Missing liberal hypocrisy (Jerusalem Demsas, Mar 22, 2026, The The Closing Argument)
After the end of WWII, the Allied powers were figuring out what to do with Italy’s African colonies. Libya and Somalia got independence, but Eritrea was handled very differently.There’s a quote that can be cited by basically any Eritrean in the world attributed to John Foster Dulles, a U.S. representative to the UN General Assembly who would go on to become Eisenhower’s secretary of state:
“From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interests of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.”1
Essentially, the U.S. was preparing for the Cold War — lining up allies, securing military bases, containing Soviet influence — and wanted Eritrea’s Red Sea ports and communications facilities to go to its existing ally, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a landlocked country without Eritrea, which was (and is) a large part of its motivation for continued hostilities with its smaller neighbor.
During Ethiopia’s occupation of what is now an independent country, it imposed its own language, banned political parties and unions, and dissolved the Eritrean parliament at gunpoint. Eritreans did not go quietly; what followed was a long and bloody war of resistance.
In a country of about 3 million, between 60,000 and 80,000 were killed, and 50,000 children were orphaned. Those casualties include many of my parents’ direct relatives. Proportionally, if this happened in the U.S., that would mean about 6.8 million deaths, on the low end. Hilariously,2 Ethiopia switched sides in the Cold War anyways and imposed communism on both its own people and Eritrea as well. This was all depressingly predictable at the time.
The U.S. decision to oppose Eritrean independence ended up being net negative for world peace and national security as well as for its stated aims of the right to self-determination and independence.
In failing to remove the USSR we compromised our Founding ideals across the globe and let communism kill 100 million people.