The El Alamein Declaration, issued following the October 4 meeting between Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sudanese Sovereignty Council Chairman Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, represents an attempt to redraw some of the rules of the strategic balance in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa—not by creating a new military alliance, but by bringing together a set of issues that have until now largely been treated as separate crises. The significance of the declaration lies precisely in this linkage. Maritime security in the Red Sea, Ethiopia’s quest for access to the sea, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute, Sudan’s territorial integrity and Somalia’s position on the Somaliland question are now being placed within a single regional framework. This reflects a growing recognition that the crises of the Horn of Africa have become so interconnected that managing them in isolation is increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Ethiopia’s absence from both the meeting and the resulting document carries an unmistakable political message. Yet it does not necessarily mean that the four countries are seeking to construct an explicitly anti-Ethiopian bloc. What they share is a particular conception of regional sovereignty: the rejection of attempts to create new realities through unilateral action, whether concerning ports and maritime corridors, transboundary resources or the territorial integrity of states. This distinction is important. The emerging alignment is less about containing Ethiopia as a country than about establishing limits on how regional power can be exercised. Ethiopia remains too large, too strategically located and too deeply embedded in the political and economic architecture of the Horn of Africa to be excluded from any sustainable regional order. The issue, therefore, is not whether Ethiopia should have access to the sea, but under what political and legal conditions that access should be secured. Marwa El-Shinawy This becomes particularly significant in the Red Sea. The declaration’s emphasis on the principle that the management and security of the Red Sea should primarily be the responsibility of its littoral states reflects a political position, not a rewriting of international law. But it also reflects the determination of coastal states to retain a central role in shaping the security and strategic arrangements of a waterway that has become the focus of intensifying regional and international competition. The Red Sea is no longer merely a maritime corridor linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. It has become an increasingly contested strategic space where shipping routes, ports, military deployments, energy security and regional rivalries intersect. Any attempt to alter the balance along its shores therefore carries consequences well beyond the immediate countries involved. At the centre of this equation is Ethiopia. Since losing its direct access to the sea following Eritrea’s independence in 1993, maritime access has become a strategic and economic imperative for Addis Ababa. That imperative intensified after Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland in January 2024, an agreement Mogadishu rejected as an infringement on Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Yet Ethiopia’s need for reliable access to the sea does not give it a right to exercise sovereignty over another state’s territory. Conversely, protecting the sovereignty of coastal states does not necessarily require denying Ethiopia stable, long-term commercial access to ports. This is where the real space for a future settlement lies: in separating access from sovereignty, commerce from military presence, and economic necessity from territorial control. Ethiopia can have predictable access to international maritime trade without that access becoming a vehicle for establishing sovereign or military footholds inside another country. That distinction could prove decisive. If Ethiopia’s legitimate economic requirements are treated as inherently illegitimate, the result will be greater securitisation of the dispute and deeper regional polarisation. But if maritime access is negotiated through transparent, internationally recognised and commercially grounded arrangements, the issue could become a point of managed interdependence rather than a trigger for confrontation. A similar logic applies to the Nile dispute. Reaffirming the principles of avoiding significant harm, consultation and prior notification does not create new rules of international law. It does, however, place the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam issue within a broader conversation about regional security and stability rather than leaving it confined to the traditional trilateral framework involving Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. This broader framing matters because the GERD dispute is no longer simply a technical disagreement over water management. It has become intertwined with questions of trust, sovereignty, development, strategic influence and the distribution of power in the Horn of Africa. Any durable arrangement will therefore have to address not only water flows and operating rules, but also the wider security environment in which the dam dispute has evolved. The Sudan and Somaliland questions are linked in the declaration through an even broader principle: resistance to altering the region’s political geography through unilateral faits accomplis. In both cases, sovereignty and territorial integrity are placed at the centre of the four countries’ understanding of regional order. But this is also where the limits of the emerging alignment become apparent. The four states do not share identical political interests, security priorities or foreign-policy calculations. Their cooperation is therefore better understood as an alignment of interests than as a coherent regional alliance. Nor does the declaration establish mutual-defence obligations, create joint forces or announce the establishment of military bases. Its immediate significance consequently lies less in military power than in political coordination, diplomatic signalling and the collective ability to raise the costs of unilateral action. For Egypt, however, the real test will be how this diplomatic leverage is used. A strategy aimed at permanently containing Ethiopia would neither be realistic nor sustainable. Addis Ababa will remain a central actor in any long-term political, economic or security arrangement in the Horn of Africa. Its geography and demographic and economic weight ensure that it will continue to seek secure and dependable access to maritime trade. Egypt’s strategic objective, therefore, should not be to exclude Ethiopia from the emerging regional order, but to shape the rules under which Ethiopia participates in it. This requires a delicate balance. Cairo needs to strengthen coordination with the Red Sea and Horn of Africa states while keeping open channels for negotiation with Addis Ababa. It must make unilateral moves costlier without making negotiated compromise politically impossible. That is ultimately the strategic value of the El Alamein Declaration. Its importance will not be measured by the sharpness of its language or by the number of issues it brings together. It will be measured by whether the four countries can transform their overlapping interests into a durable negotiating framework—one capable of deterring unilateral action while leaving sufficient political space for diplomacy. The Horn of Africa does not necessarily need more red lines. It needs clearer rules for managing competing interests before those interests harden into permanent confrontation. If the El Alamein Declaration is an attempt to alter the negotiating balance before the balance of power shifts again, its success will depend on whether it can move beyond the declaration of positions towards the construction of workable regional arrangements. The real challenge, therefore, is not to create another bloc in an already fragmented region. It is to establish a regional order in which sovereignty is protected, maritime access remains open, transboundary resources are governed through negotiated rules, and no single actor can alter the strategic map simply by creating facts on the ground. That would make the El Alamein Declaration more than a diplomatic statement. It would make it an early blueprint for a new regional balance. Marwa El-Shinawy, Academic and Writer
