This is a series, I on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Gregory Coppley, the editor and publisher of Defense and Foreign Affairs.

Ethiopia. I read from a document from Gregory in these last hours.

Ethiopia is now facing an existential crisis.

If it fails now, then it could be removed from the map of the world as a great sovereign

nation of nations, and its mission to stabilize the great crossroad of world trade would

be lost forever.

Gregory, Ethiopia is a very complicated story battling in all directions.

There is the tango with Somalia. There's the tango with several liberation fronts. There's a long list of them.

There's alienation sometimes from Eritrea.

There's also the question of Europe and the United States and how they treat the capital

Addis Ababa and Prime Minister Abbe, a receiver of a Nobel Prize, is now more a warlord than he is a peacemaker. How to understand

the existential crisis of Ethiopia? What is the major threat or is it just a

combination of threats that undermine the confidence in

survival? Well it's it's it's something that we have to look at in the longer term

bearing in mind that Ethiopia is probably one of the oldest civilizations

with the continual governance pattern in the world, over 3,000 years of continual functioning with the solomonic line and the like.

So right now we've seen, we're seeing the culmination of 50 years of chaos which began when the government of

Emperor Holly Selassie was overthrown in 1974. So that basically started off a cycle of 50 years of violence. In the period before

that we saw Ethiopian leaders able to resist foreign interventions whether they were from Egypt or in 1896 from Italy, and once again in

1935 to 1941, again from Italy.

But these were wars of foreign aggression against the country.

What we're seeing now since the coup of 1974 has been internal dislocation and internal massacres where the various communist

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