Recent reports revealed that the Trump administration has been quietly pursuing normalization of ties with Eritrea, a small nation in the Horn of Africa with a 700-mile coastline on the Red Sea, sitting directly opposite Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen at the entrance of the Bab al-Mandeb strait.
With the U.S. locked in a war with Iran that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and roiled global energy markets, an ally on the Red Sea has never looked more valuable. Saudi Arabia, locked out of its main Gulf export terminals, has been routing roughly 4 million barrels of crude oil a day through its Red Sea port of Yanbu. This makes the Bab al-Mandeb the sole outlet for the world's biggest petroleum exporter to reach the global market.
The Houthis and Iran have now threatened to shut that corridor too, and the prospect of both chokepoints closing simultaneously has focused minds in Washington on Eritrea and the Red Sea arena more broadly.
It was Egypt that reportedly arranged the meeting between Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s Africa envoy, and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki in Cairo. The talks were first reported by the Wall Street Journal and independently confirmed by Semafor. Boulos has denied discussing Eritrea while in Cairo, but the denial has done little to quell speculation that U.S.- Eritrea normalization is in the works — especially in light of a statement from the Eritrean Embassy in Washington released last week that did not deny the talks, but defended the case for normalization, attacking critics of the process as “hired lobbyists.”
The State Department, meanwhile, told RS it “looks forward to strengthening the United States' relationship with the people and Government of the State of Eritrea.”
Egypt’s role as a broker is one of the most important details of the story. The Iran war has badly shaken Egypt’s own economy. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi noted recently that attacks on Red Sea shipping cost Egypt $10 billion in Suez Canal revenues. Though el-Sisi was careful not to get into specifics, he was seemingly referring to the Houthi shipping blockade of 2023-2025, launched in solidarity with Gaza, during Hamas’s war with Israel.
During that period, Egypt took significant steps to thaw its long troubled ties with Iran and also reportedly conducted secret consultations with the Houthis, attempting to contain Red Sea escalation. With the Houthis and Iran now threatening to reopen that front as Iran’s war widens, Cairo has every reason to want the entrance to the Red Sea secured.
Indeed, Egypt’s interests in Eritrea run deeper than emergency economics. Cairo has spent the past two years constructing an elaborate pressure architecture around neighboring Ethiopia, and Washington has now been recruited into it, apparently without fully grasping the role it is being asked to play.
The grievances driving Egypt are longstanding. Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in September, and has since announced plans for three additional dams on the Nile. Egypt views Ethiopia’s construction of dams as “existential” threats to its water security. El-Sisi told Trump in January that he valued American support on the Nile issue and praised the president for offering to restart mediation, but Ethiopia continues to resist efforts to come back to the table, arguing that its position is legally justified, and that the GERD's inauguration has created a fait accompli.
In response to this situation, Egypt has concluded agreements to upgrade Eritrea’s ports of Doraleh and Assab with facilities capable of hosting Egyptian warships. Egypt has also deployed troops to Somalia’s peacekeeping mission, placing Egyptian forces on Ethiopia’s south-eastern flank. It has lobbied Saudi Arabia to deepen security links with Eritrea, and it has aligned itself firmly with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in its civil war against the Emirati-backed Rapid Support forces — a conflict in which Eritrea is also backing the SAF, while Ethiopia has been supporting the RSF.
In short, Egypt has constructed a clear strategy of encircling Ethiopia from all sides. And now, by brokering the rapprochement between Washington and Asmara, Egypt is no doubt keen on activating American diplomatic weight in its regional campaign.
For Washington, the sudden interest in normalizing with Eritrea is anchored in necessity. Washington has shunned Eritrea for decades on account of its abysmal human rights record, and the Trump administration itself included Eritrea in its own travel ban in June 2025.
The move also sits awkwardly with the fact that the administration has made protecting Christians worldwide from persecution a signature foreign policy cause. Eritrea has been designated as “Country of Particular Concern” by the State Department every year since 2004, and its crackdowns on unregistered Christian groups have been especially harsh.
But with the Hormuz blockade dragging on, ceasefire talks with Iran in limbo, and the possibility of Houthi attacks on shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb, the administration is reaching for whatever leverage it can find. While the U.S. and Eritrea were in talks as early as September of last year, when Boulos met Eritrea’s foreign minister on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, the speed with which the reset has accelerated underscores how the Iran war has squeezed Washington’s options in the Red Sea.
Another complication is that, even if normalization grants Washington a new strategic perch on the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the way it is being pursued carries costs. Whatever Washington’s intentions, allowing Cairo to broker the normalization means the move will be read across the Horn of Africa as in alignment with the Egypt-Eritrea axis.
That perception runs counter to America’s interests, given that Ethiopia is the Horn of Africa’s most populous country, its largest economy, a longstanding security partner, and the host of the African Union.
The risk is magnified by the poisoned history of the two nations, and the fact that Ethiopia and Eritrea are massing troops along their shared border. Eritrea and Ethiopia fought each other before in a brutal border war from 1998 to 2000 that was rooted in Eritrea’s painful separation from Ethiopia after a three-decade independence struggle.
For years after that, they remained locked in a state of “no peace, no war” until the United Arab Emirates helped broker a historic peace deal in 2018, for which Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
After that, the two countries joined forces to crush a rebellion in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region from 2020 to 2022 — a conflict that cost more than 600,000 lives and displaced millions. But the alliance collapsed immediately after the conclusion of the war. It was at that point that Ethiopia’s prime minister began demanding Red Sea access through Eritrean territory. Asmara responded by arming his enemies: ethnic Amhara militias fighting the Federal Government of Ethiopia in the interior, and factions within the Tigray movement they had fought jointly to defeat.
In April, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), whose 2020 clash with the Ethiopian government triggered the war, announced it was reinstating its own parliament, a direct challenge to federal authority that mirrors the provocation that started the 2020-2022 Tigray war. Ethiopian officials have accused Eritrea of encouraging the move, a move officials in Addis Ababa suspect is designed to keep land-locked Ethiopia off-balance and away from the coast.
The Horn is thus on the verge of renewed war, and normalizing with Eritrea — which has been quietly cultivating the TPLF as a proxy against Ethiopia as of late — risks heightening tensions further.
But there is also an opportunity for the U.S. to act as a stabilizer. Washington now has lines open to all sides. It has historically partnered with Ethiopia, it is opening channels with Eritrea, and it holds genuine leverage over Cairo through military aid and close personal ties between Trump and el-Sisi.
Used wisely, those assets could make Washington a de-escalatory force in a region that badly needs one. Used carelessly, it risks being absorbed into the Horn of Africa’s long-standing rivalries.