Washington (Somalia Today) — The Trump administration is weighing a diplomatic opening to Eritrea, one of Africa’s most secretive states, as rising tensions around the Strait of Hormuz and renewed fears over the Bab al-Mandeb are sharpening Washington’s focus on the Red Sea.
The move, still under internal review, would mark the most serious US effort in years to rebuild higher-level ties with the long-isolated Horn of Africa state, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
According to The Journal, President Donald Trump’s adviser for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, has told foreign counterparts that Washington aims to begin lifting some sanctions on Eritrea as part of a broader push to normalise relations.
The Journal said Boulos held talks with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki in Cairo late last year and separately met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo this week, with Egypt helping facilitate the contacts.
A State Department spokesperson told the newspaper that the administration “looks forward to strengthening U.S. ties with the people and government of Eritrea,” but did not address the sanctions issue directly.
Chokepoint risks
The timing of the diplomatic push is significant.
Iran’s confrontation with the United States has heightened concern over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels have also threatened to widen the conflict, raising the prospect of new pressure on the Bab al-Mandeb, the narrow southern gateway to the Red Sea.
If the Houthis open a broader front, the Bab al-Mandeb would be an obvious target because of its role in funnelling traffic toward the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important trade arteries.
That threat is not theoretical for Washington. US warships and commercial vessels have repeatedly faced danger in and around the Red Sea, forcing the Pentagon to adjust deployments and routing.
Some officials now see the Red Sea region as too strategically important for the United States to keep Eritrea at arm’s length, even given the country’s rights record.
That calculation has also shown up in naval movements.
Recent reports that a US aircraft carrier sailed around southern Africa toward the Middle East rather than taking the shorter Red Sea route underscore how security concerns have altered military planning in the corridor.
Eritrea’s geography gives it outsized importance in that debate. The country sits across from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and controls more than 700 miles of Red Sea coastline, placing it along one of the world’s most sensitive maritime routes.
Neighbouring Djibouti already hosts a dense concentration of foreign military bases, underscoring how intensely major powers view the waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
Sanctions and repression
For some officials in Washington, that strategic reality appears to be driving a reassessment of a policy built on sanctions and limited engagement.
Yet any US rapprochement would mean dealing with a government that rights groups routinely rank among the most repressive in the world.
Freedom House again rated Eritrea “Not Free” in its latest assessment, noting that the country has held no national election since independence, remains under one-party rule and has kept independent media shut since 2001.
Washington’s current sanctions framework is rooted mainly in the Tigray war.
In 2021, the US Treasury sanctioned the Eritrean Defence Forces, the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice and other Eritrean-linked entities under measures tied to the conflict in northern Ethiopia.
Treasury said at the time that the sanctions targeted “Eritrean actors that have contributed to the crisis and conflict” in Ethiopia.
The legal basis for those Ethiopia-related sanctions remains in place, meaning the sanctions architecture has not been dismantled even as Washington now considers a possible thaw with Asmara.
That is why critics question what Washington expects in return.
Cameron Hudson, a former US intelligence and State Department official quoted by the Journal, said sanctions relief normally follows a change in conduct.
“Normally, when we lift sanctions, the country has done something to merit it,” Hudson said. “If we are going to reward them with lifting sanctions, then what are we getting for it?”
Regional fallout
Any reset with Asmara would reverberate across the Horn of Africa, where relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia have deteriorated sharply.
In February, Ethiopia accused Eritrea of “outright aggression” and of backing armed groups inside Ethiopian territory, allegations Eritrea rejected as “false and fabricated.”
The dispute is tied in part to Ethiopia’s increasingly forceful campaign for sea access, including through Eritrea’s Red Sea port of Assab, and comes as renewed instability in Tigray has stirred fears of a wider conflict.
The United Nations lifted its own sanctions on Eritrea in 2018 after a thaw with Ethiopia and improved ties with Djibouti, but that opening never fully translated into a durable reset with the West.
Eritrea soon returned to the centre of regional conflict through its role in the Tigray war, leaving Washington to balance strategic necessity against a long record of repression and mistrust.
Now, with pressure mounting on both the Hormuz and Red Sea routes, the administration appears willing to test whether geopolitical imperatives can justify re-engagement with one of the region’s most isolated governments.
Whether that effort produces a real opening, however, may depend not only on events at sea but also on how much political risk Washington is willing to take onshore.
