Addis Ababa, October 27, 2026 (FMC) — The Cairo–Asmara-backed Tsimdo campaign against Ethiopia has suffered the fate of a reckless scheme built on arrogance, miscalculation and the fantasy of a rapid national collapse.
Its architects imagined that a convergence of hostile forces could plunge Ethiopia into chaos within two weeks, overwhelm its defenses and create the conditions for a political outcome dictated by force.
Instead, the campaign’s grand ambition evaporated in a matter of days, leaving behind the wreckage of a strategy that profoundly underestimated the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and the country it is sworn to defend.
The so-called honeymoon between hostile forces was never a partnership for peace, stability or the welfare of the Ethiopian people. It was a convergence of interests united by the expectation that Ethiopia’s challenges could be exploited to weaken the state and fracture its national cohesion.
The culprits might have had different calculations and pursued different interests, but they converged around a destructive premise: that coordinated pressure from within and beyond Ethiopia’s borders would deliver the collapse they desired.
That premise has been shattered. The speed with which the campaign’s ambitions dissolved exposes the gulf between the confidence of its architects and the realities they faced.
They treated Ethiopia’s complex political and security environment as an opening for a quick victory. They mistook simultaneous threats for an unstoppable force and assumed that a country confronted on multiple fronts would surrender before it could respond.
The result has been a brutal lesson in the limits of hostile coordination when it collides with determined national defense.
The two-week timetable was itself a revealing expression of the plotters’ delusion. It reflected the belief that Ethiopia could be brought to its knees on an externally imagined schedule, as though the fate of a sovereign country could be decided by the ambitions of those seeking to destabilize it.
The ENDF’s resistance overturned that calculation. What was conceived as a short road to national chaos became a rapid collapse of the campaign’s own expectations.
Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, Chief of Staff of the ENDF, addressed the wider confrontation in his message marking the 119th Defense Forces Day on October 25. His remarks underscored the failure of forces that sought to undermine Ethiopia through armed struggle, hostile coordination and attempts to weaken the national army.
His message also rejected the idea that those unable to achieve power through peaceful political competition could secure it by joining foreign actors and pursuing violence.
The warning that no transitional government would be built on the grave of the Defense Force was more than a declaration of military resolve. It struck at the heart of the political fantasy behind the campaign: that Ethiopia’s national defense institution could be destroyed or neutralized to clear the way for a new order imposed through force.
The ENDF, Berhanu made clear, would not be dismantled to satisfy the ambitions of armed factions. Its mission is to dismantle threats against the country.
The failure of the hostile campaign also exposes the hollowness of alliances held together by a shared desire to weaken another nation. Such convergence may create the appearance of strategic strength, but coordination alone does not guarantee victory.
A campaign requires more than a common enemy; it requires sound judgment, realistic objectives and the ability to withstand the consequences of confrontation.
When its central assumptions prove false, the alliance’s apparent strength becomes a liability, and its members are left confronting the failure of the very project that brought them together.
For Ethiopia, this episode reinforces a central truth about national security: the country’s sovereignty cannot be reduced to an experiment in destabilization.
Political tensions and security challenges do not automatically translate into state collapse, nor do hostile actors acquire the power to determine Ethiopia’s future simply by coordinating their actions. The country’s institutions, its people and its defense capabilities remain decisive factors that outside calculations cannot wish away.
The human cost of armed confrontation makes the failure of this strategy all the more consequential. The people of Ethiopia have endured the destruction and disruption that follow when political ambitions are pursued through violence.
The people of the Tigray Region, in particular, have paid a heavy price through loss of life, damaged livelihoods and prolonged insecurity. They deserve peace, recovery and the opportunity to rebuild their future—not another round of conflict designed to revive the ambitions of political actors who continue to treat war as a shortcut to power.
The lesson must therefore extend beyond the battlefield. Those seeking political influence must abandon the illusion that armed campaigns, foreign backing and efforts to weaken national institutions can substitute for legitimate political participation.
Ethiopia’s future cannot be built by destroying the foundations of its security, and no faction has the right to impose the costs of its failed ambitions on millions of citizens.
The collapse of the two-week fantasy does not mean that every security challenge has disappeared. Vigilance, institutional strength and continued investment in national defense remain essential.
But it does mean that the expectation of a rapid Ethiopian collapse has failed to materialize, and that the hostile campaign has not achieved the outcome its architects sought. Ethiopia must now turn its resistance into a durable foundation for peace, stability and development, denying those who thrive on conflict the opportunity to repeat the same destructive experiment.
The image of a honeymoon captures the fragility of this hostile convergence: an alliance that imagined a swift triumph but could not sustain its ambitions when confronted with reality.
Its timetable dissolved, its expectations collapsed, and its promised upheaval failed to materialize. The Cairo–Asmara-backed Tsimdo honeymoon vanished like smoke in days—not because its architects lacked ambition, but because they mistook ambition for power and hostility for the ability to bring Ethiopia to its knees.