Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv spent years building to control the Bab el-Mandeb and the Horn. The chokepoint has now passed to the one actor the plan was meant to exclude, and the states it pressed have drawn together against it.

For a decade the southern approaches to the Red Sea were ordered around one assumption, that the states which counted on this water were those with the deepest treasuries and the closest ties to Washington. In September that assumption failed. Fighters of the Houthi movement, under Iranian direction, took the island of Mayun in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb and with it working control of a strait through which roughly 12 percent of world trade passes. The power that had spent eight years assembling the architecture to hold this chokepoint, the United Arab Emirates, was no longer on the coast to contest it.

The Gulf press reads the episode as a new Iranian front against the United States. It is that. It is also the clearest sign to date that the design Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv pursued across the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa has yielded the reverse of what it promised, and that the actors now setting terms in the region are those who plan around national interest rather than around the guarantees of a fading order.

The Emirati doctrine

To read the collapse only as a Gulf quarrel is to miss the method behind it. Since the counter-revolutionary turn that followed the Arab uprisings, Abu Dhabi has pursued a consistent strategy across three theatres. In Libya it backed Khalifa Haftar against the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, where Türkiye emerged as the principal external patron of the other side, the sharpest earlier collision between the two projects. In Yemen it built and armed the Southern Transitional Council against the government it had nominally joined the war to restore, and it worked to root out the Islah party, the Yemeni movement linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders had found refuge in Türkiye. On the Horn it cultivated Somaliland and other regional administrations rather than the federal centre in Mogadishu. The through-line, as one Italian analysis put it, is that the UAE prefers sub-national clients because they let it weaken rivals and carve out platforms for maritime power at the same time. The two aims reinforced one another. Every client that undercut a central government also delivered a port, a runway or an island, so the map of Emirati proxies became, over time, a map of Emirati bases.

Those rivals are named plainly in the record. The Saudi-Emirati axis that formed after 2011 defined itself against Iran, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and Türkiye, and for years Riyadh and Abu Dhabi moved together against all four. Türkiye read the doctrine from the receiving end. Ankara accused the UAE of financing the 2016 coup attempt against President Erdoğan, and only later, when it set about repairing Gulf ties, did it curtail the activities of Islah figures on its own soil. What separates Ankara and Riyadh from Abu Dhabi is not tactics alone. Both Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, whatever their other differences, treat strong central states as the basis of a stable order, while the Emirati approach has repeatedly favoured the actors that hollow those states out. The Red Sea is where that difference became a fault line.

The design on the water

The maritime side of the project was never hidden. From 2018 Abu Dhabi built what one analysis called a circle of bases around the Gulf of Aden: Socotra, administered by some accounts as something close to an overseas territory; runways on the smaller islands of Abd al-Kuri and Samhah; a base on Mayun itself; and on the African shore, Berbera in Somaliland and Bosaso in Puntland. The stated aim was to watch the water and interdict Iranian weapons bound for the Houthis. Israeli strategy converged on the same map. According to reporting attributed to the Middle East Monitor, Israel had long been weighing a base in Somaliland to monitor Yemen and the Bab el-Mandeb, and on 26 December it became the first state to recognise the breakaway republic, in language its prime minister tied to the Abraham Accords.

The Horn divides

For Ankara the recognition was a direct challenge. Türkiye has treated Somalia as a pillar of its Africa policy since 2011. It operates its largest overseas base, Camp TURKSOM, in Mogadishu, trains Somali forces, and casts itself as the guarantor of Somalia’s unity against the secession of Somaliland. Israel’s move placed it, in the reading of regional analysts, on a collision course with Türkiye. President Erdoğan called the recognition illegitimate and unacceptable and set out to rally Arab and Muslim governments against it, issuing a joint declaration with the Saudi crown prince in early February.

Egypt arrived at the same position by a different road. Cairo regards the Bab el-Mandeb as a strategic extension of the Suez Canal, and a senior Egyptian strategist has called securing the strait a national security priority, because canal revenue depends on the traffic that passes through it. When Ethiopia signed a memorandum with Somaliland in January 2024 to lease coastline for a naval base, Egypt read it as an attempt to redraw the Horn against its interests, and in August 2024 it signed a defence pact with Mogadishu and began sending troops and materiel, with plans that envisaged as many as ten thousand personnel for Somalia. Cairo’s interest runs past the canal. Its long confrontation with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has taught it to treat the Horn as an extension of its own water security, and the Somaliland question folded neatly into that older anxiety.

The pattern was consistent across the capitals. The UAE cultivated Somaliland and the sub-state administrations, while Egypt, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia placed their weight behind Somalia’s federal government. Warning that Israel intended a base on its soil, Mogadishu signed defence pacts with Qatar and with Saudi Arabia, and its president said an Israeli base would never be allowed. More than fifty states condemned the recognition, and the African Union and the European Union restated Somalia’s territorial integrity. What had been sold as a low-cost foothold hardened a counter-alignment, running from Cairo through Riyadh and Doha to Ankara, that stood behind the very central state the design was meant to erode.

The collapse in Yemen

On the Yemeni shore the design came apart faster still. In December the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council pushed into Hadramaut and al-Mahra, the provinces that run along Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Riyadh read the advance as an attempt to complete a separatist state on its frontier, and on 30 December it bombed the port of Mukalla, striking what the coalition described as an Emirati weapons shipment landed from Fujairah. The internationally recognised government gave the UAE 24 hours to withdraw, and Abu Dhabi complied. Within about eight days it lost Socotra, Mayun and the coastal outposts it had taken eight years to build, dismantling its own island infrastructure as it left. The coalition’s spokesman later accused Abu Dhabi of running a covert operation to move the STC leader by sea to Berbera and onward to the Emirates, a charge the UAE did not answer. By 9 January the council had dissolved itself.

The rupture between the two Gulf capitals was strategic before it was personal, and it left the anti-Houthi front without its principal paymaster and without the coastal positions that front had relied on. The consequences of that vacuum arrived within months.

The strait changes hands

The timing was decisive. Iran had been at war with the United States and Israel since late February, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was already disrupted. Saudi Arabia, the largest oil exporter, had rerouted much of its crude through the Red Sea, which raised the value of the far end of the same route at the very moment its Yemeni shore stood undefended. The Houthis advanced through the summer and took the coast in September. They seized Mokha on the tenth, Perim the following day, the strait by the twelfth, and the Hanish islands within the week, ground the UAE had abandoned months earlier. The coastal forces that gave way were those of the National Resistance Front, part of the fractured camp the Gulf rupture had left without a patron.

That the operation served Iran as much as the Houthis is not seriously disputed. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the advance advanced Iranian aims, with United States officials describing IRGC personnel on the ground. The Abu Dhabi-owned National reported that the Quds Force commander Abdul Reza Shahlai was directing operations in person and that fighters had arrived on a flight from Tehran. Iran’s object, on the Institute’s reading, is to establish the Houthis as the guarantor of passage through the Bab el-Mandeb, the posture Tehran has adopted at Hormuz. The provenance of that reporting warrants a note of its own, since the Emirati press has an evident interest in foregrounding Iran’s hand and passing over the vacuum Abu Dhabi’s own withdrawal created.

The geography compounds the point. The Houthi advance has carried the movement to within twenty miles of Djibouti, the state across the water that hosts American, French, Chinese and other bases, the densest concentration of foreign force on the Red Sea. None of it moved to hold the island in the middle of the strait. For Riyadh the effect is measurable. The Houthis have declared an embargo on Saudi shipping while letting other vessels pass, and Saudi crude loadings through the strait fell by more than a third in two weeks. Analysts reckon that a full closure of a waterway carrying close to a quarter of the world’s container traffic would place a comparable share of global oil and gas at risk. Iran’s allies now hold the Yemeni bank of the Bab el-Mandeb; the UAE and its partners retain the African bank at Berbera and Bosaso. The chokepoint has, in practice, been partitioned between two rival camps.

What Ankara reads in it

The lesson taken in the region is not obscure. A strategy built on the fragmentation of states and the purchase of coastlines, underwritten by an order that assumed American guarantees would hold, has left its chief author without the prize it sought and has driven the states it pressed into a common front. The clearest statement of how this looks from Ankara came in Harici’s own pages, where the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy described an Israeli vision of regional primacy that depends on weakening and collapsing surrounding states, and named Türkiye as the country Israeli officials now discuss in the terms they once reserved for Iran. Levy was careful to add that Israel was neither the sole nor always the primary agent of state collapse, and that qualifier is worth keeping. The claim that Türkiye is a designated target is a characterisation, advanced by an interested party and serving Ankara’s own purposes, and it should be weighed as such.

What does not depend on characterisation is the record of the past year. The doctrine of backing sub-state clients against central authorities reached its furthest extent, in Yemen and on the Horn, and then it broke. The states that were meant to be fragmented drew closer together, from Cairo to Ankara. The power that built the ring of bases lost half of it in a week. And the chokepoint at the centre of the whole enterprise passed to the actor the enterprise had been built to exclude. For a region long instructed that security flowed from alignment with Washington and its partners, the year offered a different instruction, that presence without the will to hold ground decides nothing, and that the order which promised to keep the strait open no longer commands the coast. The powers that gained were those that never staked their security on that promise, and the map they are now redrawing runs from the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden without waiting on a guarantee from abroad.

Israel’s strike on a military base near the Syrian city of Idlib occupied a prominent place on the agenda of Türkiye, the Middle East, and Arab nations. Official statements followed in quick succession. The US Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria and Iraq, Tom Barrack, also drew attention with his bizarre remarks and his proposal to establish a tripartite security mechanism between Türkiye, Syria, and Israel.

Israel must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, and the harshest reactions must be delivered. Of this, there is no doubt.

Yet how sincere are the Arab states voicing these reactions? How consistent are they? How courageous? How willing are they to take steps that carry genuine deterrent power and impose real sanctions? We must, of course, reflect upon the answers to these questions.

For we know that certain Arab nations maintain intense, deep, and intricate relations with Israel. We need look no further. We recall, for instance, that Qatar, with which Türkiye also maintains very close ties, provided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with $15 million in the 2012 elections and $50 million in the 2018 elections to finance his political campaigns. Indeed, this funding is continually kept on the agenda by the opposition in Israeli domestic politics. It is well known that during that period, Netanyahu gave a statement to the police regarding the funds, his advisers who received the money were arrested, audio recordings and confessions surfaced, and Netanyahu’s dismissal of the affair as “a political plot against me” failed completely to convince.

The truly remarkable aspect lies here: this affair preoccupied the Israeli public for days and became the foremost item on the political agenda. Yet in Qatar, across the broader Arab world, throughout the Islamic world, and in Türkiye, the matter received scant attention. Only a handful of voices raised the issue or expressed outrage that millions of dollars were channelled to such a killer, such a perpetrator committing the crime of genocide in Palestine, to fund his election campaigns; even their voices were barely heard.

Let us now speak frankly. With the Islamic world and the Arab nations in this state, who can reasonably expect Israel to take a step back regarding Palestine? Who can remain optimistic about a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, that recognizes the independence, integrity, and sovereignty of Palestine? Who can genuinely believe that Arab states are determined, consistent, valiant, and sincere on the Palestinian question? While the silence of Islamist and conservative-pious circles regarding Qatar’s financial assistance remains plain for all to see, who can be convinced that demonstrations, rallies, and press conferences concerning Gaza and Palestine will yield tangible results? Who, what power, or which Arab state can sustain the hopes of the oppressed, sorrowful, and aggrieved Palestinian people? Qatar? Saudi Arabia? The United Arab Emirates? Egypt? Jordan?

Nor should we forget that elections will be held in Israel on 27 October. Benjamin Netanyahu is escalating his aggression and recklessness, seeking both to salvage his waning poll numbers and reputation and to shift the political agenda by emphasizing securitist policies and external threats. Heavily worn down by corruption allegations against himself and his wife, Netanyahu cannot leverage security policies and military measures as effortlessly as before, given that his primary opponent, former Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot, leaves him on weak footing against a military rival. Yet despite such corruption, attrition, genocide, and bloodshed, Netanyahu appears to maintain his grip on his party; indeed, most candidates who prevailed in the primaries are politicians in his close circle.

Qatar, which enjoys considerable admiration and esteem in our country, not only backs Benjamin Netanyahu in domestic Israeli politics but also conducts joint military drills in the Eastern Mediterranean with the US, France, and Greece; Israel takes part in these exercises as well.

Let us admit that Qatar cares neither for the Palestinian cause nor for the innocent Muslims slaughtered in Gaza. It values neither the Islamic world nor Arab unity. It neither takes into account the sensitivities, priorities, and interests of Türkiye, nor does it share Türkiye’s anxieties and concerns.

Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst

The photograph that Western agencies distributed from Bishkek arrived with its meaning already fixed. Above an image of the Kyrgyz president escorting China’s Xi Jinping past an honor guard, the caption read COUNTER US POWER. The image itself showed a familiar diplomatic ritual, two heads of state walking a red carpet. The caption supplied what the image did not: an adversary, a purpose, and the direction in which a Western audience was meant to orient its concern. The gap between the neutral picture and the loaded words is a useful place to begin, because it is where the framing of the entire summit was decided before a single line of analysis was written.

On Sept. 1 the Shanghai Cooperation Organization marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in the Kyrgyz capital, with ten member states, more than a dozen heads of government, and the secretary-general of the United Nations among the guests. Most European and North American outlets carried a single Agence France-Presse dispatch, which described the bloc as one that seeks to be a counterinfluence to the West. France 24 reported that the Russian and Chinese leaders had traveled to Central Asia to counter Western influence. British coverage of an earlier session of the same body called it a secretive summit of an “axis of upheaval.” In each formulation the West occupies the grammatical center of a meeting it did not attend. The organization is assigned no purpose that can be stated without reference to Washington and Brussels. It is defined entirely as a reaction to them.

Türkiye is the hole in the caption

The framing meets its first and largest obstacle in the guest list, and specifically in the presence of a NATO member at the table. Türkiye holds the status of dialogue partner in the organization, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has attended its summits in person. A Western reader told that the SCO is an axis assembled against his alliance is not encouraged to ask why a founding member of that alliance keeps a seat in it. The same AFP dispatch that calls the bloc a counterinfluence to the West records, several paragraphs below its lead, that the organization now counts fifteen dialogue partners including Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Türkiye belongs to NATO. Saudi Arabia and Qatar host the forward headquarters of United States Central Command and the largest American air base in the region. An organization built to oppose the West does not assemble this membership, and a caption that calls it one survives only for readers who do not reach the paragraph that contradicts it.

Türkiye’s position is the part of the picture that Western coverage is least equipped to interpret, because the prevailing map allows for only two teams. Ankara is not choosing the SCO over NATO. It is doing something the two-team model cannot represent, treating the organization as a venue to be worked, neither joining it nor shunning it. A state that keeps its treaty commitments in the Atlantic while cultivating standing in a Eurasian security forum is hedging against a future in which the Atlantic order no longer sets the terms alone. That behavior is legible from Istanbul and largely illegible from the outlets that produced the Bishkek caption, which is why their account of the summit reads, from this vantage, as a description of a world that has already begun to pass.

The vocabulary and its tell

The language of the coverage repays close attention. The recurring terms are “counter,” “against,” “anti-Western,” and “axis,” a vocabulary of opposition that grants the bloc no content of its own. The word “axis” carries the heaviest freight. It imports the moral architecture of the Second World War, and more recently of the “axis of evil,” and lays it over a trade-and-security forum whose membership includes a NATO government. The transfer is performed a few lines from the facts that make it untenable, and the proximity is the tell.

There is a structural habit worth naming as well. The AFP copy notes that the organization’s founding declaration describes it as not an alliance directed against other states, and then, in the following sentence, observes that the Russian and Chinese leaders have delivered anti-Western speeches at past summits. The self-description is admitted and immediately withdrawn. The skepticism applied here is selective. When a NATO communiqué describes the alliance as defensive, the same wire services do not append a reminder of its record of offensive operations. The doubt switches on for adversaries and off for partners, a selection that rests on assumption and not on evidence. Coverage outside the Western agency system handles the same material with a cooler hand. Al Jazeera quoted a regional analyst describing the SCO simply as not a coherent anti-Western alliance, a plain and accurate line that appears in no Western headline, because it does not fit the caption.

A bloc that grew in proportion to the pressure

The organization’s history explains more than its rhetoric does. It began in 1996 as a border-demarcation arrangement among China, Russia and three Central Asian republics, a technical body concerned with the settlement of frontier lines. It gained momentum in close proportion to the pressure applied to its members from the West. India and Pakistan acceded in 2017. Iran was admitted after years of sanctions had made membership useful to Tehran and to the bloc alike. The roster of dialogue partners expanded toward fifteen as American secondary sanctions and tariffs demonstrated to a widening circle of governments the value of a forum beyond Washington’s reach. At Bishkek the rotating chairmanship passed to Pakistan, another long-standing American security partner. The pattern is consistent: the organization has grown less by recruitment than by the steady conversion of states that Western policy has pressed toward the exits.

Iran offers the sharpest illustration. President Masoud Pezeshkian took his seat in Bishkek six months into a war with the United States. A week before the summit, the U.S. Treasury announced a sanctions campaign it named Operation Economic Outcast, extending secondary sanctions to five further sectors of the Iranian economy, aviation, digital assets, gold, shipping and technology, and warning in a separate alert that any party of any nationality paying Iran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz risked U.S. penalty. Secondary sanctions do not fall on the target alone. They fall on any government or firm that trades with the target, which makes them an instruction directed at the sovereign decisions of other states, enforced by the threat of exclusion from the dollar system. China, the largest purchaser of Iranian oil, responded that it would firmly defend its interests. A measure aimed at Tehran functions as a demand issued to Beijing, and Beijing traveled to Bishkek. India provides a second instance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a scheduled bilateral with President Vladimir Putin days after Washington imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods over New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil. The instrument intended to discipline India accompanied it to the very table it was meant to keep it from.

The divisions are real, and they are the point

An accurate account of the summit requires equal candor about the organization’s limits, and candor here is what separates analysis from a mirror image of the framing under examination. The SCO is not a unified bloc. Russia and China compete for influence across the same Central Asian ground. India and China share a contested and periodically violent border, which is why Modi and Xi appeared on the same platform but arranged no formal bilateral. India and Pakistan hold membership in the same body while remaining adversaries. A proposed development bank has been discussed for years without becoming a functioning institution. The 40 percent of humanity the organization claims to encompass is a measure of scale, not of common purpose.

These divisions do not rescue the Western frame. They sharpen the judgment it obscures. Agreement among these governments does not exist, and it is not what makes the summit notable. What makes it notable is the preference of states that distrust one another to manage their disputes inside a structure the United States does not control. The arbitration of one it does control is the option they declined. That preference is a heavier comment on the standing of the American-led order than any declaration could produce. It requires no alliance and no shared ideology. It requires only that a critical mass of states has concluded that the Western order is something to work around, and that the working-around now proceeds openly, at the level of heads of state, beneath a caption instructing Western readers to see a hostile axis where a hedging one stands.

The shrinking center

The phrase that recurs whenever Western officials describe global opinion is “the international community.” Bishkek is a reminder of how much that phrase conceals. The community it invokes is a specific and diminishing set of capitals that grew accustomed, during the brief period of unchallenged American primacy after 1991, to mistaking its own consensus for the consensus of humanity. The summit in the Kyrgyz capital assembled a NATO member, a Western-courted partner in India, the Gulf security clients of the United States, and the two most heavily sanctioned states on earth, and it did so under the observation of the United Nations secretary-general. No description of that room as an anti-Western axis can be reconciled with its composition. The description persists because it serves the audience it is written for, offering a shrinking center the reassurance that it remains the fixed point around which the world still turns.

From Ankara, and from the wider vantage of states that have watched the post-1991 order lose its monopoly, the reassurance reads as a lagging indicator. The two men in the photograph were walking to lunch. The power that could not prevent the lunch, could not hold its Indian partner at a distance from Moscow, could not isolate the state it is fighting, and could not keep the head of the United Nations from attending, is nonetheless assured by its own press that the summit was organized around opposition to it. The more accurate reading is the one Türkiye’s own conduct already reflects. The world is not arranging itself against the West so much as arranging itself without waiting for it, and the caption over the photograph is the last place that development will be admitted.