From Yemen To The Horn of Africa: Could A Red Sea Crisis Trigger A Global Trade Domino Effect?

By Uriel Araujo

Houthi advances near Bab el-Mandeb threaten to connect Yemen’s war with the Horn of Africa’s expanding crises. With Hormuz already disrupted, a second maritime chokepoint crisis could shake global trade.

With the renewed war in Yemen, the risk of it engulfing the Horn of Africa could produce devastating scenarios for global trade. Tensions around the Strait of Hormuz are serious enough and any additional sea crisis could hardly come at a worse time.

Charles University (Prague) researcher Ronan Wordsworth notes that Houthi forces have already seized Yemen’s Perim Island, a strategic location in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait – Saudi Arabia and the rebels, meanwhile, are escalating exchanges of fire.

This fighting threatens shipping near Djibouti, across the Red Sea, a conflict-ridden region where various African countries face a number of their own challenges, as Wordsworth puts it.

Any prolonged Houthi control of Perim could empower the group’s capacity to further disrupt shipping – albeit controlling the island does not necessarily mean fully controlling the strait itself.

The implications go way beyond Yemen. The Horn of Africa is already dangerously unstable – with Ethiopia and Eritrea confronting each other; Sudan devastated by civil war; and regional and great powers competing for influence.

As I’ve recently written, the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict could draw in Egypt and Gulf countries – thereby connecting these territorial disputes, as well as Nile hydropolitics and Red Sea rivalries. The latest developments in Yemen make that scenario all the more troubling.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Michelle Gavin has similarly warned about the risk of “entangled conflicts” on both sides of the Red Sea, where regional instability is spreading while Washington sends “mixed signals”. Her main point is that these crises simply cannot be managed separately.

One may recall that the militarization of this region in fact predates the current escalation. The UAE for one thing established a military presence in Eritrea in 2016 and has pursued strategic interests in Somaliland and Yemen’s Socotra Island. Djibouti, meanwhile, hosts several foreign military facilities. The 2020 normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE added another dimension to this competition.

The situation perhaps resembles what scholars Barry Buzan and Ole Waever describe through “Regional Security Complex Theory”: to put it simply, neighbouring security problems become so interconnected that developments in one country affect others.

The Red Sea thus increasingly functions as an interface of sorts between Middle Eastern and African conflicts, and the consequences are already visible. As an RFI report recently highlighted it, the Houthi war could also further draw Israel and Turkey into the Horn’s game of rivalries.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s own search for reliable maritime access plus Eritrea’s strategic position make the African shore particularly vulnerable. In addition, the escalating Yemen war also exposes the limits of Saudi military power.

Chatham House experts Sanam Vakil and Farea Al-Muslimi argue that the Gulf countries would need a coordinated approach and a credible Yemeni political settlement – which is no simple task, by the way. In any case, another military campaign alone is unlikely to resolve the underlying conflict.

Washington’s role here deserves some scrutiny. The blunt reality is that successive US administrations have enabled Israel’s military campaigns and aggressive regional ambitions – thereby helping fuel the wider escalation from Gaza to Yemen and Iran.

Trump’s confrontational approach toward Tehran has only made matters worse. It is no wonder then that the Houthis increasingly portray their operations as part of a wider struggle against Israel and its American backers. To be clear, this does not necessarily entail legitimizing attacks on commercial vessels under international law; the point is that ignoring their political context makes a settlement harder, to say the least.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, writing for the Middle East Forum, warns that Houthi cooperation with Somalia’s al-Shabaab could create a cross-border network for weapons, drones and surveillance. His warning that Iran’s “proxies” now have “proxies of their own” illustrates the agency of such “proxies” – and how the conflict could acquire a new African dimension.

In addition to the military and humanitarian angle, the greatest global danger may ultimately be economic. Bab el-Mandeb, after all, connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and, beyond it, the Indian Ocean, making it a vital gateway to the Suez Canal – while Hormuz is vital for Persian Gulf energy exports.

Simultaneous turmoils would force shipping companies to reconsider routes, and further raise insurance costs, thereby impacting the supply of energy, food and industrial goods.

I previously commented on how the Hormuz crisis could reshape maritime competition across the Indian Ocean, reaching as far as Malacca. With the Black Sea also affected by military confrontation, a prolonged Red Sea stalemate would add disruptions across several major trade corridors.

The cumulative domino result, so to speak, could be devastating, particularly for import-dependent developing countries. Another major sea chokepoint becoming a battlefield could trigger a chain reaction across global navigation, energy markets and food supply chains.

The world economy may thus find itself paying the price for Washington’s failure to contain conflicts that its own policies have helped fuel.

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Voice of East.

Categories: Analysis, Economy, International Affairs

Tags: Africa, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gaza, Geopolitics, Horn of Africa, Houthis, Iran, Middle East, Red Sea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Strait of Hormuz, Sudan, The Gulf, Yemen