Two decades after the outbreak of their devastating 1998-2000 war, in 2018 Eritrea and Ethiopia ended the state of no-war-no-peace that had prevailed since the end of fighting. Despite the fanfare that greeted the sudden thawing of relations, the new dynamic between Asmara and Addis Ababa brought with it familiar and new signs of danger. Opaque and without institutional backstopping, the rapprochement ended up changing the alignment of forces in the region before hurtling it back into yet another war. In examining how it is that the 2018 peace let to war in 2020, this paper finds all the four major parties to the conflict variously complicit in the carnage that followed.