The strait changes hands: How the Red Sea design collapsed into Iran’s favour

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.