Question: What do you see happening in the dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and what do you think of your controversial predecessor, Susan Rice?

Snyder: [Susan Rice was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton Administration.] "I worked for Susan as an officer. I know Susan quite well." The Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute, he said, has been so difficult to settle because "the two leaders on both sides are very rigid men. They are not the modernizers that I think Susan hoped they would be. And that I hoped they would be."

Snyder had worked with Eritrea's president, Issaias Afwerki, years ago. "I crawled around shell holes with Issaias when he was still a rebel and we were interested in a particular weapon that had been fired at him by the [former Ethiopian dictator] Mengistu regime. And he is a very tough-minded revolutionary. But he hasn't transformed himself into a national leader that looks beyond the narrow agenda to the broader national interests."

Snyder had a similar opinion about Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi. "Meles sits atop an Ethiopian system that has not made a fundamental transformation. I think we all hoped that it would have changed, and it has done some things. It has done a lot of things in terms of trying to put power down into the regions, etc. But it hasn't begun to cast a broader vision of what Ethiopia should be about. And the boundary dispute has become a kind of litmus test for the two of them.

"The piece of land they are fighting over is worthless. I mean it's worthless in the sense of how an American MBA looks at it. It's not economically viable. One of the things we said, in fact, to Prime Minister Meles at the highest level was, 'We'll build you another Badme [the disputed area]. We'll build you a Badme city on the hill. If this local population is disadvantaged, we'll build them brand new state-of-the-art houses, wells, roads, and everything else on the right side of the border. If that's what this is about, if this is really about the people, which is what you keep telling us this is about.'

"It's not. It's about the line in the sand between two old revolutionary comrades who can't find a way out. The way out is to get out of the box. They are looking at this border as what their relationship is about. It's not. They have to remember their revolutionary roots. It's about raising both of the populations up. And that means they need to say, okay, fair or not fair we agree that this bloody deal is going to be concluded."

He said Meles and Issaias should accept the line proposed by Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, president of the UN Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission. "He's 80 years old. And maybe it's not exactly the boundary in the Italian treaty, you could read it 53 ways." But the two sides need to make a sacrifice to put an end to the fighting and normalize relations.

The Ethiopians, he said, have nominally demobilized, "but they rotate in fresh troops. Any day they could launch an attack against the Eritreans." The Eritreans, with their smaller population, have kept their troops in uniform at the expense of their economy, which is faltering. Snyder suggested that after defusing the border issue the two countries should join forces and constitute themselves a common economic zone. "It's going to take ten years or twenty years, but start with free trade. Make the border meaningless. And then make the port of Assab [in Eritrea] what it should be. It should be the Ethiopian route to the sea. Not Djibouti. Tie both countries together and lift both boats, so that your legacy is not a hundred thousand dead men, which is what they've done now. They've fought World War I tactics with World War II weapons. Which proves that if we had done that we could have killed millions more than we did in World War II. Very sophisticated weapons in trench warfare, it was a slaughter. And they are geared to do it again unless they step back from this box where if I win he loses."