The Twig and the Phantom Carrot

Washington reached for the carrot-and-stick playbook, found neither vegetable, and stamped a visa instead. A guided tour of one press release and of the two camps now busily misreading it.

By Sewasew Teklemariam

Let us begin, as one always should with American foreign policy, by reading the document rather than the reaction to it. On Thursday the State Department issued a statement of perhaps three hundred words, the diplomatic equivalent of clearing one’s throat. It announced that Secretary Rubio, exercising his authority under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, would impose visa restrictions on hardline members of the TPLF and their immediate families. For readers who do not keep the immigration code on the nightstand: that subsection lets the Secretary bar any foreigner whose presence he judges inconvenient to American foreign policy. In plainer English still, it is a no-entry stamp.

It is worth dwelling on what this instrument is not, because both Ethiopian camps are about to pretend it is something else. It is not a sanction in the asset-freezing, bank-blocking, villa-confiscating sense. No Treasury list, no frozen accounts, no SWIFT messages going dark. It is a consular officer, somewhere, declining to let a named individual queue at the airport. The statement cites the clash earlier this year between the Tigray Security Forces and the ENDF — the first since the guns fell silent in 2022 — notes the hundreds of thousands freshly displaced, and closes with the two ritual phrases of the genre: that Washington stands with the people of Tigray, and that it reserves “all available tools.” Having, one notes, selected the lightest one in the drawer and quietly shut it on the rest.

The Economist taught a generation of foreign ministries to think in carrots and sticks: punish the bad, reward the good, and watch incentives do the governing. So let us audit the produce. The stick, here, is a visa ban — which is to a sanction what a strongly worded letter is to a subpoena. Call it a twig. And the carrot? Search the three hundred words and you will not find one. There is no inducement to anybody, no reward dangled for good behaviour, no “do this and receive that.” Washington has approached the table brandishing a twig in one hand and, in the other, nothing at all.

This is not carrot-and-stick. This is stick-and-shrug.

And yet two entire political universes have decided that this twig is the most consequential object in the Horn of Africa.

Consider first the view from Arat Kilo, where the press release is being read as vindication delivered by registered post. At last, the reasoning goes, the Americans see it our way: the TPLF are the spoilers, the named party, the wreckers of a peace the government was selflessly nurturing. Cue the victory lap. One hates to interrupt a good lap, but the statement names no federal virtue whatsoever. It does not mention the drone strikes. It does not mention the unilateral extension of the interim mandate in April — the act that actually lit the fuse. It blesses neither the budget cuts nor the fuel blockade nor the years of disputed-territory limbo in which displaced Tigrayans remain parked in camps. Washington restricted one side and described the war’s renewal in the careful passive voice of a man who has no intention of choosing godfathers. To read “we restrict TPLF hardliners” as “we endorse everything Addis Ababa has ever done” requires a selective literacy normally reserved for horoscopes. The federal camp has received a press release and mistaken it for a security guarantee.

Now cross to the other universe, where the same three hundred words are proof of the eternal imperial conspiracy. Washington, it is announced, dances to Abiy’s tune; the visa ban is persecution; one must wear it as a medal. There is something magnificent about a movement that has spent five years denouncing American imperialism reacting to an American visa restriction as though it were a death in the family. As a rule, the hardliner most likely to thunder against Western perfidy is also the one least likely to keep a timeshare in Virginia. But the badge-of-honour reflex is reliable: every sanction becomes a certificate of authenticity, every rebuke confirmation that one is, at last, over the target. And then comes the quiet pivot — if Washington will not have us, Asmara will. The patron rotates; the grievance is monetised; and the visa ban, far from chastening anyone, obligingly supplies the fresh persecution narrative the hardliners required for the next recruitment notice, the one summoning the region’s youth to report to the centres at Adwa.

Here is the joke neither camp will tell at its own expense. A visa restriction is the one diplomatic instrument engineered to miss precisely the people it names. It stings the moderate who hoped to send a daughter to Georgetown; it cannot lay a finger on the hardliner who regards a US entry stamp as collaboration in the first place. So the federal camp celebrates a punishment that changes nothing, the hardline camp mourns a punishment that costs it nothing, and both perform their assigned emotions with a sincerity that would be touching if it were not so expensive for everyone else.

As for the twig-wielder, Washington has rediscovered the great convenience of the gesture that asks nothing of the gesturer. A visa restriction requires no aid budget, no special envoy, no sleepless fortnight in Pretoria, no awkward telephone call to Asmara, and — crucially — no carrot. It is foreign policy as press release: the satisfying click of a tool being reached for, without the inconvenience of the tool actually doing anything.

And the carrot? Still, as they say, in the post — as it was always going to be. Carrots cost something; sticks, even twig-sized ones, are free; and the cheapest foreign policy on the menu is the one in which everybody gets to feel vindicated and nobody is required to change. The federal camp has its vindication. The hardliners have their medal. Washington has its press release. Asmara has its opening. And the displaced in the camps, along with the youth now being summoned to the recruitment centres — the very people in whose name all three hundred words were ostensibly composed — are left, as usual, with the one thing no podium is offering: a reason to laugh, and absolutely nothing to laugh about.

Sewasew Teklemariam writes on the Horn of Africa for The Ethiopian Tribune.