Twilight Struggle: Red Sea, the newest addition to GMT’s Lunchtime Series, will be added to the GMT P500 list this week! TS: Red Sea is a two-player, card-driven game that builds on the award-winning Twilight Struggle system and recreates the sudden spark in the Cold War around the Horn of Africa and its vital sea lanes.

With a more limited scope and much shorter playtime, TS: Red Sea is the perfect way to introduce new players to Twilight Struggle while maintaining all the tension, decision making, and theme of the original classic.

This series of articles will introduce players to the history reflected in the game and provide some example events that illustrate the ties between the history and gameplay.

From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s, security in the Horn of Africa revolved around a very stable relationship: the de facto alliance between Emperor Halie Selassie’s Ethiopia and the United States. Emperor Selassie had been so eager to tie Ethiopia’s fortunes to the United States that he sought out a meeting with FDR before the end of the Second World War. Once this security pillar was established, the rest of the pieces of the security puzzle fell into place.

The Somali people had long-standing grievances against the Amhara people that dominated Ethiopia. Aggravating these resentments were former Somali grazing lands ceded to Ethiopia by Great Britain in 1948, known as the Ogaden. Though Britain had conditioned the transfer on self-government for the ethnic Somali inhabitants, Ethiopia adopted a heavy-handed sovereignty instead. Ethiopia’s approach led almost immediately to resistance, irredentist claims, and ultimately war with the Somalis. Since the United States was allied with Ethiopia, Siad Barre’s newly independent Somalia quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union. And that was the dynamic for the early portion of the Cold War.

However, by the mid-1970s, the Selassie regime had grown old, corrupt, and increasingly authoritarian. When a wave of famine struck the Horn, the decaying gears of the Ethiopian monarchy were simply unable to act with resolve to stave off a wave of public outcry. In 1974, as had happened in many nations in Africa and the Middle East, the Emperor was deposed by low-level military officers, who ultimately killed him in captivity. The Derg, or Committee, was the leadership of this junta and quickly moved Ethiopia into a pro-Soviet orbit.

It is, perhaps, not overly harsh to call Soviet policy in the horn cynical. The Russians had hoped to have their cake and eat it too and establish an alliance with Ethiopia and Somalia simultaneously. But having wooed their Somali allies with astounding amounts of military hardware, they found themselves between a rock and a hard place. The Ethiopian Derg offered the Soviets the opportunity to ally themselves with the most populous and influential country in the Horn. It also meant an embarrassing reversal for the Americans, who were racking up embarrassing reversals around the globe. So when the Soviets’ Somali allies insisted on using the instability in Ethiopia as the opportunity to launch an offensive to retake the Ogaden region, they switched alliances and fully backed Ethiopia. The fragile Marxist state in Ethiopia desperately needed the help, as the Somalis cut through the regime’s forces like butter. The USSR rushed Cuban ground forces to Ethiopia’s aid. Soviet naval and air forces participated in the conflict itself.

Now it was the American turn for a bit of cynicism. Fearing being locked out of the vital sea lanes that dominated access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, the United States entertained overtures from the Somali government for an alliance.

This rapid flip flop of positions left for a very muddled situation. Israel had spent years courting the Ethiopian government, both because of the desired emigration of Ethiopian Jewry and to maintain its own vital access to the Red Sea. Washington’s new priorities did not really change much of the calculus for Israel, who had troops helping the Ethiopians combat their Eritrean separatists. Meanwhile, Romania spent the previous five years causing friction within the Warsaw Pact as it sought to establish an ever more independent foreign policy. Ceaușescu decided that the Ogaden War would further bolster Romania’s independent credentials and remained closely tied to the Somali government.

The fallout from the conflict and swift role reversal in the Horn haunts the countries in the region to the present day. The massive weapons cache provided to the Somalis aided greatly in that once proud country’s descent into chaos and warlordism. Ethiopia’s strained relationships with its ethnic minorities and slow response to another famine in the 80s would carve Eritrea into an independent nation. Sudan, which played host to Ethiopian rebels, would deal with rebellion of its own, and those rebels established an independent South Sudan in the early 21st Century. And in an illustration of how the past is predicate, the United States and its 21st century peer competitor, the People’s Republic of China, today find themselves in a new struggle for influence in the Horn of Africa.

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