Nearly forty-eight hours after Israel became the first and only country to formally recognise Somaliland, and after more than twenty states and regional organisations had already flooded the diplomatic arena with statements rejecting the move, Eritrea finally issued its two short paragraphed response – one that revealed far more about Asmara’s contradictions than about the recognition itself. Presented as a sober warning against regional destabilisation and geopolitical manipulation, the statement instead exposed the uneasy tension between Eritrea’s long-cultivated revolutionary mythology and its present-day diplomatic posture.

For three decades, Eritrea has insisted that its legitimacy is self-derived – rooted in its liberation struggle, national sacrifice, and internal will rather than bestowed by external actors. Recognition, in this narrative, has always been something Eritrea neither sought nor required. Yet the denunciation of Israel’s decision to recognise Somaliland strikingly elevates recognition to a matter of profound geopolitical consequence. Eritrea now treats recognition as a dangerously consequential act capable of igniting regional disorder. This represents not merely rhetorical inconsistency but an intellectual dissonance: recognition cannot simultaneously be something Eritrea does not need and something so politically potent that it must be urgently reviewed by the United Nations Security Council when applied elsewhere.

More importantly, Eritrea’s position carries implicit logical consequences it seems unwilling to acknowledge. By calling for Israel’s recognition to be revisited and for the issue to be escalated to international platforms, Eritrea implicitly endorses the idea that questions of unilaterally granted state legitimacy can be revisited, scrutinised, and potentially reversed. If this principle holds, then Ethiopia or any other relevant actor could theoretically question the historical and procedural legitimacy of Eritrea’s own secession and call for its re-examination under international law, on the basis of the premise that Ethiopia has argued against the legitimacy of the referendum and subsequent recognition process the Eritrean People Liberation Front, the EPLF, seceded today’s Eritrea from the Mother State. Eritrea, however, clings to the assertion that its statehood is beyond review. It demands immunity for itself from the very logic it wishes to impose on others.

Asmara’s choice to explicitly appeal to China deepens this inconsistency rather than resolving it. Invoking Beijing and drawing an analogy with the Taiwan question is intended to cloak Eritrea’s stance in the familiar rhetoric of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet Eritrea has never accepted similar inquiries into its own breakaway from its former sovereign, Ethiopia, as legitimate legal or moral exercises. Instead, it has framed such challenges as affronts to its dignity and historical truth. Appealing to China is therefore not a neutral invocation of international legal principle; it is a geopolitical alignment designed to reaffirm Eritrea’s long-standing anti-Western posture while selectively borrowing China’s sovereignty discourse for regional political utility.

Equally telling is what Eritrea’s statement conspicuously avoids. The country refrains from explicitly naming Israel, choosing instead to refer to the decision obliquely as “the ploy.” If the act truly represents a grave destabilising intervention, intellectual confidence would require naming the actor directly and assigning responsibility transparently. Eritrea’s evasive phrasing suggests diplomatic caution cloaked as solemn concern – a reluctance to confront Israel directly while still wishing to benefit from the credibility that comes with moral indignation.

But perhaps the most ethically troubling omission lies in Eritrea’s complete erasure of Somaliland as a political subject. The Eritrean regime, more than most states, should understand the psychological, political, and historical weight of a long struggle for sovereignty in the absence of international recognition. Yet Somaliland’s decades-long quest is dismissed entirely; there is no acknowledgment of its internal legitimacy, its political endurance, or its popular will. Instead, Somaliland becomes a passive object within a geopolitical script written by others. This reveals that Eritrea’s stance is not grounded in solidarity with struggles for self-determination or in consistent ethical principle. It is dictated by expediency.

Finally, Eritrea’s refusal to explicitly declare solidarity with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud or affirm clear support for Somalia as a political partner highlights entrenched political fractures. Rather than openly backing Mogadishu, Eritrea confines itself to sterile procedural language, hiding political estrangement behind diplomatic abstraction. This reflects a persistent and unresolved tension between Asmara and the Somali leadership – a fissure so durable that even states with leverage over Eritrea, such as Egypt, have been unable to mend it. Eritrea’s voice here is less an expression of principled commitment to Somali sovereignty than an instrument within an ongoing regional rivalry.

That said, Eritrea’s intervention does not project the assured authority of a principled defender of international order. Instead, it reveals a state deeply entangled in its own contradictions: selectively revering international legitimacy while refusing it for itself, invoking sovereignty while erasing another people’s political agency, appealing to legalism while driven by geopolitical resentment, and disguising political hostility beneath formal rhetoric. Rather than strengthening Eritrea’s moral standing, the statement underscores the uncomfortable truth that Asmara remains trapped between its provisional and revolutionary self-image, and its overt deficiency of coherent, intellectually solid statecraft in a rapidly evolving regional landscape.

By Horn Review Editorial