives, evidence and counter-evidence that can be examined, challenged and answered. Those who seek to shape Tigray’s direction owe the public arguments that can survive scrutiny, not passing rhetoric on YouTube, TikTok or Facebook.

The generation that survived the war now faces a quieter test: whether we can think together when we do not agree, cooperate when we do not fully trust one another, and hold our leaders to account without tearing ourselves apart.

I began by saying that our next mistake may not come from weakness. I want to end there too. We are used to thinking of danger as coming from the enemy, from the tank and the blockade and the lie. But the mistakes that are hardest to undo are often the ones whose logic looked reasonable at the time. That is my real fear. Not that Tigray will be too weak to act, but that Tigray will misread its own leverage, or misjudge how far the other side is willing to go, and give away too much, refuse too much, or risk too much, in a moment that does not return.

Our people have already paid too high a price for choices that seemed defensible and turned out to be irreversible. The responsibility now is not only to be brave. That is no longer the question. The responsibility is to make sure that every strategy we choose remains a strategy even when the other side refuses to behave as we expect. And so we must judge each path, whether agreement, refusal, or continued pressure, by one hard standard: not whether it brings us relief, not whether it satisfies our anger, and not whether it removes one enemy from the picture, but whether it leaves the next generation of Tigrayans freer, safer, and more able to decide their own future for themselves.

The real test is not whether all our assumptions are reasonable. It is whether Tigray can survive when one of them turns out to be wrong.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！