The “new Cold War” is not yet as clearly delineated as Cold War I, but new strategic shapes are definitely emerging. One of those patterns is in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, where the United States and Egypt are being outmaneuvered.
Russia, China, and others are gaining traction over arguably the most significant sea lane in the world.
It is true that the United States has begun to rebuild some of the regional momentum it had achieved with the 2020 Abraham Accords, and has begun to rebuild a working relationship with the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which have significant Red Sea roles and influence. But all those states have “moved on” in the two years since the U.S. Biden administration disavowed the work of its predecessor Trump administration, in achieving those Abraham Accords.
The states of the region have given little support to the current U.S. position to isolate and fight a proxy war against Russia. They have embraced expanded relations with communist China even as the United States upgrades its own trade war with Beijing.
Now, Russia has consolidated itself on the Red Sea littoral in a way not seen since the strong Soviet presence there during the Cold War. This was driven almost entirely by the fact that the United States—in attempting to support Egypt’s position as the dominant power controlling the Red sea—had supported the losing side in the Ethiopian civil war, the extreme Marxist Tigré Popular Liberation Front (TPLF).
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki on Jan. 26 and agreed on a framework of cooperation, which includes Russian use of the Eritrean port and airport at Massawa on the Red Sea. This could become as significant as the Russian naval and air force basing at Latakia, Syria’s Mediterranean port city.
And although it is conceivable that Egypt, which itself brooks no other major power dominating the Red Sea, could at some stage restrict Russian naval passage to Russian naval vessels transiting the Suez Canal to the Red Sea, Lavrov made it clear that Russia would be prepared to transit the Atlantic from Russian northern ports and enter the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope sea route, as it did periodically during the Vietnam War for Russian resupply of the North Vietnamese forces.
Lavrov, in his January Africa sojourn, also visited South Africa—which dominates the Cape of Good Hope sea lane—and cemented relations with the African National Congress (ANC) government of President Cyril Ramaphosa. With that emerged the reality that the more-or-less moribund and meaningless BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) treaty had suddenly become militarily and strategically viable, quite apart from its earlier failure as an economic alliance. This takes on more meaning with the reaccession of the leftist Brazilian government of President Luiz Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva on Jan. 1.
Moscow and Beijing have organized an imminent BRICS-flagged military exercise involving Russia, China, and South African forces. That is not to say that Russia and China are necessarily in total harmony over Moscow’s global reassertion. But at this stage they are not openly at odds with each other.
Eritrea was one of the few African countries that voted against a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s Feb. 24. 2022, invasion of Ukraine, although many African governments abstained in that vote. This already signaled a major move away from the United States, or at least a refusal to follow Washington on moving to create the “new Cold War” with Russia.
Eritrea, historically part of the Ethiopian Empire and its face on the Red Sea, revived its strong alliance with the Ethiopian government in 2018, following the collapse of the Marxist TPLF-controlled government. The subsequent U.S. support for the TPLF—which sought to recapture control of the Ethiopian government—meant that Washington lost influence in Addis Ababa. And although the United States appeared to be able to win back the confidence of Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed Ali at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit (Dec. 13–15, 2022), which was attended by Abiy, it failed to do so.
Indeed, that summit, like former U.S. President Barack Obama’s Africa Summit (Aug. 4–6, 2014), did little to rebuild Washington’s influence in Africa, despite the decline in Beijing’s influence there. In fact, the major gain by any external power as China’s dominance in Africa began to erode was Russia, which made a significant entry into Mali as the supporting military influence, ousting that of France and, indeed, the regional ECOWAS treaty states, dominated by Nigeria.
Meanwhile, even though Washington seemed to acknowledge the end of the main Ethiopian civil war, with the defeat of the TPLF, it failed to move from the acceptance of the TPLF defeat to an embrace of the Abiy government of Ethiopia. The United States still has “given hope” to the rump TPLF leadership that the Marxist force could revive its military operations. The Nov. 2, 2022, Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities, brokered by the African Union (AU) and mediated by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in Pretoria, South Africa, was, literally, the unconditional surrender of the TPLF.
Despite this, the TPLF has, as of early February 2023, only surrendered its heavy weapons, leaving its combatants still in control of their small arms, and their aspiration to return to power.
Not that Ethiopia is without massive challenges now that the TPLF has been somewhat tamed. Another civil war, led by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), continues unchecked, and the problem with this is that Prime Minister Abiy identifies himself as Oromo, and has appeared reluctant to rein in the OLF and its compatriots.
Moreover, Abiy himself appeared to endorse (or, at least, not oppose) a recent attempted coup within the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, possibly the largest Orthodox Christian church in the world. A schism within the Church’s synod attempted to appoint a new patriarch and new bishops. Abiy is himself a strenuously practicing Pentacostal Christian (and has recently moved away from the previously-acknowledged reality that his mother was Amhara, not Oromo).
So Abiy may have revealed or shown himself to be against the mainstream Orthodox Church, which would alienate a very substantial part of the population, particularly the Amhara and the overwhelmingly Orthodox Tigreans (who are already alienated from the Abiy government). This has led to the creation of a new Amhara political party that is now set to break away from the nationally-governing Prosperity Party.
Meanwhile, Eritrea remains Ethiopia’s key ally in combating a revived TPLF. But so, too, do Russia, China, and NATO member Turkey remain Addis Ababa’s allies, despite the reluctance with which Abiy revived relations with Beijing. Now it appears that landlocked Ethiopia’s plan to revive its navy—opposed by Egypt—will take place in cooperation with Eritrea and Djibouti, particularly with Russian cooperation. Earlier plans to engage French naval cooperation in the revival of the Ethiopian Navy—which had achieved significant capability under the late Emperor Haile Selassie I, until his 1974 overthrow—had collapsed. Israel remains a key trainer for the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) naval ambitions.
Still, Eritrea’s vital assistance to Abiy cannot be taken for granted, given the Eritrean government’s commitment to the Orthodox Church.
Even so, all this may force the Egyptian government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi reluctantly back to a closer relationship with the United States. However, Cairo’s control over Sudan—the Red Sea state between Eritrea and Egypt—as a major pressure against Ethiopia on the matter of control of the Nile water flow has slipped. In January 2023, it became clear that Sudan, for some time hostile to Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), had now revived its embrace of the GERD project, which was built to export Ethiopian hydroelectricity to Sudan.
So the future stability of the Suez-Red Sea sea lane is now compromised.
