Assab Is Not Coming Back: Why Eritrea Has Every Reason to Keep Ethiopia Landlocked

The Weight of a Port City

Assab sits at the southern end of Eritrea's coastline, close to the border with Djibouti, facing the Bab al-Mandab strait. During the decades before Eritrean independence, it functioned as Ethiopia's primary Red Sea port. Oil passed through it. Grain moved through it. For a country of forty million people at the time, it was not a convenience but a lifeline. When Eritrea formally separated in 1993 and those facilities became foreign territory, Ethiopia had to rebuild its entire trade logistics around borrowed access: first Assab under a transitional agreement, then Djibouti once that relationship collapsed during the 1998 to 2000 war.

The war itself was ostensibly about Badme, a dusty border town of no obvious strategic value. But many analysts have long argued that the port question was the unspoken fuel. Ethiopia's loss of Assab access in 1993 had already created a structural grievance. The war formalized the breach. By 2000, Ethiopia was fully dependent on Djibouti, and Eritrea had locked Assab. It has been locked ever since.

Why Asmara Does Not Want a Deal

The standard framing of the Assab question treats it as a negotiation problem: two countries with aligned incentives (Ethiopia needs a port, Eritrea has one gathering dust) that simply need to find the right framework. That framing is wrong. Eritrea does not have a port gathering dust. It has an asset whose value is not commercial but strategic, and that value is maximised precisely by withholding it.

Consider what reopening Assab to Ethiopia would require from Asmara's perspective. It would mean formal, legally binding access arrangements with a neighbour five times larger by population. It would mean Ethiopian personnel, goods, and capital flowing through Eritrean territory on a permanent basis. It would mean dependence on continued Ethiopian goodwill for port revenues, creating exactly the kind of vulnerability that Eritrea's isolationist posture is designed to avoid. And it would mean conceding that the port's best use is as a transit hub for a country Eritrea spent a decade fighting.

President Isaias Afwerki's government has operated for thirty years on a doctrine of self-reliance and strategic ambiguity. Engaging with Ethiopia on Assab would require transparency, legal commitments, and a degree of interdependence that runs against every instinct the PFDJ government has ever displayed. Even the Algiers Agreement of 2000, which ended the border war, left Assab outside any commercial framework. That was not an oversight.

The 2018 Peace Thaw and What It Revealed

When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and President Isaias signed a joint declaration of peace in July 2018, the Horn of Africa watched with genuine surprise. The declaration moved quickly: embassies reopened, flights resumed, phone lines were reconnected. Eritreans in the diaspora celebrated. Ethiopian officials spoke openly about economic integration and port access. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 partly on the strength of that agreement.

But Assab did not open. Not in 2018. Not in 2019. Not in 2020. The peace agreement did not produce a port agreement because the two sides did not want the same things from it. Abiy wanted trade access and regional legitimacy. Isaias wanted relief from international pressure, a buffer against internal dissent, and a realignment of his country's relationship with regional powers without any domestic structural change. Assab was never on the negotiating table in a practical sense because Eritrea never brought it there.

The subsequent Tigray war complicated matters further. Eritrea fought alongside the Ethiopian federal government against the TPLF, creating a new military alignment that rewrote earlier assumptions. But the Tigray war did not produce Assab access either, even as Eritrean troops operated deep inside Ethiopian territory alongside federal forces. If anything, the war showed that military cooperation and commercial cooperation are entirely separate tracks that Asmara has no intention of connecting.

The Economic Argument Does Not Hold

Proponents of renewed Eritrea-Ethiopia port negotiations often point to the economic case. Assab, they argue, is severely underutilised. Eritrea's economy is weak. Port revenues from Ethiopian trade could fund development, reduce Eritrea's isolation, and give Asmara a stake in regional stability. The argument sounds logical. It underestimates how PFDJ calculates its own interests.

Eritrea's government has consistently chosen political control over economic growth. It maintains one of Africa's most closed economies, with currency controls, a state-dominated business environment, and chronic emigration driven by mandatory indefinite military service. The suggestion that port revenues would induce a change in behaviour presupposes that the government is trying to improve living standards. The evidence suggests it is trying to maintain power. Those are not the same objective.

A port deal that brought Ethiopian trade through Assab would also bring Ethiopian economic influence. Contractors, logistics operators, and finance would follow trade. In an Eritrean economy where the government controls virtually all significant enterprise, foreign economic presence is not an opportunity. It is a threat to the patronage networks that sustain the PFDJ structure.

Ethiopia's Alternative Routes and Why They Are Not Enough

Ethiopia has not been waiting passively. Djibouti handles the overwhelming majority of Ethiopian trade, and Ethiopia has paid heavily for that dependence, both in port fees and in the political leverage it concedes to a small neighbour. Addis Ababa has also invested in infrastructure through Berbera in Somaliland, taken a stake in the Berbera port, and signed frameworks with Somalia in the hopes of diversifying its maritime access.

None of these alternatives eliminate the Assab question. Berbera is useful but geographically distant from Ethiopia's northern industrial heartland. Djibouti is expensive and politically risky. A genuine Assab agreement would transform Ethiopia's northern trade corridor in ways that Berbera and Djibouti cannot replicate. That is why Ethiopian officials continue to float the idea publicly even when Eritrea gives no indication of interest.

The asymmetry is fundamental. Ethiopia needs a port agreement more than Eritrea does. That imbalance means that any negotiation would require Ethiopia to make significant concessions on other issues to secure what Asmara already has. What those concessions might be is unclear, and whether Ethiopian domestic politics would permit them is even less certain. Addis Ababa is pursuing something Asmara has no structural incentive to provide, and framing it as a mutual benefit does not change the underlying asymmetry.

What Would Actually Change the Calculation

Three scenarios could alter Eritrea's position on Assab, and none of them is imminent.

The first is a change of government in Asmara. Isaias Afwerki is in his late seventies and has no publicly named successor. A post-Isaias government, particularly one oriented toward economic reform or regional integration, might see Assab differently. But succession in Eritrea is entirely opaque, and the PFDJ's institutional culture does not suggest that reformers are waiting in the wings. The next Eritrean government could be more rigid, not less.

The second scenario is a broader Horn of Africa security architecture that gives Eritrea formal guarantees and a stake in regional institutions it currently rejects. If Eritrea were embedded in a security arrangement that reduced its sense of siege, the calculus around Assab might shift. But that kind of arrangement requires the very regional trust-building that Eritrea has systematically avoided for three decades.

The third is economic collapse so severe that the PFDJ can no longer sustain its current posture. Eritrea's economy is already fragile, with remittances from the diaspora providing a significant share of household income. But the government has shown remarkable tolerance for economic deterioration when the alternative is political change. Collapse is not impossible, but it is not imminent.

Why Ethiopia Keeps Asking Anyway

Ethiopian officials know the obstacles as well as anyone. They continue to raise Assab publicly for several reasons that have nothing to do with expecting a yes from Asmara.

Domestically, Ethiopia's landlocked status is a political issue. Abiy Ahmed's government has connected port access to national dignity, historical grievance, and economic development in ways that resonate across ethnic and regional lines. Continuing to raise the issue signals resolve to an Ethiopian public that remembers what the coastline meant and resents its loss. Dropping the demand entirely would carry political costs.

Internationally, keeping Assab visible in diplomatic conversations maintains Ethiopia's ability to signal dissatisfaction with the current arrangement without taking concrete steps. It is a way of applying soft pressure on Eritrea in multilateral forums, and of reminding Gulf states and Western partners that the Ethiopia-Eritrea relationship remains unresolved. It costs Addis Ababa very little to keep asking.

The result is a conversation that both sides continue without any expectation that it will conclude. Ethiopia asks for access it cannot compel. Eritrea declines to offer access it has no incentive to grant. The port sits at the bottom of the Red Sea corridor, handling a fraction of its theoretical capacity, while five hundred kilometres away the world's most populous landlocked country pays top dollar to move its goods through a smaller neighbour's single port.

The Honest Assessment

Assab will not reopen to Ethiopia on any meaningful timeline that current analysts can project. The conditions for change are structural and political, and none of them are moving in a direction that suggests imminent resolution. Ethiopia will continue to invest in Berbera, continue to negotiate with Somalia, continue to pay Djibouti's fees, and continue to raise Assab as an aspiration. Eritrea will continue to say nothing, do nothing, and hold the card it has held since 1993.

The harder question is what Ethiopia does with that reality. The Berbera investment is real and underutilised. A genuine commercial relationship with a stable Somali government would reduce Djibouti dependence in meaningful ways. Those alternatives are imperfect, but they are available. Assab is not.

Analysts who spend energy modelling how an Assab deal might be structured are doing interesting work. But the first step is acknowledging that no such deal is on offer, and that Eritrea's reasons for withholding it are rational from Asmara's perspective, however costly they are for the region as a whole.