The United States has lifted sanctions on Eritrea, a move that places Washington directly inside a five-way contest for influence over the Red Sea alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Israel, according to Business Insider Africa. The decision is particularly striking given that Eritrean forces were implicated in atrocities during the Tigray conflict — a war that, by most estimates, claimed roughly 600,000 lives and drew widespread international condemnation.
The Red Sea is not an abstract geopolitical prize. Approximately 12% of global trade — including a substantial share of Europe-bound oil and Asian manufactured goods — transits the Bab-el-Mandeb strait that Eritrea's coastline flanks. Houthi attacks on commercial shipping since late 2023 have already forced major rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks and hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to global supply chains. Control over, or reliable access to, Eritrean ports and airspace is therefore a concrete strategic asset.
Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki has historically played external powers against each other with notable success. The country hosts no permanent foreign military base — unlike neighbouring Djibouti, which houses American, Chinese, French, and Japanese installations — making Asmara's alignment genuinely up for grabs. Saudi Arabia and the UAE deepened ties with Eritrea during the Gulf states' own Yemen campaign, using Eritrean territory as a logistical staging ground. Turkey has expanded its Horn of Africa footprint aggressively, signing defence and economic agreements across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Israel, long reliant on Red Sea access through Eilat, views Eritrean proximity to Yemen as directly relevant to its own security calculus.
Washington's sanction rollback breaks from a post-Tigray posture that had kept Eritrea at arm's length. The Biden administration had imposed targeted sanctions on Eritrean military officials and the ruling People's Front for Democracy and Justice in 2021 and 2022, citing documented abuses including mass killings and sexual violence in Tigray. That the US is now willing to deprioritise those accountability demands in exchange for strategic positioning tells investors and regional governments something important: Horn of Africa geopolitics has once again become subordinate to big-power competition.
For African operators and policymakers, the practical implications run in several directions. First, Eritrea — one of the most closed economies on the continent, with virtually no foreign direct investment, an opaque banking system, and a government that has resisted IMF engagement for decades — may now attract renewed commercial interest as sanctions recede. Port Massawa and Port Assab, both on the Red Sea, have long been considered underutilised assets. Second, the US re-engagement creates leverage for Asmara: Isaias can now extract concessions from multiple competing powers simultaneously, which historically has translated into infrastructure investment and debt relief rather than democratic reform.
Ethiopia's own calculus shifts too. Addis Ababa has been landlocked since Eritrean independence in 1993 and has pursued access to Red Sea ports through deals with Somaliland, Somalia, and indirect arrangements with Djibouti. A US-Eritrea rapprochement complicates that picture: Isaias and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, once briefly allied during the Tigray war, have returned to a frosty relationship. Any US-brokered normalisation that includes port access for Ethiopia would require delicate diplomacy that Washington has not yet signalled it is prepared to invest in.
The broader pattern is one Africa has seen before: external powers compete for strategic footholds, local governments extract short-term rents, and civilian populations — particularly in Tigray, where accountability for 600,000 deaths remains unresolved — bear the long-term cost. Human rights organisations have already criticised the sanctions rollback as rewarding impunity.
Why it matters: The US decision to re-engage Eritrea is less about Asmara and more about the Red Sea becoming the world's most contested maritime corridor. For investors, it may unlock a long-frozen frontier market; for regional governments, it resets the negotiating table around port access and defence agreements; for the 600,000 dead in Tigray and their survivors, it confirms that great-power strategy remains the variable that overrides accountability.