Abiy Ahmed has a phrase he keeps returning to. He calls Ethiopia’s lack of a coastline a “geographical prison” and frames sea access as an existential question of justice. In a country of 130 million people that exports almost everything through Djibouti at extortionate transit costs, the framing has obvious resonance. It is also the closest a sitting African leader has come, in this decade, to publicly preparing his population for a war of territorial revision.
The latest indicators are alarming. Both Ethiopia and Eritrea have mobilised significant troop concentrations along their shared border. In February 2026, Addis Ababa formally wrote to Asmara demanding the withdrawal of Eritrean forces from what it called Ethiopian territory; Asmara fired back that the allegations were “patently false and fabricated.” Ethiopia now accuses Eritrea of providing clandestine support to dissident factions of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and to Amhara Fano militias whose insurgency has continued to bleed Ethiopia’s northern highlands. Eritrea, for its part, has withdrawn from IGAD, accusing the regional bloc of “becoming a tool against” it. There is no functioning diplomatic channel between the two governments worth the name.
What is different about this round of tensions is that Tigray — the very battleground of the 2020–22 war — is no longer a buffer that absorbs the conflict. The Pretoria Agreement that ended that war has frayed. A split has emerged inside the TPLF between a faction that wants to honour the 2022 peace and a faction that has reportedly opened back-channels with Eritrea against Abiy. The interim regional administration that Addis installed has lost public legitimacy. Tigrayan elders are openly saying that another full-scale war would amount to “slow, certain death” for a population that has not recovered from the last one.
For Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, the strategic logic is brutal but coherent. He sees Abiy’s sea-access doctrine as an existential threat to Eritrean sovereignty, and he has correctly judged that international guarantees against Ethiopian expansionism are worth roughly the paper they are printed on. Better, in his calculus, to keep Ethiopia destabilised through proxy support to its internal opponents than to face an Ethiopian army that has had time to reconstitute and to acquire Turkish, Russian and Emirati drones. Eritrea has been here before — and it has survived precisely by being the smaller, harder, more unforgiving party.
The wild card is the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi has poured money, drones and political backing into Abiy’s Ethiopia and is the principal external sponsor of any Red Sea ambition he may pursue. The UAE also has its own port and base interests in Berbera, Bosaso, Assab and the western Indian Ocean. A war over a Red Sea outlet would simultaneously be a regional realignment of port economies that touches Somaliland, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran. This is no longer just an Ethiopian-Eritrean quarrel; it is a node in the wider contest for the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint.
For East Africa, the implications are direct. Kenya hosts roughly half a million Ethiopian and Eritrean nationals between Eastleigh, Kakuma and the diaspora communities of Nairobi. Any renewed war would generate refugee flows on a scale that would dwarf the South Sudanese influx and immediately stress Kenya’s already-strained security and humanitarian capacity. Kenyan exporters to Ethiopia — flour, tea, services — would lose one of the fastest-growing markets on the continent. And the regional intelligence picture, already complicated by Al-Shabaab’s resurgence and the DRC crisis, would become almost impossible to manage with a hot conflict in the north.
The African Union has so far been unforgivably quiet. Its Peace and Security Council has not placed the issue on its formal agenda; the Commission has been reluctant to lean publicly on a host country that doubles as the AU’s geographic home. IGAD has been hollowed out by Eritrea’s exit and by the wider crisis of confidence in Khartoum. The diplomatic infrastructure that might have averted a second Tigray war does not exist in 2026.
The Kenyan position should be clear and is not. Nairobi has hedged, refusing to publicly side with either party while quietly continuing security cooperation with Addis. That hedge is no longer affordable. A war between Ethiopia and Eritrea would not stay between Ethiopia and Eritrea — it would pull Egypt into a deeper anti-Ethiopian posture over the GERD, drag in Sudan’s exhausted parties, and create a strategic opening for Al-Shabaab and the Houthis to exploit a distracted Horn. Kenya needs to lead a pre-emptive diplomatic effort, with the AU and the Gulf states, before the first cross-border strike makes mediation impossible.
What to watch next: any movement on the Pretoria Agreement’s stalled disarmament timeline, Abiy’s next major public address, and whether Addis Ababa accepts a UAE-mediated channel to Asmara. If those three signals all turn negative within the next month, the Horn of Africa will be in a war by the end of 2026.
