Ethiopia, the World’s Oldest Ally and Its Newest Convenience: From Korea to Gaza, and the Perils of Selective Internationalism
Ethiopia’s history, from Korea to Cold War abandonment, from peacekeeping leadership to domestic fragmentation, offers a lesson that extends beyond Addis Ababa. It is a lesson about the limits of loyalty in an international system that rewards power and punishes principle. Strategic partnerships grounded in development and mutual respect, such as the one recently signed with India, strengthen sovereignty because they assume equality of agency and mutuality of benefit. Security arrangements imposed by geopolitical necessity do not, because they assume hierarchy and instrumentality.
0
0
By Sewasew Teklemariam
There is something almost tragicomic about watching great powers rediscover Ethiopia every few decades, dusting off the same old script: brave ally, reliable troops, convenient geography. One might be forgiven for thinking that somewhere in Washington, a filing cabinet labelled “Break Glass in Case of Unpopular War” contains a single index card reading: “Try Ethiopia.”
And so here we are again. Seventy-four years after Ethiopian soldiers froze in Korean trenches defending a principle called “collective security,” Addis Ababa finds itself courted once more, this time for Gaza, that graveyard of diplomatic ambition and geopolitical vanity. The Americans, it seems, have run out of takers. The Arabs are squeamish. The Europeans are preoccupied. Enter Ethiopia: loyal, militarily competent, and crucially still returning phone calls.
One almost admires the symmetry.
Let us begin with an uncomfortable fact that tends to disappear from polite diplomatic conversation: Ethiopia earned its stripes as an international actor not through hashtag solidarity or conference-room grandstanding, but by sending young men to die in someone else’s war. Between 1951 and 1954, over 6,000 Ethiopian troops served in Korea under the United Nations Command, personally authorised by Emperor Haile Selassie. The Kagnew Battalions fought at Pork Chop Hill, Old Baldy, and other places whose names now exist only in military histories and fading monuments. They earned a distinction almost quaint by today’s standards: not a single Ethiopian soldier was left behind or captured. Not one (United Nations Command historical records; US Army Center of Military History).
This was not theatre. It was war, and Ethiopia bled for it. The casualty figures, whilst modest by Korean War standards, were significant for a country of Ethiopia’s size and resources. Ethiopian field hospitals treated wounded Americans, Britons, and Turks alongside their own. Ethiopian officers coordinated with UN commanders in conditions that would test any alliance. And when the armistice was signed in 1953, Ethiopia remained in Korea for another year, because that was what collective security demanded.
Why? Because Haile Selassie, having watched the League of Nations abandon his country to Mussolini’s poison gas in 1936, believed, perhaps naively, that multilateralism might actually mean something if smaller nations upheld it. Ethiopia, he reasoned, must defend collective security abroad so that collective security might one day defend Ethiopia. It was a wager on principle over pragmatism, idealism over cynicism, the sort of bet that history tends to punish with exquisite cruelty.
It didn’t, of course. But more on that shortly.
The Korean deployment was not merely military. It was deeply symbolic. Here was an African nation, barely a decade removed from Italian occupation, standing shoulder to shoulder with the West not as a supplicant or protectorate, but as an equal partner in defence of international law. Ethiopian diplomats at the United Nations made much of this. So did American officials, who found Ethiopia’s participation useful for demonstrating that the Korean intervention was a truly international effort, not merely Western imperialism in multilateral drag.
Yet even then, cracks were visible. Ethiopian requests for military aid and modernisation assistance were met with warm words and modest gestures, but nothing approaching the largesse showered on more strategically located allies. The message, subtle but unmistakable, was clear: Ethiopia’s contribution was valued, but not valuable enough to fundamentally alter the transactional calculus of Cold War patronage.
Fast forward to December 2025. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in Addis Ababa, all smiles and Memoranda of Understanding. Bilateral relations are elevated to a “Strategic Partnership” that most elastic of diplomatic phrases, meaning everything and nothing simultaneously. There is talk of customs cooperation, digital infrastructure, peacekeeping training, and G20 debt relief (Government of India press briefings; Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements). All very modern. All very multilateral. The optics are impeccable: two ancient civilisations, both asserting themselves on the global stage, forging bonds of South-South cooperation untainted by colonial baggage.
Then, almost on cue, the other shoe drops.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to the Times of Israel, has asked Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to consider contributing Ethiopian troops to a proposed International Stabilisation Force for Gaza (Times of Israel, 19 December 2025). Not a UN mission, mind you. Not even a particularly coherent coalition. Just a hastily assembled fig leaf for President Trump’s latest ceasefire plan, which Arab and Muslim states are treating like a radioactive briefcase (Reuters, 17 December 2025).
Pakistan has demurred. Indonesia is dodging calls. Saudi Arabia is suddenly very interested in Yemen again. Egypt, despite its own security concerns in Sinai, has made its discomfort plain. Jordan, normally America’s most reliable Arab partner, is keeping a careful distance. Even the Gulf states, usually amenable to American security requests when sufficiently incentivised, have found reasons to be elsewhere.
And so Washington, in its infinite resourcefulness, has turned to Ethiopia: that reliable old warhorse, still standing after everyone else has bolted from the stable. One might call it flattering, if it weren’t so depressingly familiar.
To be fair, Ethiopia is a serious peacekeeping nation. It currently ranks among the top global contributors to UN missions, with troops in Abyei, Darfur, and Somalia (UN Department of Peace Operations data). Ethiopian soldiers are disciplined, experienced, and, unlike certain Western contingents, unlikely to flee at the first whiff of cordite. They have earned respect in some of Africa’s most challenging environments, operating in conditions that would give European defence ministers nightmares and human rights lawyers apoplexy.
But Gaza is not Darfur. And the proposed ISF is not a UN mission.
It is a politically contested, regionally explosive, militarily ambiguous intervention in one of the world’s most volatile theatres. Trump’s ceasefire framework explicitly links stabilisation to Hamas disarmament, a condition that Hamas rejects, Arab states won’t enforce, and no serious analyst believes can be achieved without catastrophic escalation (Reuters; public statements by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, November 2025). The very premise of the mission is contested. The rules of engagement are undefined. The exit strategy is non-existent. The political legitimacy is questionable at best.
In other words, it’s a deathtrap wrapped in a press release. And Ethiopia is being asked to walk into it.
The parallel to Korea is instructive, but not in the way American officials might hope. Korea, whatever its horrors, was a UN-mandated mission with broad international support, clear opposing forces, and a defined military objective. Gaza would be none of these things. It would be an occupation masquerading as stabilisation, a political arrangement imposed by force and sustained by the presence of foreign troops whom neither side particularly wants. Ethiopian soldiers would find themselves policing a ceasefire that nobody believes in, enforcing a disarmament that cannot be achieved, and serving as convenient targets for any faction seeking to demonstrate its resistance credentials.
Then there is Egypt, which watches all of this with the cold attentiveness of a creditor studying a debtor’s new car. Relations between Addis Ababa and Cairo are hardly warm. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam remains a source of existential anxiety for Egypt, which views Ethiopian control over Nile waters the way Britain once viewed German control of the Channel: intolerable.
Ethiopian troops in Gaza, right on Egypt’s doorstep, would be read in Cairo not as burden-sharing, but as triangulation. Ethiopia securing American goodwill in the Middle East whilst remaining immovable on the Nile. Geopolitical judo. Egypt might publicly welcome the assistance, might even offer logistical support and coordinated border security. Privately, it would seethe. And mistrust, once entrenched, is devilishly difficult to dislodge. Every Ethiopian patrol near Rafah would be interpreted through the prism of Nile politics. Every American commendation of Ethiopian reliability would be seen as a subtle rebuke to Egyptian inflexibility on GERD.
The broader Arab world would face similar contradictions. How does one explain to a restive population that African troops are being deployed to stabilise Gaza when Arab armies stood aside? The optics are appalling. The politics worse. Ethiopian participation, however well-intentioned, risks becoming a symbol not of international cooperation but of Arab impotence and Western manipulation.
To understand why many Ethiopians regard these American overtures with the enthusiasm one reserves for unsolicited timeshare presentations, one must confront an inconvenient historical truth: the West has form. The overthrow of Ethiopia’s monarchy in 1974 was not merely a domestic revolution. It was Cold War opportunism dressed in Marxist rhetoric. Haile Selassie, having served as a steadfast American ally, hosting Kagnew Station, America’s largest communications facility in Africa, supporting Western positions at the UN, maintaining open trade and diplomatic channels, found that loyalty evaporated the moment his utility did.
Western powers, suddenly squeamish about imperial anachronism and distracted by Vietnam, Watergate, and oil shocks, stood aside. The Soviets, delighted, moved in with advisors, weapons, and ideological support (Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia; declassified US and Soviet Cold War records). What followed was not liberation, but systematic dismantling. Ethiopia’s historical state structure was replaced by a Derg regime whose brutality matched its incompetence, and then by an ethno-federal system whose long-term consequences are still being violently litigated in Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara.
The lesson? Loyalty rewarded when convenient. Sovereignty negotiable when inconvenient.
Nor did the post-Cold War era offer correction. Instead, Ethiopia became a laboratory for externally endorsed political engineering, celebrated when stable, condemned when fractured. Critics argue, with some justice, that the international community prioritised short-term manageability over long-term cohesion, tolerating governance models that institutionalised division whilst ignoring their destabilising effects. Western donors pumped billions into Ethiopia during the Meles Zenawi years, praising “African Renaissance” and “developmental state” whilst carefully averting their gaze from political repression and ethnic manipulation.
When the system finally collapsed into civil war in 2020, those same donors expressed shock, shocked!that such instability could emerge from a framework they had spent decades endorsing. It is within this historical memory that fears of a “second disintegration” must be understood, not as paranoia, but as pattern recognition.
If Ethiopia commits troops to Gaza without a clear UN mandate, defined rules of engagement, and regional consensus, it risks becoming once again, the geopolitical equivalent of a hired extra: visible in the frame, expendable in the edit. The question is not whether Ethiopia can contribute to global peace. Korea answered that. The question is whether selective internationalism, driven by great-power convenience, will once again leave Ethiopia holding the bag whilst others collect the applause.
There is also the domestic dimension to consider. Ethiopia is hardly in a position of domestic tranquillity from which to project military power abroad. The Tigray conflict may have formally ended, but its political, economic, and humanitarian consequences continue to reverberate. Ethnic tensions remain acute. The economy is strained. The military itself has been stretched thin by years of internal conflict. Deploying thousands of troops to Gaza whilst Amhara and Oromia simmer would be the diplomatic equivalent of reorganising the deck chairs whilst the hull takes on water.
Ethiopia’s history, from Korea to Cold War abandonment, from peacekeeping leadership to domestic fragmentation, offers a lesson that extends beyond Addis Ababa. It is a lesson about the limits of loyalty in an international system that rewards power and punishes principle. Strategic partnerships grounded in development and mutual respect, such as the one recently signed with India, strengthen sovereignty because they assume equality of agency and mutuality of benefit. Security arrangements imposed by geopolitical necessity do not, because they assume hierarchy and instrumentality.
If there is to be another chapter in Ethiopia’s long record of international service, it must be written with historical memory as strategy, not sentiment. The Kagnew Battalions deserve better than to be remembered as a cautionary tale of loyalty unrequited. Ethiopia’s current generation deserves better than to repeat their predecessors’ mistakes in a different desert, under a different flag, for similarly nebulous reasons.
The filing cabinet remains open. The index card remains tempting. But perhaps this time, Ethiopia might politely suggest that someone else take a turn. After all, there are plenty of nations who have benefited from American patronage over the decades. Perhaps it’s their turn to demonstrate that special relationships involve actual reciprocity, not just convenient deployment schedules.
History, as they say, doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme. And Ethiopia has heard this particular verse before.
Key Sources:
United Nations Command & UN Department of Peace Operations historical records; US Army Center of Military History (Korean War archives); Times of Israel, 19 December 2025; Reuters, 17 December 2025; Government of India and Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs press releases; Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia
