Addis Ababa (Somalia Today) – Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s long quest to regain sea access appears to be shifting away from Somalia and towards Eritrea’s Red Sea coast.
A military build-up near Tigray and rising friction with Asmara have fuelled fears that the port of Assab has become Addis Ababa’s new strategic focus.
Ethiopia has not publicly abandoned the Somalia track, but recent diplomatic and security moves suggest the centre of gravity has moved north.
Somalia route hits limits
That shift follows two years in which Abiy’s Somalia route ran into hard political limits.
His January 2024 memorandum with Somaliland offered Ethiopia access to the sea in exchange for possible recognition of the breakaway region.
The deal triggered a major crisis with Mogadishu, which fiercely denounced it as a violation of its sovereignty.
Turkish mediation later helped cool the row and, in December 2024, Ethiopia and Somalia agreed to pursue commercial arrangements.
Those deals aimed to give landlocked Ethiopia “reliable, secure and sustainable” access to the sea while respecting Somalia’s territorial integrity.
The thaw deepened in early 2025, when Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud visited Ethiopia, and Abiy later travelled to Mogadishu.
That does not mean the Somalia file is closed, but it does suggest the unilateral route through Somaliland has become far harder to sustain.
The dispute pushed Somalia closer to Egypt and Eritrea, both already at odds with Addis Ababa.
In October 2024, the three countries agreed to deepen security co-operation in a move widely seen as increasing regional pressure on Ethiopia.
From Berbera to Assab
For Abiy, the maritime question has never gone away.
Ethiopia lost its coastline when Eritrea broke away in 1993, leaving Africa’s most populous landlocked country dependent on neighbours for access to global trade.
In recent years, Abiy has increasingly framed sea access as an existential national issue, though he has also said Ethiopia does not intend to go to war with Eritrea to obtain it.
In March 2025, he reiterated that his government had no intention of entering into conflict with Eritrea over sea access and wanted to pursue the issue through dialogue.
Yet tensions with Eritrea have kept rising.
In February, Ethiopia accused Eritrea of military aggression and of backing armed groups inside Ethiopian territory, an accusation Asmara rejected.
In the same exchange, however, Addis Ababa also said it remained open to dialogue on maritime affairs, including access to the Red Sea through Assab, underlining how central the Eritrean port has become to Ethiopia’s calculations.
Recent reporting has sharpened fears that Assab, not Somaliland, is now the most combustible theatre in Abiy’s sea-access campaign.
It was reported late last month that Abiy’s ambition for sovereign access to Assab had helped provoke a military build-up along the Eritrean border.
Ethiopian troops backed by tanks and heavy weapons have reportedly massed near Tigray, where tensions involving Eritrea and Tigrayan forces have raised fears of a wider confrontation.
Magnus Taylor, deputy Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group, warned that the stand-off carries a real danger of escalation.
“There’s a possibility of mistakes or miscalculation,” he said. “And the situation could deteriorate further in the coming months.”
A harder turn north
Ahmed Abdi, a Mogadishu-based analyst, said the emerging pattern suggests Abiy now sees Eritrea as the easier, though no less dangerous, path.
“Given that Assab was always more attractive to Abiy, and that the communities there are seen as closer to Ethiopia, it appears Abiy has concluded that taking it is easier than trying to seize part of Somalia’s coast,” Abdi said.
He noted that Abiy’s rhetoric had also tried to build a political justification for such a move, even if not a legal one.
“Even though he has no legal basis, Abiy can at least try to create an argument to cast doubt on the separation of Assab and Eritrea,” Abdi said.
“Looking at those statements, he has been laying the groundwork to justify taking Assab. Faced with two illegal options, he seems to have chosen the easier one.”
Abdi’s reading draws directly on Abiy’s own remarks last October.
In a parliamentary address, the Ethiopian leader said there was “no official record or institutional decision” documenting Ethiopia’s loss of sea access, and argued that no cabinet, parliament, or public body had formally approved it.
Abiy later described Ethiopia’s loss of access through Eritrea’s secession as a “mistake” that “will be corrected”.
Those remarks alarmed Eritrea and added to concerns that Addis Ababa was trying to recast a settled historical outcome as an open national grievance.
The economic argument
The appeal of Assab is not hard to see.
Before the 1998-2000 border war, Ethiopia relied heavily on Eritrean ports, including Assab.
Since that war, Ethiopia’s trade has shifted overwhelmingly to Djibouti.
Around 90 percent of Ethiopian trade now passes through Djibouti, a dependence that Ethiopian officials have increasingly portrayed as costly and strategically unsustainable.
That economic argument has become a central part of Abiy’s case at home.
In February, he said Ethiopia’s economy was expected to expand by 10.2 percent in the 2025-26 fiscal year, as the government pressed ahead with reforms and sought to attract more investment.
But any war scare with Eritrea risks undercutting that message, spooking investors and diverting resources back into conflict at a time when Ethiopia is still grappling with insecurity in multiple regions.
A region already on edge
The risk is magnified by the unfinished legacy of the Tigray war.
Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces during the devastating 2020-2022 conflict, but relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara soured after Eritrea was left out of the talks that ended the war in November 2022.
Since then, tensions inside Tigray and along the Eritrean frontier have repeatedly raised fears that the fragile post-war order could unravel.
A new Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict would reverberate far beyond the border.
The UN’s trade and development agency notes that the Suez Canal, which links directly to the Red Sea route, handled about 12 percent to 15 percent of global trade in 2023.
The corridor is already under strain from conflict in Sudan, insecurity in Somalia, and attacks on shipping linked to the Yemen war.
Another armed crisis in the Horn would add pressure to one of the world’s most important trade arteries.
For Somalia, that wider shift matters as much as the immediate diplomatic relief.
The easing of tensions with Addis Ababa reduced the risk of a direct Somalia-Ethiopia rupture.
But if Abiy’s maritime ambitions are now concentrating on Assab, the region may simply be moving from one dangerous arena to another.
Ethiopia has not renounced its interest in Somali ports.
Still, the political road through Somalia looks narrower than it did a year ago, while the northern road towards Eritrea looks more central, more volatile, and far more militarised.
In that sense, Abiy’s Somalia gambit may not be dead. But it no longer appears to be the main front. Assab does.
