Inside Cairo Necolonial Political Establishment and Its Longstanding Strategy to Contain Ethiopia By Yordanos D. Sept. 4, 2026 (ENA) Egypt’s relationship with Ethiopia has evolved beyond a dispute over Abay (Nile) waters into a broader strategic rivalry involving political influence, regional security, maritime access and the balance of power in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Over decades, the two countries’ competing interests have intersected with developments in Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea, while Ethiopia’s efforts to expand its economic capacity, develop its water resources and regain diversified access to the sea have added new dimensions to the relationship. The pattern of competition can be examined through the historical role of Nile politics, regional alliances, security cooperation and the wider struggle for strategic influence in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. The Roots of the Confrontation The roots of the rivalry lie partly in geography, as the largest share of the Abay’s water originates in the Ethiopian highlands. Egypt, as a downstream country, has historically depended heavily on Ethiopia’s Blue Nile for its population and development. Although the river is a shared resource that can support the development of all the countries through which it flows, Egyptian officials have consistently opposed upstream countries’ efforts to use their water resources for development. Egypt has sought to invoke the 1929 Anglo Egyptian Nile Agreement and the 1959 Egyptian Sudanese Nile Agreement in Nile water politics. However, neither agreement included Ethiopia or other upstream countries as parties. Despite Egypt’s repeated efforts to use these agreements as a basis for its position on Nile waters, agreements concluded without the participation of upstream countries, including Ethiopia, cannot permanently prevent those countries from developing their own water resources. That was one of the reasons Ethiopia constructed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which has transformed the longstanding dispute over the Nile into a new chapter. In fact, Egypt’s actions concerning Ethiopia have deep historical roots. Historical studies have linked Egyptian involvement to the Somali Ethiopian conflict. Egypt has also sought to widen its presence in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean by cultivating relationships with countries competing with Ethiopia and applying different forms of pressure on Ethiopia. Egypt has also been working consistently with countries around Ethiopia, including Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea aiming to put its pressure in Ethiopia. Egypt and Somalia signed a defense agreement in August 2024, expanding military and security cooperation. While both governments described the relationship as supporting Somali sovereignty and counterterrorism, the agreement attracted attention in Addis Ababa because of its timing and its connection to wider Horn of Africa rivalries. Egypt also has longstanding military ties with the Sudanese Armed Forces and has publicly supported Sudan’s military leadership since the outbreak of war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023. Egypt provides direct military support to the Sudanese Armed Forces. Nevertheless, Cairo’s close relationship with Sudan’s military establishment has strategic implications for Ethiopia, particularly given the two countries’ shared border, the Al Fashaga dispute, trade routes and the wider Abay Basin security environment. Eritrea represents a particularly important dimension of Ethiopia’s maritime vulnerability. Its Red Sea coastline and ports at Massawa and Assab historically provided Ethiopia with direct access to the sea. Eritrea’s independence in 1993 transformed Ethiopia into a landlocked country dependent on neighboring states for maritime trade. Many political analysts also believe that Egypt contributed to this situation, as Egypt maintained relations with Eritrean actors during the Ethio Eritrean conflict. As part of what has been described as a longstanding strategy, Boutros Boutros Ghali has also been mentioned as one of the figures associated with developments surrounding Eritrea’s separation from Ethiopia. Boutros Ghali and Nile Politics Many political analysts argue that Boutros Boutros Ghali occupies an important place in the history of relations between Ethiopia and Egypt. As Egypt’s foreign minister before becoming UN Secretary General, he was closely involved in Egyptian foreign policy during a period of major political transformation in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Some analysts have attributed a significant role to Boutros Ghali in Eritrea’s separation from Ethiopia. Eritrea’s independence, however, resulted from decades of armed struggle the subsequent referendum. From Cairo to the halls of the United Nations, Egyptian politicians pushed to hasten Eritrea’s separation, striking at the heart of Ethiopia’s territorial integrity. Boutros Ghali was also one of the most prominent Egyptian figures associated with the securitization of Nile politics. His warning that future conflicts could be fought over water became emblematic of Egypt’s perception of the Nile as a national security issue. Under President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, Egypt’s policy toward Ethiopia has continued with a stronger military and geopolitical dimension. Cairo has strengthened relations with Somalia, maintained close ties with Sudan’s military establishment and preserved strategic relations with Eritrea, while continuing its opposition to Ethiopia’s position on the Nile and its pursuit of diversified maritime access. Egypt’s October 2024 political declaration with Somalia was issued in Asmara in the presence of Eritrean regime’s leader and called for expanded cooperation and stronger Somali security capabilities. The development was viewed in Ethiopia as contributing to an emerging regional alignment with implications for Ethiopia’s stability and development. Interference in Internal Affairs It is also alleged that Egypt has interfered in Ethiopia’s internal affairs by supporting or maintaining contacts with opposition and armed groups. Egypt was accused of interference during periods of unrest in the past, including allegations of armed groups. Such external support for armed or political actors, where established, can intensify existing divisions and prolong insecurity. Egypt has been accused of exploiting domestic disagreements whenever they serve Cairo’s broader regional interests. Support, financing, training, diplomatic backing or logistical assistance to armed groups, if established, could increase their ability to sustain conflict and place additional pressure on the Ethiopian state. Pressure on Stability and Development Egypt has persistently pursued measures that could retard Ethiopia’s development and increase strategic pressure on the country. Ethiopia’s economic transformation depends on energy, infrastructure, industrialization, agricultural modernization, trade and reliable access to international markets. Egypt’s strategy can therefore be viewed not as a single openly declared campaign, but as a pattern of strategic pressure operating across several fronts: water diplomacy, regional alliances, military cooperation, maritime influence and engagement with internal opposition forces. However, Ethiopia has managed to withstand these pressures while confronting the challenges associated with Egypt and its regional partners. The country has continued to address the Nile dispute, navigate regional alliances and maritime competition, respond to internal security challenges and construct the GERD. It has also planned the construction of additional dams as part of its broader effort to develop its water resources. Besides, Ethiopia is strongly working to regain its position in the Red Sea, which is central not only to Ethiopia’s maritime access but also to the balance of peace and security in the region. Ethiopia’s pursuit of peaceful and diversified maritime access is part of its broader economic and national security strategy rather than simply a territorial ambition. At the same time, continued regional militarization risks turning the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea into a theater of prolonged geopolitical competition. Ethiopia’s presence in the Red Sea will therefore remain an important element of the region’s future strategic balance, despite the opposition, allegations and competing narratives surrounding its return to the Red Sea. In a nutshell, the relationship between Ethiopia and Egypt reflects a longstanding competition in which water resources, regional alliances, security interests and maritime access have remained closely interconnected. From Nile politics and the historical involvement of regional actors to contemporary security and diplomatic alignments, the rivalry has extended beyond the river itself and become part of the broader geopolitical competition in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Ethiopia has continued to pursue its development objectives, including the utilization of its water resources, the construction of the GERD and efforts to secure peaceful and diversified maritime access. The developments demonstrate that Ethiopia’s economic transformation and maritime aspirations are increasingly connected to the wider strategic balance of the region. As competition continues, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea will remain important arenas in which political influence, economic interests, security considerations and maritime access intersect.

    With analysis from Pulse of Africa (POA) Sept. 2, 2026 (ENA) By Mahder Nesibu In a session with senior government leaders in 2023, Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, stated that his country's fortunes are intimately tied to the Nile and the Red Sea, and that these two bodies of water are fundamental factors to the country's growth or its decline. In that session, the Prime Minister set out the geographical, historical, ethnic and economic foundations of what he termed Ethiopia's legitimate need for access to the sea. The Ethiopian state has echoed that framing consistently in the years since, and securing maritime access now stands as a defined objective within Ethiopia's national interest thinking. The geographical argument begins with scale. Ethiopia sits in close proximity to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and stands as the largest country by area in a Horn of Africa region whose other states it dwarfs in size. Addis Ababa regards its landlocked status, which it has taken to describing as a geographical prison, as an unnatural condition rather than a settled fact of geography. That framing carries into a set of ethnic considerations centred on the Afar communities along the Red Sea coast, whose cultural and political centre lies within Ethiopia's own Afar region but who have been structurally separated, on both sides of the border, from the freedom to interact as one community. The separation, among many other negative consequences, severely restricted access to the Red Sea coast, and by extension to lucrative trade and resources, of significant number of Afaris who consider the sea a home. An economic imperative runs alongside these arguments. The Ethiopian economy has sustained growth of roughly ten percent a year for close to three decades, expanding its demand for engagement with the Red Sea correspondingly. Neighboring Djibouti services approximately 95% to 97% of Ethiopia's international trade, and that degree of dependence on a single conduit makes diversification a pressing concern as the economy continues to expand and requires more reliable and resilient supply chains. Demography reinforces the same case. The Horn of Africa's total population, spanning Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Djibouti, is estimated at around 170 million people, of whom Ethiopia accounts for roughly 80 percent, a population exceeding 130 million and still expanding. For Addis Ababa, this represents a structural dilemma, in that a population of this scale remains poorly connected to global maritime trade and exchange, and the toll of that disconnection grows heavier as the country's economic and demographic weight increases. The historical dimension of the argument is, in some respects, the most telling, and it is the one the Prime Minister invoked directly in referring to the Red Sea's influence over Ethiopia's periods of strength and weakness. The pattern he described holds up under scrutiny: Ethiopia's most active and prosperous historical periods have consistently coincided with its presence on the Red Sea, while its darkest moments of decline and dormancy have tended to follow its retreat from the coast, whether through internal weakness or foreign intervention. The recent past illustrates this most clearly. In his work “አሰብ የማን ናት” (“To Whom Does Assab Belong”), the Ethiopian intellectual Dr Yaqob Haile-Mariam —prominent lawyer, legal scholar and politician — revisited the question of Assab in 2011, arguing that the port had long served as a natural outlet for Ethiopia and that the Ethiopian government of the period had erred in allowing Eritrean secession to proceed without first securing an outlet to the Red Sea, an outlet he regarded as fundamental to Ethiopian statehood. He criticised Addis Ababa's lack of initiative in pursuing the matter seriously through negotiation and advocacy on international platforms. For Dr Yaqob, Assab embodies a longer sequence of historical episodes that pushed Ethiopia away from the Red Sea, even as it remained, in recent history, Ethiopia's most actively used port. Ethiopia was rendered landlocked when Eritrea seceded in May, 1993. Tracing a lineage back through the historical ports of Adulis and Zeila, Assab connected Ethiopia to the Red Sea until Eritrean secession, and continued to do so in more unconventional arrangements afterward. Dr Yaqob argued that Ethiopia's landlocked status constitutes a structural national problem, and that Assab remains the clearest historical case through which that problem should be understood and addressed. He was particularly critical of how Assab came to be left within Eritrean territory during the secession process, and of the broader terms under which Eritrea separated from Ethiopia. This fits into a considerably longer pattern. The Red Sea has functioned as a critical corridor for global commerce and connectivity since antiquity, and it was through this waterway that Axum, one of the earliest manifestations of Ethiopian civilisation, achieved its prosperity. Axum traded through its port of Adulis on the Red Sea as far as the Roman Empire and India, with that trade forming the principal pillar of a prosperity that made Axum one of the major powers of Late Antiquity. The Red Sea, as a source of state power, was equally an arena of competition. Axum's decline at the turn of the first millennium CE is generally attributed to its loss of standing as a trading power, following the emergence of the Umayyad Caliphate, which challenged Axumite control of the maritime route and forced a retreat into Ethiopia's interior. That pattern recurred through much of the second millennium, as Ethiopia repeatedly re-establish its presence on the coast and repeatedly encountered geopolitical resistance, including from the Ottoman Empire in the medieval period, which understood the strategic value of the Red Sea as clearly as Ethiopia did. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed a similar trajectory, though the arrival of colonialism, and later the geopolitics of two world wars and the Cold War, made the competition sharper and the Red Sea theatre considerably more complex. Italian colonialism, beginning in the late nineteenth century, marked the start of Ethiopia's modern retreat from the sea. Ethiopia's Bahr Negash resisted colonial incursions along the coast, but resistance proved insufficient to prevent Italy from annexing Ethiopia's coastal territories, a colonial advance ultimately halted at Adwa in 1896 before it could extend across the whole country. Italian colonial strategy was shaped in part by the significance of the Red Sea, beginning with the occupation of Assab and extending later into the economically rich Ethiopian interior. (The 1869 purchase of Assab was a direct private transaction between an Italian agent and local Afar leaders without the formal consent or prior knowledge of the central Ethiopian imperial government.) Although the colonial project ended in 1952, when Ethiopia regained sovereignty over what is now Eritrea, that arrangement did not endure. A secessionist movement took root in the territory and eventually reshaped the regional order entirely. The place of Eritrea within Ethiopia, referred to by Ethiopian intellectuals as the “Eritrean Affair”, is a complex question that extends well beyond the matter of maritime access, but the direction the affair ultimately took, culminating in Eritrean secession, has been shaped substantially by the question of access to the sea and by what Ethiopian analysts describe as a conspiracy to deprive Ethiopia of it. The role of External actors was crucial to that trajectory. The Eritrean secessionist movements, from the Muslim League during the federation period to the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and later the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), received support from states such as Egypt, which regarded Ethiopia as a historical rival. Ethiopia's leadership has long been aware of this dynamic. In 1928, Emperor Haile Selassie, addressing the Eritrean question, spoke of his country's hope in reclaiming the territories and seaports that had been taken by its enemies. External support for Eritrean secessionism following Eritrea's unification with Ethiopia reflected a strategy pursued consistently by regional and other powers, chief among them Egypt, which shared the Red Sea with Ethiopia and viewed it as a competing power over that waterway, and which regarded Ethiopia, over the Nile even more than the Red Sea, as its principal rival. Ottoman and Egyptian incursions into the Red Sea coast during the 16th and 19th centuries systematically chipped away at the Ethiopian Empire's direct access to maritime trade ports, laying the groundwork for its modern landlocked status. Emperor Yohannes IV successfully defeated major military incursions by Khedivial Egypt—then an autonomous vassal state of the Ottoman Empire—during the Egyptian–Ethiopian War in the mid-1870s. The current Ethiopian administration has internalised this history directly. Beyond describing the Nile and the Red Sea as the twin determinants of Ethiopia's prosperity, Prime Minister Abiy's government has developed what it calls the vision of the two waters, a framework built around the geopolitical interconnection between these two bodies of water rather than treating either in isolation. The historical foundation for this argument is substantial. It runs from Ethiopia's ancient rulers, who regarded the Red Sea as a natural frontier of their state and ruled accordingly, to the country's contemporary leadership, which now treats Red Sea security as a fundamental national security interest and the possession of a reliable maritime outlet as central to that interest. Whether that outlet is eventually secured through Assab or through other arrangements, Ethiopia's pursuit of renewed access to the sea aims to reverse a historical pattern in which loss of the coast has repeatedly coincided with periods of national decline, and access to it with periods of national strength. Combined with the mounting demographic and economic imperatives now shaping Ethiopia's position, that argument rests on considerable historical and material weight. The question carries consequences that extend beyond Ethiopia itself, reaching the wider region and the international community. An Ethiopia genuinely integrated into the global maritime system would loosen a structural constraint that has long limited its growth, and given Ethiopia's scale as one of Africa's largest and most closely watched economies, that growth would carry transformative implications for the Horn of Africa and the continent more broadly. On the geopolitical side, the Red Sea has become, in recent decades, a site of considerable instability for international trade and shipping, a dilemma that concerns the international community and Ethiopia in equal measure. Dependent on the Red Sea for its commerce yet excluded from direct access to it, Ethiopia's landlocked status prevents it from playing a substantive role in addressing the security challenges that affect both itself and the wider region. Ethiopians tend to read their own history on the Red Sea as one of prosperous trade and stability, and a reliable outlet today, in their reading of that history, would allow the country to play a meaningful part in securing it once again.