ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA—On April 23, 2026, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that U.S. Envoy Massad Boulos seeks to lift some sanctions on Eritrea and perhaps even normalize ties with Africa’s most politically and diplomatically isolated country. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi reportedly brokered the initiative that included secret talks between Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki and Boulos in Egypt.
Seeking to rehabilitate Isaias is akin to choosing a cancer-stricken blind amputee with leprosy in a prizefight against a 25-year-old boxing champion.
On paper, the strategic logic makes sense: The Red Sea is a vital channel for trade. Eritrea has an 840-mile coast and also claims several islands offshore islands. Iran increasingly contests the waterway not only through the Houthi presence in Yemen, but also via General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, who controls Sudan’s Red Sea coast.
In reality, the idea is a disaster. Boulos is naïve. Sisi hopes to broker U.S. rapprochement with Eritrea for a single reason: to encircle Ethiopia as part of a local cold war between the two Nile River powers. While Sisi cares about freedom of navigation through the Suez Canal, if he truly cared about U.S. security, he would not back Houthi-friendly Burhan.
Seeking to rehabilitate Isaias is akin to choosing a cancer-stricken blind amputee with leprosy in a prizefight against a 25-year-old boxing champion. After all, Isaias is 80 years old. He has reportedly suffered strokes or other health crises. Nor is succession in Africa’s most totalitarian country clear.
Even if Isaias were to last, he is notoriously untrustworthy. He has allied, at various times, with Israel and then Iran, the United Arab Emirates and then Qatar, Russia and now perhaps the United States. He has attacked every neighbor—Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Sudan. In 1998, he ordered Eritrean forces to invade Ethiopia to seize the disputed border town of Badme, a war that may have killed over 100,000. More recently, he offered training to Somali armed forces and then forced them to fight on his behalf in Ethiopia. By any objective standard, Eritrea is also a state sponsor of terror. Five years ago, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Filipos Woldeyohannes, the chief of staff of the Eritrean Defense Forces, for his actions in Tigray.
Isaias’ Eritrea is basically a slave state, with its population subject to indefinite and unpaid military service.
For President Donald Trump to push forward with Boulos’ proposal for rapprochement would also insult Ethiopian and Eritrean Americans. Isaias’ Eritrea is basically a slave state, with its population subject to indefinite and unpaid military service. Many Ethiopians have relatives killed or terrorized by the wars that Isaias initiated. Inside the United States, Eritrean diplomats and their fronts spy on the Eritrean diaspora and extort money from them.
Boulos is right that Eritrea is a strategic state, but a better way forward would be to apply the Venezuela model to Eritrea and bring Isaias to justice; a long list of countries would like to try him. Eritreans active in the so-called Blue Revolution are already preparing for the day after. They harbor no territorial ambitions and are naturally pro-Western. Trump and Boulos should pursue the long game, not gamble on a dictator who repeatedly has shown himself hostile to the West, incapable, and insincere.
