A Career In Misreading: The Curious Case Of Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin has contrived a curious vocation: the steady, almost industrious production of error, delivered with the unflinching confidence of a man untroubled by consequence. One is tempted to wonder whether there is not, in his case, a certain professional dependency upon being wrong - an attachment so entrenched that each fresh misjudgment is mistaken for insight.

His latest offering, portentously titled “Lifting Sanctions on Eritrea Will Lead to U.S. Strategic Defeat,” is merely the newest exhibit in a long and undistinguished catalogue: alarmism, conjecture, and Eritrea once again cast - lazily, reflexively - as the villain of a narrative that dissolves the instant it is exposed to fact.

Rubin’s trajectory is instructive. Here is a man who passed through the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans - a body now synonymous with the selective handling of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq catastrophe - and emerged not chastened, but curiously emboldened.

Where others might have acquired a measure of humility from that debacle, Rubin appears instead to have distilled its method into a personal creed: begin with a conclusion, gather fragments to sustain it, and discard whatever proves inconvenient. It is an approach less suited to analysis than to advocacy, and even there, of a particularly clumsy sort.

That he now occupies the agreeable altitude of a “senior fellow” only adds a faintly comic dimension to the affair. The marketplace of commentary on Eritrea has never lacked for noise; yet many who enter it depart quietly, undone by either analytical weakness or the simple absence of an audience willing to indulge it. Mr. Rubin, it seems, suffers from both deficiencies in equal measure.

His treatment of Eritrea is unmoored from reality. Consider his assertion that President Isaias Afwerki “ordered Eritrean forces to invade Ethiopia” in 1998. The historical record, adjudicated through international mechanisms including the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission, establishes plainly the origins and legal contours of that conflict, including the status of Badme. To airbrush such findings sums up Rubin’s willful lack of knowledge and his reliance on a deeply contested claim.

Similarly risible is Rubin’s suggestion that renewed engagement between Washington and Asmara is but a subplot in an Egyptian design to “encircle Ethiopia.” Such a claim betrays not strategic acuity but a rather adolescent appetite for conspiracy.

It presumes, implausibly, that American policy in the Red Sea corridor - one of the most strategically consequential regions on the globe - is dictated by Cairo’s whims. Eritrea’s relevance, however, is not derivative of any external patron; it is anchored in geography. Situated astride the Red Sea, Eritrea occupies a position of intrinsic importance to global commerce and maritime security. Engagement with Eritrea is thus a function of structural reality, not the product of Egyptian influence.

Indeed, Rubin’s entire “encirclement” thesis collapses upon even cursory inspection. The Horn of Africa is no chessboard of fixed allegiances but a fluid and complex arena in which states pursue overlapping, and at times contradictory, interests. Ethiopia itself engages broadly with Gulf partners, with Sudan, and beyond. To reduce this intricate landscape to a crude binary of Cairo versus Addis Ababa is analytically negligent.

Unable to persuade by the orderly force of reason, Rubin descends instead into the manufacture of unsupported claims, contriving a world that conforms not to fact, but to the demands of his own closed analytical framework.

This is evident in his claims regarding Somali forces. Rubin asserts, with characteristic certainty, that Eritrea “forced” Somali troops into combat in Ethiopia. This is a serious and unsupported allegation that has not been substantiated by credible evidence.

Eritrea has indeed hosted training programmes for Somali forces as part of efforts to rebuild Somalia’s national army. Allegations of their deployment to Tigray have been denied by Somali authorities themselves, while multiple inquiries have failed to produce substantiating evidence. Rubin, however, elevates conjecture into fact, as though repetition might suffice where proof is absent.

Haunted, it would seem, by his own neocolonial spectres, Rubin further pronounces - without irony - that Eritrea is “by any objective standard” a state sponsor of terrorism. The claim collapses at once. Eritrea’s track record of combatting fundamentalist terrorism, going back to the Bin Laden days in the mid-1990s when he was based in Sudan, is well established and a matter of historical record.

Nor does his argument improve when he descends into the well-worn tropes concerning Eritrea’s diaspora. The notion that Eritrean diplomatic missions, often skeletal in staffing and modest in reach, somehow sustain a vast apparatus of surveillance over a global community of hundreds of thousands is, on its face, implausible. It is a claim that relies less on demonstrable capacity than on insinuation.

Likewise, his characterisation of diaspora contributions as extortion willfully ignores the historical reality of voluntary mobilisation during the liberation struggle and the subsequent reconstruction period. The 2% rehabilitation tax, whatever one’s view of it, emerges from that tradition of shared national responsibility, not from the caricature Rubin so eagerly promotes. Furthermore, Rubin conveniently glosses over the US’s full levying of taxes on its citizens for income earned abroad.

His invocation of the so-called “Blue Revolution” is perhaps the most revealing of all. This motley assemblage of regime-change activists - fractured, externally encouraged by circles hostile to the Eritrean state, and associated with the disruption of Eritrean community events abroad - is presented by him as a credible alternative.

This is, after all, a movement whose associated actions have generated serious concern across several European countries, particularly after violent disruptions at Eritrean community gatherings. That Rubin should mistake agitation for governance, or provocation for legitimacy, speaks volumes about the quality of his judgment.

And therein lies the essential difficulty. Rubin does not so much analyse Eritrea as project upon it. His method, visible from Iraq to the present, consists in imposing ideological preconceptions upon complex realities and then mistaking the result for insight. The record is consistent: confident assertions, dismal outcomes, and a conspicuous absence of accountability.

Meanwhile, as Rubin lurches from one misjudgment to the next, apparently in the forlorn hope that accumulation might redeem error - Eritrea has endured and indeed outlasted entire cycles of such commentary - each proclaiming “imminent collapse”, each quietly receding when reality declines to oblige.

The familiar playbook - delegitimise, isolate, and agitate for regime change - has been attempted elsewhere with results that are, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, catastrophic. That Rubin persists in its recitation speaks less to conviction than to a certain intellectual inertia, impervious to both evidence and experience.

Eritrea, for its part, proceeds from rather more durable principles: sovereignty, non-interference, and engagement on the basis of mutual respect. These are not abstractions but operating realities in a region where geography confers both responsibility and relevance. No quantity of rhetorical embroidery can obscure that fact.

In the final analysis, what Mr. Rubin offers is not strategy but repetition - the recycling of discredited assumptions under the guise of fresh alarm. It is a performance long on presumption and short on substance, delivered, as ever, with the air of a man entirely convinced that error, if expressed with sufficient confidence, may yet pass for truth. Eritrea, having seen this spectacle before, is unlikely to be impressed.