The New Red Sea Wars

On June 3, U.S.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the U.S. Congress that the fighting that had raged for three years in Sudan was now a “proxy war” and blamed Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for frustrating American efforts to bring the conflict to an end.

Rubio was saying out loud what many observers already knew: what started as a domestic power struggle has morphed into a wider regional war, drawing in outside powers and spilling across Sudan’s borders. The spread of the conflict in Sudan is part of a larger geopolitical transformation.

For much of the past century, policymakers have treated the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as separate strategic regions divided by the Red Sea. That distinction is now evaporating. Wars on one side of the sea increasingly alter the military calculations on the other.

This entanglement is only deepening in the wake of the United States’ and Israel’s decision in February to launch a war on Iran, driving a deeper wedge between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh (which were already at odds), weakening the American-anchored security order in the region, and underscoring the importance of securing the Red Sea for shipping.

For the past decade, the UAE has been the most aggressive outside player in the Horn of Africa, establishing ports and military bases, offering large financial packages to key allies, and involving itself extensively in Sudan’s civil war.

But the recent war in Iran, along with the breakdown of the Emirati-Saudi security partnership in Yemen last December, made Riyadh less confident of Washington’s protection, more anxious about the UAE’s security ties to Israel, and more intent on controlling the Red Sea’s security picture.

And so as Saudi Arabia has leaned into an alignment with Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, it has also brought that alignment to bear to strengthen key partnerships in the Horn. It is trying to counter factions in the Horn that are backed by the UAE or Israel even as it struggles to manage threats from Iran and its allies—including the Houthis, who have seized control of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

At the same time, the risk of conflict is increasing between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF), backed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, and Ethiopia, an ally of the emirates, as well as the chance that another direct war could erupt between Ethiopia and Eritrea. A new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea on the Red Sea would likely turn into a regional conflict that overlaps with the one in Sudan.

And it would not only be aggravated by the existing Emirati-Saudi rift—it might well deepen that divide. Some Middle Eastern governments once saw the Horn of Africa as a low-stakes theater in which they could compete for leverage at relatively little cost. But as wars in the Middle East and the Horn become inextricably linked, a single security sphere is coalescing.

Unless leaders in both the Middle East and the Horn recognize how interconnected their security dilemmas have become, instability will continue to ricochet in both directions, and the overlapping conflicts and disputes will become harder to resolve. separation of powers In some respects, the growing entanglement between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East is a return to a historical norm.

Over millennia, the sea connected present-day Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Yemen, and people, goods, and cultural trends moved regularly among them. Amharic, Ethiopia’s dominant language, and Tigrinya, widely spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, are both Semitic tongues. Christianity spread early to what is now northern Ethiopia, making it home to one of the world’s oldest Christian Orthodox traditions.

In the sixth century, an Aksumite ruler in based in modern-day Ethiopia briefly conquered parts of Yemen. Not long afterward, the Prophet Mohammed sent some of his earliest followers across the Red Sea to take refuge with a Christian Aksumite king there. Islam later spread across the sea and along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast.

From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire ruled territory on both sides of the Red Sea, and Omani rulers built an empire tying the Arabian Peninsula to much of East Africa’s coastline, eventually moving their capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. These links persisted into the modern age.

When the Saudi kingdom conquered the Hejaz region on the western Arabian Peninsula in the early twentieth century, elites in the port city of Jeddah sent their families across the Red Sea to Port Sudan for safety. And in April 2023, when war erupted in Khartoum, many Sudanese took refuge in Jeddah.

Starting in the twentieth century, however, a separation began to harden between the two sides of the Red Sea as European colonialism and nationalist movements severed governance links crisscrossing the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Connections remained—for instance, Persian Gulf wealth flowed to nearby African countries and African labor and exports flowed the other way after a 1970s oil boom transformed the Gulf economies, and Middle East countries played a substantial role in a war during that decade between Ethiopia and Somalia.

But the political gulf between the Arabian and African Red Sea shores widened further after the end of the Cold War. The first Gulf War, in 1990-91, upended the Middle East and expanded the U.S. military footprint there, giving Gulf states a reprieve from managing their near abroad. Around the same time, polities in the Horn began to fragment.

Somalia’s collapse drove Somaliland, a former British colony along the Gulf of Aden, to claim independence in 1991. Regime change in Ethiopia led to the 1993 secession of Eritrea, and an intensified civil war in Sudan eventually prompted South Sudan’s 2011 secession. The United States made fraught and often counterproductive efforts to try to manage these convulsions in the Horn of Africa.

Yet it rarely saw the Horn and the Middle East, or its role in each region, as linked. While Gulf states focused on threats emanating from Iran and the Levant, the Horn turned inward. Regional leaders in these areas also did not view them as intimately connected.

East African leaders such as Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi primarily sought influence across the African continent rather than across the Red Sea, championing institutions such as the African Union. Influential Christian elites in both Ethiopia and Kenya, the Horn region’s two strongest countries, have little attachment to the Arab world.

Political power in the Persian Gulf region was concentrated in Riyadh and around the Persian Gulf capitals of Abu Dhabi and Doha, not the Red Sea shore. When Sudan partitioned, the process was led by the African Union with backing from the United States and Europe; the Arab world was on the sidelines.

THE HORN CIRCLES BACK During the turmoil of the Arab Spring, the Horn began to draw back into the Middle East’s sphere of influence. In a key turning point in 2011, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first non-African leader to visit Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, in almost 20 years as he sought to expand Turkish influence in the region.

The uprisings also destabilized Yemen and led to the Houthis’ takeover of much of the country in 2014. The decision by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to intervene militarily against the Houthis in 2015 increased the Horn’s strategic importance because Gulf states needed new military bases and personnel to sustain their campaign against the rebel group.

The emirates opened a military base on the Eritrean coastline while Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Sudan sent tens of thousands of troops from the country’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces into Yemen to support the Saudi and Emirati efforts there.

At the same time, Middle Eastern countries had begun to doubt U.S. security commitments to the region amid the Obama administration’s widely publicized “pivot to Asia” and diplomacy with Iran, which accelerated their scramble to secure their own interests in a wider area. Middle Eastern governments became more anxious and competition among them grew more intense.

A 2017 intra-Gulf crisis culminating in the blockade of Qatar by neighboring countries spilled directly into Africa, as loose blocs of patrons competed for influence and Saudi Arabia and the UAE pushed Horn leaders to choose a side.

The UAE began to make increasingly ambitious political interventions in the Horn: for instance, it placed a major bet on the Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmed, who rose to power in 2018, by backing his regime with an early infusion of $3 billion and providing critical military support when he faced a rebellion in the Tigray region. The catastrophic war in Sudan further fused the Horn of Africa to the Middle East.

When mass protests in 2019 threatened to topple Bashir’s regime in Khartoum, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh backed a military junta that seized power. After the junta’s two leaders turned on each other in 2023, the UAE emerged as the major patron of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, although Abu Dhabi formally denies the extent of its interventions.

Saudi Arabia also had historic ties to the RSF and at first tried to mediate between the two sides, but the scope of the UAE’s intervention eventually led Riyadh to more firmly back the SAF. Saud Arabia has become the Sudanese army’s most important ally. Over the past year, those disputes in the Horn of Africa began to spill back across the Red Sea.

Tensions between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh over the war in Sudan appeared to contribute to the breakup of the Emirati-Saudi partnership to counter the Houthis. In December 2025, Saudi Arabia and the Yemeni government demanded that the UAE pull out of the country after a sudden offensive near the Saudi border by separatist forces backed by the emirates.

The same month, Israel became the first country to recognize the independence of Somaliland. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others in Africa and the Middle East fiercely opposed this move, but the UAE remained silent, deepening the tensions within the Gulf. The war in Sudan further fused the Horn of Africa to the Middle East.

The Emirati-Saudi rift, exacerbated by Horn politics, hindered a collective Gulf response after the United States and Israel declared war on Iran in February. The war itself entangled the Horn and the Middle East only more tightly.

Saudi Arabia sought to safeguard itself through new regional security pacts and diplomatic alignments, while the UAE strengthened its security partnerships with the United States and Israel. Although both sides try to downplay the extent of this rift in public, its effects are evident on the other side of the Red Sea, too.

Saudi Arabia has deepened its involvement in both Sudanese and Somali affairs, in coordination with Egypt and Turkey: such support appears to have driven the SAF’s recent gains on the battlefield and emboldened SAF leaders to continue to reject U.S. truce proposals. Meanwhile, the Somali government is expanding its partnerships with key Saudi allies, including Pakistan.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt also oppose Ethiopia’s quest to regain a sovereign coastal port and naval presence on the Red Sea, and are bolstering their ties to Ethiopia’s coastal neighbors. (Saudi Arabia’s wish to control maritime security in the Red Sea has only grown since the Strait of Hormuz’s closure forced it to divert the bulk of its oil exports through that waterway.)

Middle Eastern countries’ expanding involvement in the Horn increases the risk that internal conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan will merge into a larger regional war zone. An infusion of Emirati military support for the RSF through Ethiopia has helped stoke distrust between Khartoum and Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia, meanwhile, accuses the SAF of giving safe harbor to thousands of fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which in April effectively annulled a 2022 peace deal and retook power over Ethiopia’s Tigray region. In late September, with quiet backing from Eritrea, the TPLF launched large-scale offensives against the Ethiopian army, pushing the region back into war.

By early October, the Ethiopian army had retaken Tigray’s regional capital, a move that may only force the fighting north toward the Ethiopian-Eritrean border. A new Ethiopian-Eritrean war would, in effect, pit Egypt and Saudi Arabia against the UAE. In Somalia, meanwhile, longstanding political struggles are becoming increasingly entangled with the Middle East’s widening security conflicts.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, which sits near the Bab el Mandeb Strait in the Gulf of Aden, caused deep alarm in Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. In response, in early 2026, Mogadishu signed a formal defense cooperation agreement with Riyadh and canceled their existing security and economic deals with Abu Dhabi.

The UAE had already aligned with Somaliland by establishing key military infrastructure there and revamping a major port in Berbera; it also created a military outpost and took over a port, Bosaso, in the nearby semi-autonomous Puntland region, which has been at odds with Somalia’s federal government for years.

As the Houthis in Yemen have expanded their operations around the Bab el Mandeb Strait and refreshed their attacks on Saudi Arabia, they have also reportedly sought to develop their own inroads into the Horn, especially with the Islamist insurgent group al-Shabab, which controls swathes of southern Somalia.

The Yemeni group has threatened to attack Somaliland should Israel establish a presence there, and U.S. officials have asserted that it is already sending al-Shabab weapons. A MORE PERFECT UNION To some extent, the Middle East’s expansion into the Horn of Africa is filling a vacuum left by others.

The United States’ general retrenchment from African diplomacy and aid has encouraged Horn leaders to look elsewhere for partnerships. They need to make up for specific exits: for more than 15 years, for instance, the United Nations provided logistical support for an African Union military deployment in Somalia to counter al-Shabab. The mission succeeding in helping take and hold territory.

But in July, the Trump administration vowed to block the UN from giving logistical support to the mission. This move is likely to prompt even greater involvement by Turkey, the Somali government’s top backer, and other allied countries. The Horn’s renewed integration with the greater Middle East is not inherently a negative trend.

Horn leaders are right to want diverse allies. Investments by the Gulf’s state-directed economies have given Horn countries an economic lifeline, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Middle East capitals can also serve as crucial hubs for mediating conflicts: in 2024, for instance, Erdogan mediated a détente between Ethiopia and Somalia.

But for now, those upsides are outweighed by the fact that integration of the two regions is occurring substantially through proxy warfare and arms. It was always unlikely that the Horn of Africa and the Middle East would remain as separate as they were during the twentieth century. Throughout much of history, the Red Sea connected societies on either shore, and today, geography is reasserting itself.

The biggest danger arises if some Middle East governments continue to act as if they can back various warring factions in the Horn without absorbing the consequences, and if Horn governments seek Middle Eastern patronage mainly to arm themselves against local rivals.

Arresting this trajectory will require Saudi Arabia and the UAE to agree to work together to deescalate conflict in the Horn before a new regional war erupts. As for Sudan, the two should step back from maximalist demands and press the respective belligerents to agree to a cease-fire and a transitional government.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE also need to coordinate to prevent a new cross-border war involving Ethiopia: Abu Dhabi needs to discourage any push by Ethiopia to expand its war with the TPLF into Eritrea and all the way to the Red Sea coastline, while Riyadh should discourage its key allies Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan from meddling inside Ethiopia.

The two could work together to restart quiet talks between the Somali government in Mogadishu and Somaliland’s administration in Hargeisa about their long-running dispute. Leaders in the Horn itself, meanwhile, have experience managing hostile interstate relations so they simmer at a low boil rather than explode into outright regional conflict.

They should immediately call a regional summit among Horn heads of state and should also encourage a more collective approach toward regional security from their Middle East allies. An alternative, darker version of integration is also visible. The Emiratis and Saudis could entrench their respective positions in the Horn even if the two capitals patch up some of their differences.

Other rivalries among various Middle East powers—for instance, between Turkey and Qatar on the one side and Israel and the UAE on the other—could also exacerbate the Horn’s internal fault lines. One way or the other, the Horn of Africa’s return to the Middle East theater is likely irreversible.

The question now is whether the various powers can find a way to manage their different interests to defuse conflict—or whether, conflict by conflict, they will continue to discover that wars launched on one side of the Red Sea no longer remain contained there, forcing millions of civilians throughout the Horn to pay the price.