Korybko to DW: Eritrea of all countries isn’t a “Rising Power”!

What if a “rising power” is actually a country bleeding out? That’s the weird and wild contradiction at the heart of this geopolitical head-scratcher. Deutsche Welle floated the idea that Eritrea is becoming a rising power along a critical global shipping artery—but analyst Andrew Korybko isn’t buying it. With abject poverty, roughly one-fifth of the population having fled, and no modern air, drone, missile, or naval forces to speak of, the label seems less like observation and more like speculative fiction. Sometimes the strangest story isn’t a quantum paradox—it’s the gap between a headline and reality. The real mystery: why would anyone call this a rise? There’s something almost cosmic about the way geopolitical labels get attached to countries. A phrase like “rising power” sounds like a law of physics—an object in motion, gaining mass, bending the space around it. But Eritrea, by Korybko’s account, is less a rising star and more a gravitational anomaly: a nation so economically and militarily constrained that the label feels like a category error. The source article from Deutsche Welle leans heavily on one analyst’s opinion, and Korybko pushes back with hard numbers: poverty, mass exodus, absent modern military capabilities. What makes this weird and wild is the narrative machinery behind it. Eritrea sits along a global shipping artery—a chokepoint of commerce that makes strategists see potential where others see suffering. It’s the same cognitive trick that makes us imagine a desert as a future metropolis or a war-torn region as a “pivot state.” We project power onto geography, not onto actual capabilities. The Red Sea corridor is genuinely important, but importance is not the same as strength. A rock in a river is important to a boat; that doesn’t make the rock a rising naval power. Korybko’s critique also raises a deeper question: who benefits from calling Eritrea a rising power? In a region already crowded with foreign military bases, drones, and missile systems, labeling a poor, depopulating state as “rising” could serve as justification for intervention, containment, or even flattery. That’s the wild part—narratives don’t just describe reality; they bend it. And when media outlets rely on a single source to support a counterintuitive headline, the line between journalism and speculative geopolitics blurs. In the end, this is a story about the stories we tell about power. Eritrea may be strategically located, but strategic location without economic base, population stability, or military capacity is like a quantum state that collapses the moment you measure it. The measurement here—the DW headline—seems to have collapsed into a very different reality than the one on the ground. Weird? Yes. Wild? Absolutely. And worth reading the original critique carefully. Source:: https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopolitics/korybko-to-dw-eritrea-of-all-countries-isn-t-a-rising-power/