Among the angry individuals who were ready to unite to overthrow him were Georgis and Dajach Tafari Makonnen. The leader of these was the Minister of War, Fitawrari Habta, but Iyasu remained in a strong position. He had at his command one thousand soldiers from his father's army and loyal commanders, and he held most of the empire's arsenal of weapons and machine guns.

The decisive factor in the conspiracy against Iyasu was the foreign powers, Britain, France, and Italy, whose plans for Abyssinia and its neighboring colonies, as formulated in the Tripartite Agreement of 1906, were challenged by Iyasu's independent tendencies. Iyasu's policies, which ran counter to these powers, became most evident regarding the Ogaden, especially after information emerged about his contact with and support for the jihad of Sayyid Muhammad Abd Allah Hassan, who led the Somali resistance against both British and Italian colonialism. The three powers viewed the danger of Iyasu's policies as stemming from their encouragement of resistance movements in their colonies and the potential for widespread chaos within them, particularly as they were newly established under colonial rule and the situation had not yet stabilized. Overlooking such policies could threaten their existence from the farthest reaches of Somalia to Darfur, where its Sultan Ali Dinar began to oppose the British and communicate with Turkey, declaring his support for it at the beginning of World War I.

The three powers also expressed their fear of Abyssinia's continuously increasing arms imports and its impact on their neighboring colonies, to the extent that smuggled rifles and ammunition were being sold in Sudan and British East Africa (Kenya and Somalia). The enemy powers, Germany, Austria, and Japan, became a source of these weapons, and Germany showed a tendency to become the main foreign power in Abyssinia.

A report from the British mission in Addis Ababa dated January 1914 mentions their monitoring of Iyasu's contacts with Austria and the Austrian consul's travel to his country to arrange the purchase of one hundred cannons for Abyssinia and the training of some of its officers in their use.

Their work focused on the new provinces that Menelik had incorporated in the south, west, and east, finding fertile ground there for spreading Christianity among their pagan and Muslim populations alike. Undoubtedly, these missions sensed the danger of Iyasu's policies in these provinces.