Ethiopia’s demand for access to the sea is usually presented as an economic argument. A large population, rising transport costs and dependence on foreign ports are offered as proof that the country faces an intolerable historical injustice.

But there is a deliberate confusion at the center of this campaign.

Commercial access to a port is negotiable. Ownership of another country’s coastline is not.

Landlocked countries trade through neighboring states across the world. They negotiate tariffs, leases, transport corridors, customs arrangements and infrastructure partnerships. None of this requires annexation, coercion or the rewriting of borders.

When Ethiopia’s political class blurs access with possession, it is no longer solving a logistics problem. It is manufacturing a territorial claim.

And if that claim produces another war, the elites who promoted it will not pay the highest price. Ethiopian workers and farmers will. Eritrean families will. Young soldiers on both sides will be ordered to bleed for an ambition designed far above them.

A ruling class in search of an external mission

Governments facing internal fragmentation often search for an external cause capable of reorganizing public anger. A territorial demand offers exactly that. Economic hardship can be reframed as foreign obstruction. Political failure can be disguised as national humiliation. Citizens who question the government can be accused of standing against the destiny of the state.

The port campaign gives Ethiopia’s ruling class a story larger than its record: the country is not struggling because of war, debt, inflation, political division or weak institutions; it is struggling because history denied it a coastline.

This explanation is politically useful because it moves responsibility outward.

A government can be judged for failed policy. Geography cannot. A ruling party can be blamed for conflict. A neighboring country can be turned into a permanent excuse.

The sea becomes a symbol onto which every frustration can be projected.

The Ethiopian worker does not need Eritrean territory

What would an ordinary Ethiopian worker actually gain from a war for a port?

He would not receive ownership of a shipping terminal. He would not negotiate freight contracts. He would not control the commercial corridor or sit in the boardrooms that benefit from it.

He would be asked to finance the campaign through taxation, inflation and declining public services. His children might be recruited. His workplace would suffer from interrupted trade and investor flight. His family would carry the consequences of another regional conflict long after patriotic speeches had ended.

If territory were seized, the strategic rewards would be managed by political, military and commercial elites. The worker would receive the bill.

This is the oldest arrangement in expansionist politics: rulers speak in the name of the nation while ordinary people provide the bodies.

Ethiopian workers need reliable electricity, productive industries, stable prices, functioning schools and peace. They do not need to die so an ambitious political class can stand beside somebody else’s sea.

Eritrea is not an obstacle to Ethiopian development

Eritrea did not create Ethiopia’s landlocked geography. Nor is Eritrean sovereignty responsible for the economic choices made in Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia can pursue negotiated access through Eritrea, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia, Kenya or Sudan according to law, mutual interest and regional conditions. Diversifying trade corridors is a legitimate economic objective.

What Ethiopia cannot legitimately demand is that one of those neighbors surrender sovereign control because Ethiopia considers its own size historically important.

A population of more than one hundred million does not create property rights over a smaller country. Economic need does not erase borders. National ambition does not suspend consent.

If size created entitlement, no small state in Africa would be secure.

Imperial nostalgia disguised as economics

Part of the sea-access campaign draws emotional power from imperial memory. Eritrea is imagined not as a neighboring country with its own history and sovereign will, but as territory that Ethiopia once possessed and therefore may claim again.

This is colonial reasoning.

Previous control does not establish permanent ownership. If it did, the entire African map would become an invitation to endless war. Every empire could reactivate old borders, every occupation could become a legal title and every liberation struggle could be dismissed as a temporary inconvenience.

Eritrean independence was not an administrative accident. It emerged from a long armed struggle and was confirmed through a referendum. Treating that sovereignty as negotiable because Ethiopian elites regret losing coastal control is not economic realism. It is imperial nostalgia with a spreadsheet attached.

Nationalism is being used to suppress class questions

The port narrative asks Ethiopian citizens to see themselves as one body with identical interests. But a factory worker, a rural farmer, a military contractor and a politically connected investor do not carry the costs and rewards of war equally.

The language of national destiny hides these divisions.

Who would receive contracts for military supply and reconstruction? Who would control logistics concessions? Who would negotiate port operations? Who could move money and family members abroad if conflict expanded? And who would remain in uniform or in an economy weakened by war?

These are class questions, and patriotic spectacle is designed to keep them from being asked.

A socialist analysis does not deny that Ethiopians share a country. It asks whether the policy promoted in the country’s name actually serves most of its people.

A war for territorial access would not.

Peaceful access exposes the lie

The possibility of negotiated commercial access exposes the weakness of the expansionist argument.

If Ethiopia’s concern is genuinely economic, it can offer Eritrea a mutually beneficial arrangement: port fees, infrastructure investment, rail and road cooperation, customs coordination, energy exchange and predictable long-term contracts.

Such an agreement could create jobs and revenue on both sides while reducing regional tension.

But negotiation requires recognizing Eritrea as an equal sovereign actor. It requires accepting that access is purchased through cooperation rather than granted through Ethiopian entitlement.

That is precisely what imperial thinking finds difficult. It does not merely want a service. It wants hierarchy.

The choice is therefore revealing: trade can be negotiated; domination cannot.

War would destroy the development it claims to pursue

The economic case for coercive sea access collapses under the cost of conflict.

Ports require stable corridors, insurable shipping, predictable customs systems and long-term investment. War produces the opposite: damaged infrastructure, displaced communities, military spending, capital flight, interrupted trade and decades of distrust.

A government cannot credibly claim to seek development through a strategy likely to destroy the conditions development requires.

Even a military victory would not create a stable commercial corridor. A port taken by force would remain surrounded by hostility, permanent security costs and international risk. Every shipment would carry the political cost of occupation.

The sea would not solve Ethiopia’s economic problems. It would become another front on which those problems multiply.

Eritrea has already paid for its sovereignty

For Eritreans, suggestions that sovereignty should be reopened as a bargaining question are not neutral policy proposals.

They touch the central sacrifice around which the modern nation was formed. Families across Eritrea paid for independence through lives, displacement, injury and decades of struggle. The border is not a theoretical line offered for revision whenever a larger neighbor develops a new strategic appetite.

This does not mean Eritrea should reject cooperation with Ethiopia. Geography makes cooperation desirable. Trade, transport and regional stability could serve both peoples.

But cooperation must begin with a fact that is not open to negotiation: Eritrea is not Ethiopia’s missing province, and its coastline is not Ethiopia’s inheritance.

Ethiopian socialists must oppose expansionism

Any Ethiopian movement claiming to represent workers should reject the attempt to turn them into instruments of territorial ambition.

Internationalism means more than celebrating solidarity in theory. It means refusing to support one’s own state when it threatens the sovereignty and lives of neighboring people.

Ethiopian socialists should demand peaceful trade agreements, civilian investment and regional economic cooperation. They should expose the class interests hidden beneath militarized nationalism. They should insist that public money serve Ethiopian workers rather than another generation of war.

Silence would make socialist language meaningless. One cannot condemn imperialism when practiced by distant powers while excusing it when imagined in Addis Ababa.

Eritrean nationalism must also remain disciplined

Opposing Ethiopian expansionism must not become hatred of Ethiopian people.

Millions of Ethiopians do not control their government’s strategic ambitions. Many have already suffered through internal wars, displacement, unemployment and inflation. If another conflict begins, they will be victims before they are beneficiaries.

Eritrean political language should therefore target the architects of aggression: officials, military interests, expansionist intellectuals and media figures who normalize territorial claims.

It should not reduce an entire people to an enemy identity.

This distinction is not softness. It is political clarity. Hatred unites ordinary Ethiopians with the very elites whose project should be isolated. A disciplined Eritrean position defends sovereignty while speaking directly to those across the border who also have nothing to gain from war.

The alternative is regional economic cooperation

The Horn of Africa does not lack resources. It lacks a stable political order capable of coordinating them without domination.

Eritrea has ports and a strategic coastline. Ethiopia has a large market and productive potential. The wider region has energy, agriculture, minerals and transport opportunities. Rational cooperation could create shared infrastructure and lower trade costs.

But regional integration cannot be built through the doctrine that larger states possess greater rights. It must be built among sovereign equals.

Ethiopia can gain access. Eritrea can gain commerce. Both can gain stability. None of this requires transferring ownership or threatening war.

Who benefits, and who will be buried?

Every territorial campaign eventually hides behind sacred language: destiny, historical justice, national survival or inevitable geography.

The public must answer with material questions.

Who benefits? Who pays? Who signs the contracts? Who receives the strategic asset? Who carries the weapon? Who loses a child?

In a war for Eritrean coastline, the answers would not be evenly distributed.

Ethiopian mothers should not bury their children so political elites can pose beside somebody else’s sea. Eritrean families should not be asked to defend the same sovereignty twice.

If Addis Ababa wants trade, it can negotiate trade. If it wants ownership, it is not asking for access. It is asking for submission.

And ordinary people on both sides should understand clearly who would collect the reward—and who would be buried beneath it.