Washington Moves to Lift Eritrea Sanctions: Red Sea Strategy Rewrites the Rules

What the document reveals — and what it signals

Reuters has not published the full text of the internal document, but the substance is significant: the United States intends to remove sanctions against Eritrea, with the decision framed internally around Eritrea's Red Sea position rather than any improvement in the country's governance record. That framing matters enormously. It means the administration has made an explicit strategic calculation — that the value of Eritrea's geography outweighs the costs of rehabilitating a government that, by any standard measurement, remains one of the most repressive on earth.

The sanctions being lifted are likely those imposed under the Eriʼtrea Executive Order and related designations from 2021, which targeted senior Eritrean Defense Force officials and the PFDJ party structure over Eritrea's military intervention in the Tigray war. Those sanctions were imposed after documented evidence of Eritrean forces committing atrocities in northern Tigray, including mass killings, sexual violence, and the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure. None of that has been formally addressed. Asmara has not acknowledged the conduct. There has been no accountability process, no public reckoning, no change of command for the units implicated. The sanctions are being lifted not because the case against Eritrea has weakened, but because a different set of interests has moved to the front of the queue.

The Hormuz factor: why Eritrea's geography became urgent

To understand why this is happening now, the Strait of Hormuz is the starting point. The strait — the narrow channel between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and a substantial fraction of its LNG passes — has been closed or severely disrupted as a consequence of the Iran war. The immediate effect on global energy markets has been severe. The secondary effect, less immediately visible but strategically more durable, is the intensified focus on alternative shipping corridors — and on who controls the coastline along those corridors.

The Red Sea connects the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. It is the primary maritime route between Asia and Europe, carrying container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers that would otherwise face the far longer voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. With Hormuz disrupted, the Red Sea has become even more central to the functioning of global trade. And Eritrea sits on the western shore of that sea for more than 1,100 kilometres, directly opposite Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, just north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait — the southern chokepoint through which all Red Sea traffic must pass to reach the Indian Ocean.

For Washington, the arithmetic has changed. A hostile or unaligned Eritrea — one that could offer port access, basing rights, or intelligence cooperation to China, Russia, or any regional actor seeking to project power along the Red Sea — is a significantly more expensive problem than it was three years ago. The U.S. Naval base in Djibouti (Camp Lemonnier) provides one anchor for American Red Sea presence. But Eritrea's Assab port, its Dahlak archipelago islands, and its broader coastline offer assets that are not replicated elsewhere in the region.

The history of U.S.-Eritrea sanctions: from EEPA to reversal

American sanctions policy toward Eritrea has a long and layered history. The most recent and specific measures were imposed in 2021 under the Eritrea-related executive order, targeting individuals and entities in connection with the Tigray war. But the U.S.-Eritrea relationship had been strained well before that. The State Department had long maintained travel advisories, arms embargo support through the UN Security Council, and diplomatic isolation of the PFDJ government.

What is striking about the current reported reversal is its scope. Lifting sanctions — as opposed to merely suspending them or carving out humanitarian exceptions — is a substantive act. It signals an intention to normalise the relationship, not simply to pause the pressure. For Isaias Afwerki's government, which has spent decades constructing a domestic narrative of heroic resistance against external persecution, the formal removal of American sanctions carries enormous symbolic weight. It is the international community's largest single power saying, in effect, that the period of censure is over.

The Ethiopia signal: restraining a potential flashpoint

Analysts cited by Reuters identify a second objective in the U.S. decision: sending a message to Ethiopia not to go to war with Eritrea. This framing is important and deserves unpacking. Ethiopia and Eritrea have a deeply antagonistic history — the 1998–2000 border war killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people and left a frozen conflict that persisted until the 2018 rapprochement under Abiy Ahmed. That rapprochement subsequently deteriorated during and after the Tigray war, in which Eritrean forces fought alongside the Ethiopian federal army against the TPLF. The post-Pretoria period has seen renewed tension between Addis Ababa and Asmara, with Eritrean forces remaining in parts of northern Ethiopia against the terms of the ceasefire.

A renewed Ethiopia-Eritrea war, in the current regional context, would be a serious problem for Washington. It would destabilise the Red Sea's western shore at precisely the moment that the U.S. needs that shore stable. It would draw in regional actors, potentially including Gulf states with competing interests. And it would undermine the Pretoria peace framework, which, however imperfectly, remains the only agreed basis for post-war political order in northern Ethiopia.

By engaging Eritrea diplomatically — and signalling that Asmara has geopolitical value to Washington — the U.S. is implicitly raising the cost of any Ethiopian action that might provoke Eritrea. It is also giving Isaias a reason to remain within the framework of international engagement rather than retreating further into isolation. Whether Isaias reads this signal as intended is a different question. His government's behaviour has rarely been predictable to external actors attempting to influence it through incentives.

What Isaias gets — and what he gives up

For the PFDJ government, the lifting of U.S. sanctions is unambiguously beneficial in the short term. It removes one layer of economic restriction from a country whose formal economy has been hollowed out by decades of mismanagement, military conscription, and the emigration of a large fraction of its working-age population. It opens the door to engagement with international financial institutions from which Eritrea has been effectively excluded. And it provides Isaias with a domestic legitimation narrative — that his government's policy of defiance has been vindicated.

What Eritrea offers in return is less clear from the available reporting. The most plausible exchange involves some combination of port access assurances, intelligence cooperation on Red Sea maritime security, and a commitment to maintain the current fragile equilibrium with Ethiopia. Eritrea has the Assab port facility, which was previously leased to the UAE for military use in the Yemen war and has been a point of significant interest for regional powers. The Dahlak archipelago, a chain of islands in the southern Red Sea, offers potential naval and surveillance value. Whether any formal basing arrangement is being discussed is not reported — but the strategic logic for such discussions is obvious.

The Saudi dimension

Saudi Arabia's role in this realignment cannot be overlooked. The Kingdom has its own Red Sea interests that are deeply bound up with Eritrea's geography. Saudi Arabia's western coast runs parallel to Eritrea's eastern coast; the Red Sea is, from Riyadh's perspective, a home sea rather than a distant trade route. Saudi Arabia was deeply involved in brokering the 2018 Eritrea-Ethiopia peace agreement, and has maintained an interest in Eritrean stability ever since. With the Strait of Hormuz disrupted by the Iran conflict, Saudi Arabia's dependence on the Red Sea as an export corridor for its own oil — through the East-West pipeline to the Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea coast — has increased significantly.

U.S. engagement with Eritrea therefore fits within a broader alignment of interests among Washington's Gulf partners, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of which have existing relationships with Asmara. American sanctions removal removes an awkward friction point in those relationships and allows Gulf states to deepen their own Eritrean engagement without the implicit tension of operating in a U.S.-sanctioned environment.

The human rights cost of strategic pragmatism

What this decision costs is not difficult to describe, even if it is apparently being paid without significant internal U.S. debate. Eritrea remains one of the world's most closed and repressive states. Its national indefinite military service — which the UN has called a form of enslavement — continues to drive tens of thousands of Eritreans to flee each year, generating one of the largest per-capita refugee flows in the world. Political prisoners, including members of the G-15 reform movement and journalists arrested in 2001, remain imprisoned without trial or charge. No independent media operate inside the country. No civil society organisations function independently of the state. The PFDJ controls every significant institution.

None of this is changing as a precondition of sanctions removal. The Reuters report does not suggest any governance benchmarks, human rights conditions, or accountability requirements attached to the decision. This is not unusual in the history of U.S. strategic engagement — American relationships with authoritarian partners in the Gulf, Central Asia, and elsewhere have rarely been conditioned on democratic reform. But it does mean that the people of Eritrea — those inside the country living under the system, and those who fled it — are not the intended beneficiaries of this policy shift. Their government is.

The longer arc: what this means for the Horn

The U.S. decision, if implemented as reported, will accelerate a broader realignment already underway in the Horn of Africa. External powers — the Gulf states, China, Turkey, Russia, and now an explicitly engaged United States — are competing for influence over the coastline states. Djibouti has hosted multiple foreign military bases simultaneously. Somalia is the subject of competing security frameworks. Ethiopia is negotiating its own Red Sea access strategy. And now Eritrea, which spent a decade in diplomatic deep freeze, is being courted by the world's largest military power because its coastline has become strategically indispensable.

For the Horn's people, this great-power attention rarely translates into improved governance, reduced conflict, or economic development. It tends to reinforce the security establishments of whichever government is being courted, extend the life of regimes that might otherwise face internal pressure, and import external rivalries into already fragile political environments. The Hormuz closure has made Eritrea's geography matter. Whether the people of Eritrea benefit from the sudden interest in where they live is a question that strategic documents tend not to address.