Opinion | The struggle for the Gulf of Aden

By Tom Fowdy

The Gulf of Aden is a critical strategic waterway that forms the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Here, it creates a critical junction between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, creating one of the most important shipping passages in the world, not least because through the Suez Canal, it offers a route forward to the Mediterranean Sea and therefore, Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, bypassing the immensely long, inconvenient, and treacherous route of circling all Africa. This makes the gulf an area of strategic interest and a variable in the balance of power, for whosoever controls it can choke westbound shipping accordingly.

It is no surprise that this geopolitical significance has led the Gulf and southern Arabian Peninsula to become an area of competition between Empires and great powers. First, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire sought to control the area and incorporated it as a division known as the Yemen Vilayet. However, the British Empire, which also sought to dominate global trading and maritime commerce, also had it in their sights and created the Protectorate of Aden accordingly. To this end, the British also established protectorates in what became the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, as well as incorporating Oman as an effective client state.

Following the end of formal colonialism in the Middle East, western powers have continued to exert diplomatic and military patron-client relationships with these Arab states to keep the Gulf of Aden open. This has resulted in repeated wider geopolitical conflicts over the allegiance of the nation of Yemen, which once divided into two nations, was unified in 1990 after the Cold War. Yemen, whose population is fractured between Sunni and Shi'ia Islam, is an impoverished and unstable country that lacks the lucrative oil resources of its wealthier Arab neighbors, and as such a legitimate government. Wider powers have subsequently exploited this chaos or pursued attempted external intervention to try and win control of the Gulf of Aden.

For the past 10 years, Yemen has been subject to a devastating civil war between the Iranian-backed Houthis, a Shi'ite group in the Northwest country of the corner, against its Sunni conflict, who have been backed by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the West. Despite overwhelming bombardment of the country, widespread civilian casualties and a humanitarian crisis, the Saudi coalition have been unable to remove the Houthis from power, who occupy its official capital Sanaa. However, they did stop them from taking the critical port of Aden itself. Despite this, the Houthis occupy a swathe of the Red Sea strip up from the Gulf, which has given them the power to project military power into the sea and therefore disrupt shipping as they please.

And it would be the Israeli-Gaza conflict that has triggered this. While Western-backed Arab states are increasingly sympathetic or moving towards the normalization of Israel, those aligned with Iran are intent on resisting Tel-Aviv and to this end the Houthis are militantly opposed to Israel. Thus when war broke out in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis themselves have intervened with drones, ballistic missiles and harassment of shipping with the goal of attempting to close the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to Israeli shipping, creating risk for everyone that goes through the passage. This has had a strong deterrent effect and has led the United States and the United Kingdom to respond with military action against them, sending naval assets to the area, striking Houthi boats, and preparing more strikes against targets.

This has opened a new theatre of battle in the Middle East, stemming from the west's unconditional backing of Israeli bombardment of Gaza. It thus forms an appendage of a wider regional struggle of the West against Iran in the region for influence, who has engaged in a series of proxy conflicts with them over the past few years including in Syria. American foreign policy, although focused primarily on the so-called "Indo-Pacific", has been ultimately orientated towards promoting Iranian containment and leveraging security relationships with Arab states to this end. However, this campaign, which has also attempted to crush Iran with sanctions, has proved increasingly unsuccessful especially as it has found greater backing from Russia and China.

In this case, there is little reason to assume the US and its allies will succeed in attempting to crush the Houthi movement in Yemen, which is motivated by the country's political, economic and sectarian disarray. One cannot view every problem in the world as a nail to be hit with a hammer, and the only true solution to stopping these attacks on shipping is to ultimately end the conflict in Gaza, but will they do that? Of course not, the obsession with controlling the Gulf of Aden and the entrance to the Red Sea will ultimately take priority.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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