Reassessing Ethiopia’s 2018 Rapprochement with Eritrea as a Foreign Policy Turning Point
The extraordinary rapprochement between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki in 2018 has often been remembered through the highly theatrical images that accompanied it: the cheering crowds that welcomed Abiy to Asmara, the flowers and popcorn scattered during his reception, the embraces between two leaders whose countries had spent nearly two decades in a state of hostility, the holding of hands before enormous audiences, and the almost euphoric language of reconciliation that dominated the political atmosphere of those months. Contemporary reporting on the Asmara reconciliation described chanting crowds waving Ethiopian and Eritrean flags, spreading flowers and popcorn before the leaders’ convoy, and watching Abiy and Isaias embrace after years of hostility.
For some of Abiy’s opponents, particularly sections of the Shabia aligned diaspora, these images subsequently became material for ridicule and were repeatedly presented as evidence that Abiy had been politically seduced, manipulated or humiliated by Isaias, yet such an interpretation risks confusing the visible theatre of diplomacy with its deeper strategic consequences, because when the events of 2018 are examined alongside the evolution of Ethiopian foreign policy in the years that followed, a different picture emerges: the rapprochement helped reopen a question that Ethiopian politics had largely silenced for a generation, namely Ethiopia’s historical and strategic relationship with the Red Sea and, more specifically, the place of Assab within Ethiopia’s maritime imagination.
The geopolitical importance of this development becomes clearer when placed against the transformation Ethiopia experienced after Eritrean independence and the subsequent 1998 to 2000 war, after which Ethiopia’s commercial relationship with Assab disappeared and the country became increasingly dependent upon alternative maritime corridors for its international trade. Ethiopia adapted to this reality, but adaptation should never be mistaken for the disappearance of strategic interest, because throughout the following decades the Ethiopian population expanded dramatically, the economy grew, industrial ambitions increased, demand for imports and exports multiplied, and Ethiopia sought a larger regional and continental role while remaining geographically separated from direct access to the maritime system upon which virtually all of those ambitions ultimately depended.
Ethiopia’s previous access through Assab continued until the 1998 to 2000 war, after which the maritime question became inseparable from the wider strategic consequences of Ethiopia’s landlocked position. The resulting contradiction was profound: one of Africa’s largest states was becoming economically and demographically more consequential while its maritime options remained constrained, yet discussion of the Red Sea, particularly Assab, became so politically sensitive that Ethiopian political elites often preferred to avoid the subject altogether, creating an unusual situation in which one of the country’s most consequential long term geopolitical questions remained largely outside mainstream political debate.
It was into this strategic environment that Abiy travelled to Asmara in July 2018, and although international attention understandably concentrated on the dramatic reconciliation between two states that had remained hostile for almost twenty years, the visit also produced an important psychological transformation inside Ethiopia. Crowds filled the streets, Ethiopian and Eritrean flags appeared together, Abiy and Isaias embraced publicly, and contemporary reporting described flowers and popcorn being scattered along the route of the leaders’ convoy as part of the celebration. These images later became objects of mockery, but their strategic importance lay elsewhere, because a frontier that had been presented to an entire generation as politically impenetrable suddenly appeared open to diplomacy, telephone connections, commercial flights and diplomatic relations began returning, and the Ethiopian public saw its prime minister welcomed enthusiastically in Asmara, thereby weakening the psychological assumption that Ethiopia’s separation from the northern corridor represented a political condition that could never again be reconsidered.
Only days later, Isaias travelled to Addis Ababa, where the symbolism became even more extraordinary, as thousands welcomed him and the two leaders appeared together at Millennium Hall before a huge audience in an atmosphere of political celebration that would have been almost unimaginable only months earlier. In his Millennium Hall speech, Isaias spoke about overcoming the previous era of hostility and jointly embarking on a path of development, prosperity and stability, language that demonstrated just how dramatically the political vocabulary between the two governments had changed. Yet for the purposes of understanding Ethiopia’s subsequent maritime policy, the most important words were arguably Abiy’s own, because research by the Rift Valley Institute concludes that Ethiopian interest in gaining more permanent access to a seaport was already visible during the rapprochement and that Abiy was explicit from the beginning about Ethiopia’s interest in the Eritrean Red Sea port of Assab.
The institute’s detailed Peace Research Facility paper cites Abiy’s July 2018 speech in Addis Ababa, delivered with Isaias present, as declaring: “when Isaias and I are added together we share Assab.” That statement deserves far greater attention than the popcorn, the ring or the personal chemistry between the two leaders, because it places Assab inside the political vocabulary of the rapprochement from its earliest stage and challenges the assumption that Ethiopia’s contemporary maritime agenda suddenly appeared years later. Abiy was standing beside Isaias at the height of the reconciliation, before an enormous audience, while connecting the political philosophy of Medemer with Assab, and whatever interpretation one assigns to the precise wording, its broader significance is difficult to ignore: the Ethiopian prime minister was publicly reconnecting the language of regional political integration with a port that had effectively disappeared from mainstream Ethiopian state discourse for years, thereby helping move the Red Sea question from the realm of suppressed historical memory toward the realm of contemporary strategic discussion.
The foreign policy dimension of Medemer is therefore especially important, because although the concept is usually examined primarily as Abiy’s domestic political philosophy, its language of addition, integration, cooperation and the overcoming of inherited divisions could also be applied to Ethiopia’s geopolitical environment. The deeper significance was that Ethiopia’s political leadership was encouraging the public to imagine the northern geographical space again, not as an inaccessible world permanently removed from Ethiopian strategic consciousness but as part of a region with which Ethiopia could once again engage, and as Asmara returned to the political imagination, so did Massawa, Assab and ultimately the Red Sea itself.
Seen from this perspective, the central achievement of 2018 was not that Abiy permanently solved Ethiopia’s relationship with Isaias, because subsequent events clearly demonstrated the fragility of personal diplomacy, but that the rapprochement helped change the boundaries of what Ethiopians could publicly discuss about their country’s geopolitical future. Before 2018, Assab was politically radioactive, maritime strategy was easily portrayed as nostalgia or provocation, and Ethiopia’s landlocked condition was often treated less as a strategic problem requiring sustained national debate than as an irreversible historical settlement to which the country simply had to adapt; after 2018, however, the psychological environment was different, because Ethiopians had watched their prime minister travel to Asmara, had seen Ethiopian Airlines return after twenty years, had watched Isaias receive an extraordinary reception in Addis Ababa, and, crucially, had heard Assab mentioned publicly at Millennium Hall.
This transformation illustrates an important principle of foreign policy: governments do not always begin strategic reorientation with formal doctrines, treaties or military decisions, because sometimes the first requirement is psychological, involving the gradual expansion of what a political community considers legitimate, realistic or even imaginable. A strategic objective that cannot be discussed cannot easily become policy, and an objective that has disappeared from national political consciousness must first be restored to public imagination before it can become the subject of sustained statecraft; viewed through that lens, the emotional symbolism of 2018 was not necessarily separate from strategy but potentially part of the environment that made strategic reconsideration possible, because the reconciliation weakened old taboos, reopened geographical imagination and made the northern corridor visible to Ethiopians again.
The subsequent evolution of Ethiopian policy strengthens this interpretation, because by 2023 Abiy was no longer discussing the Red Sea primarily through the emotional language of reconciliation with Isaias but was presenting maritime access before parliament as a structural question of Ethiopian national interest. AFP’s examination of those remarks concluded that widely circulated claims portraying Abiy as explicitly threatening an invasion were misleading, while documenting the seriousness with which he raised Ethiopia’s maritime predicament and the need to discuss access to the sea. In later reporting on Ethiopia’s pursuit of Red Sea access, AFP also documented Abiy’s description of Ethiopia as a nation whose existence is tied to the Red Sea and his characterization of access as a matter of survival. The progression from 2018 to 2023 is therefore strategically significant: Assab first reentered public political language within the optimism of Medemer, while several years later the broader maritime question had become sufficiently normalized to be articulated as an Ethiopian national issue independent of the original political honeymoon.
This continuity is why the popcorn and the ring deserve to be reconsidered, not because those objects themselves possessed strategic importance, but because critics who remain fixated upon them may be committing a fundamental analytical error by measuring foreign policy through photographs rather than through the political consequences that followed. The relevant question is not whether Abiy appeared excessively enthusiastic in Asmara, whether Isaias enjoyed being celebrated in Addis Ababa, whether the symbolism now appears embarrassing to some observers, or whether the emotional atmosphere of 2018 ultimately proved unsustainable; the more consequential question is what ideas became politically possible after those events that had been difficult to articulate before them, and on that measure the return of Ethiopia’s Red Sea question to mainstream political consciousness is impossible to overlook.
Assab in particular carries a meaning within Ethiopian strategic memory that extends beyond the economics of a single port, because for generations of Ethiopians it represents a period when Ethiopia’s economic geography extended directly toward the Red Sea and when the country’s relationship with maritime commerce was not mediated entirely through external corridors. Ethiopia continued to enjoy access to Assab after Eritrean independence until the 1998 war, making the port an important part of the historical memory surrounding Ethiopia’s subsequent landlocked condition. That strategic memory did not necessarily disappear when Ethiopia ceased using Assab; rather, it became politically dormant, and the importance of the 2018 rapprochement was that it provided a political environment in which that dormant memory could again become part of contemporary discussion. When Abiy connected Medemer with Assab before thousands in Addis Ababa, the statement resonated precisely because the underlying historical consciousness already existed, meaning that the political leadership did not need to invent Ethiopia’s maritime imagination but merely to reactivate a question that had been pushed to the margins of national discourse.
The broader regional environment makes that reactivation increasingly consequential, because the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa have become central arenas of competition involving ports, logistics corridors, naval facilities, energy routes, trade networks and the strategic interests of regional and global powers. For Ethiopia, maritime strategy therefore intersects with virtually every dimension of national power, including trade, industrialization, energy security, defence, foreign investment, regional influence and long term economic planning, which means that the question cannot reasonably be reduced to the preferences of Abiy Ahmed or any single Ethiopian administration. Ethiopia’s population, economic aspirations and geographical position create structural pressures that will continue producing debate over maritime access regardless of who occupies the prime minister’s office, and from this perspective the more historically unusual phenomenon may not be that Ethiopia is discussing the Red Sea today but that such a fundamental geopolitical subject remained politically subdued for so long.
This brings the analysis back to those sections of the Shabia aligned diaspora that continue to circulate images of the popcorn, the ring and the embraces as proof that Abiy was politically naïve, because their interpretation may ultimately reveal the danger of mistaking political theatre for strategic outcome. They watched Abiy being welcomed in Asmara and concluded that he had been politically captured by Isaias, yet Ethiopia was simultaneously rediscovering the northern corridor; they laughed at the popcorn without considering that the psychological barrier surrounding Ethiopia’s relationship with the Red Sea was weakening; they mocked the symbolism while Assab was being spoken about in Addis Ababa; and they interpreted Medemer exclusively as Ethiopian submission without considering that the same political vocabulary was creating an environment in which Ethiopia could once again openly imagine itself in relation to Asmara, Massawa, Assab and the Red Sea.
None of this requires the implausible assumption that every development after 2018 was secretly designed in advance or that Abiy possessed a detailed master plan whose consequences unfolded precisely as intended, because serious foreign policy analysis should distinguish between deliberate strategy and the strategic consequences that emerge from political decisions. What can reasonably be argued, and what the Rift Valley Institute’s analysis helps establish, is that Ethiopia’s interest in more permanent maritime access was already part of the strategic environment surrounding the 2018 rapprochement, even if the subsequent trajectory could not have been fully predetermined.
The ultimate irony of 2018 may therefore be that those who laughed loudest at its symbols were concentrating on precisely the least important elements of the episode, because while they debated popcorn, rings, embraces and photographs, Ethiopia was beginning a much larger conversation about geography, strategic vulnerability and its relationship with the Red Sea. They believed they were watching Abiy forget Ethiopia’s maritime history in the excitement of reconciliation, when the longer trajectory suggests that the opposite was occurring: Asmara was returning to Ethiopian political consciousness, Massawa was returning to geographical imagination, Assab was returning to political vocabulary, and the Red Sea was gradually moving from a silenced historical memory toward the centre of contemporary Ethiopian foreign policy debate.
The strategic legacy of the 2018 rapprochement should consequently be measured not by whether the personal friendship between Abiy and Isaias endured, nor by whether the optimism surrounding their early encounters proved justified, but by the ideas that survived after the political theatre disappeared, and the most important of those ideas is that Ethiopia’s separation from direct maritime access does not require Ethiopia to suppress its Red Sea interests from its own national strategic thinking. The popcorn disappeared from the streets, the ceremonial gestures ended, the political honeymoon faded and the relationship between the two governments changed dramatically, but the maritime question did not return to silence; instead, by 2023 Abiy was telling parliament that Ethiopia’s quest for access to the Red Sea was a matter of survival, which may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential foreign policy developments to emerge from the political opening that began in 2018.
Those who continue making fun of the popcorn or the symbolism of the 2018 rapprochement, especially within sections of the Shabia aligned diaspora, may therefore be exposing their own political failure and naïveté rather than proving Abiy’s, because they became so absorbed in celebrating what they interpreted as the humiliation of an Ethiopian prime minister that they failed to recognize the much larger transformation taking place beneath the spectacle: while they were laughing at the popcorn and the political theatre, Ethiopia was rediscovering the Red Sea, Assab was returning to Ethiopian political discourse, and a maritime aspiration that many believed had been permanently silenced was awakening once again.
