Robert Kaplan: Surrender or Starve

I worried that, like many realists, Afewerki is obsessed with everything that can wrong in his country rather than with what could also go right: realism, to be wholly realistic, requires a dose of idealism and optimism or else policy becomes immobilized. And that might be the Eritrean leader’s problem. He seems more comfortable in a state of wartime emergency than he does in a state of peacetime possibilities. He analyzes brilliantly what he knows, but he gives in to paranoia about what he does not know. He did not seem to understand that foreign policy in Washington is often a synthesis of what the State and Defense departments are both comfortable with, and, therefore, Eritrea’s image problems in the United States cannot simply be blamed on Foggy Bottom.

The coming years in Eritrea will determine whether its brilliantly conducted struggle against Ethiopia—which also comprised one of Africa’s best homegrown famine-relief operations—will give way to equally brilliant peacetime policies that combine political and economic liberalization without the anarchy that has followed elsewhere on the continent; or, instead, give way only to repression and consequent stagnation, leading to another form of chaos. The choice, for the moment, is in President Afewerki’s hands.

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