In a span of a month, three towering figures - if retired - in American foreign policy establishment on Africa publicly called for an end to the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict and the rapprochement between the United States and Eritrea.
In mid-December 2013, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Herman Cohen argued that bringing "Eritrea in from the cold" was overdue.
On January 13th, onetime US Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn concurred and offered a critical analysis of the context leading up to and sustaining the Eritrean-Ethiopian deadlock, which deteriorated US relations with its former Horn of Africa ally, Eritrea.
The next day, Ambassador Princeton Lyman, who recently spearheaded US diplomatic initiatives on Sudan and South Sudan, also welcomed Cohen's call for an US-Eritrean rapprochement but opined that the
estrangement persisted not for lack of trying to break it.While Cohen did not say anything that implies the process would be easy, Shinn and Lyman are right to point out the difficulty - past and future.
All these are welcome signs of - or at least invitations for - the much needed thawing of relations between the United States and Eritrea, which have shared, albeit underappreciated, strategic interests in the Red Sea basin.
Moreover, such critical interjections bid well for a resolution to the Eritrean-Ethiopian impasse and an improvement of their relations, critical for regional stability and international security. Some points deserve to be regurgitated and a few others demand added emphasis to draw the sober attention of all concerned.
The United States is not an innocent bystander in its estrangement with Eritrea nor has it by any measure been a neutral broker in the broken relations between its former allies, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
US-Eritrean relations deteriorated first because Washington betrayed its role as a guarantor of the June 2000 Algiers Agreement and tolerated - if not encouraged - Addis Ababa to renege on the binding ruling of the international court that in 2002 awarded to Eritrea the flash point of the border dispute.
Against the advice of seasoned career diplomats, political appointees of the George W. Bush Administration were brazen in their search for alternatives to what had by then entered the books of international law.
Eritrea's refusal to budge, its insistence on the implementation of the EEBC ruling first, and its pursuit of what its leaders call an independent foreign policy did not sit well with the powers that be.
When the Obama Administration took over, the figures who had helped negotiate the difficult peace agreement came back full force.
But, while leftover personal ill feelings cannot be discounted, eight years of misguided US policies and Eritrean vitriol limited their options.
Instead of being flexible and creative within the little room that they had left, the new foreign policy team lazily maintained the entrenched eight-year old policy: upping the pressure on Eritrea and pushing it further into the corner until it is cowed into line.
In 2009, Washington crafted a United Nations Security Council resolution to punish Asmara on the basis of some unverified and some unverifiable claims, and other utter fabrications of the Somalia Eritrea Monitoring Group.
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