How the Egypt-Ethiopia feud could upend Trump’s plans in Africa
The US has no plan for dealing with the complex rivalries that threaten its strategy in the region
Jonathan Fenton Harvey
On July 19, President Donald Trump’s top Africa adviser, Massad Boulos, held a series of talks in Cairo with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Eritrea and Somalia. The participants framed the discussions as an effort to bolster security in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.
These talks came as Egypt and Eritrea separately insisted that governance of the Red Sea should remain the exclusive responsibility of its littoral states, a thinly veiled warning to Ethiopia, a landlocked nation of 140 million people with growing maritime ambitions.
Later, on August 4, Boulos rejected speculation that Washington was assembling an anti-Ethiopian alliance, insisting it seeks amicable relations with all regional states. That rebuttal signals Washington’s delicate balancing act in an increasingly fractured region.
Indeed, just days after the talks in Cairo, Washington declared its interest in seeking deeper involvement by more American companies in Ethiopian Airlines’ planned $12.5 billion airport near the capital, Addis Ababa.
The U.S. may not be deliberately favoring Cairo over Addis Ababa, or vice versa. But without a coherent strategy, it is taking a scattershot approach to addressing thorny issues like the Egypt-Ethiopia Nile dispute, Red Sea access, and the African Union’s security mission in Somalia.
This risks hardening the very alignments from which Washington is trying to distance itself.
“I think Washington believes it can have its cake and eat it too: it can advance its own strategic objectives in the region around counterterrorism, critical minerals, maritime security and commercial diplomacy, while managing through ignorance the increasingly volatile regional competition playing out,” said Cameron Hudson, a former U.S. official who worked on Africa at the CIA, State Department and National Security Council.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/egypt-ethiopia-tensions/
