Regardless of its outcome, the Iran war is already having a dangerous impact on the Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa. It has upped the ante in an already contested area, at once increasing its importance and further polarizing the competing actors. It has exacerbated the fundamental differences between the rival blocs, driving a battle for resources and influence that had already destabilized the Arabian and African sides of the Red Sea for years.
The humanitarian and geopolitical stakes are evidently high. For the United States, a regional conflict threatens the partnerships that underpin U.S. interests, from Iran to counterterrorism to major economic investments worth billions of dollars. As Horn countries increasingly find themselves becoming battlegrounds, Europe, which regards the region as a strategic area for trade, migration, and terrorism, will also struggle.
Regardless of its outcome, the Iran war is already having a dangerous impact on the Red Sea region and the Horn of Africa. It has upped the ante in an already contested area, at once increasing its importance and further polarizing the competing actors. It has exacerbated the fundamental differences between the rival blocs, driving a battle for resources and influence that had already destabilized the Arabian and African sides of the Red Sea for years.
The humanitarian and geopolitical stakes are evidently high. For the United States, a regional conflict threatens the partnerships that underpin U.S. interests, from Iran to counterterrorism to major economic investments worth billions of dollars. As Horn countries increasingly find themselves becoming battlegrounds, Europe, which regards the region as a strategic area for trade, migration, and terrorism, will also struggle.
Washington must carefully use its diplomatic and economic clout to put guardrails on the competition and ensure that the regional system continues to support core economic and security interests despite being in flux. The United States has ties with nearly every major regional actor, and the region is ripe for Trump-style business diplomacy. However, bedraggled U.S.-led peace talks in Sudan show that carrots alone are not sufficient. The United States must also establish red lines and impose tangible costs on those who continue to undermine regional stability.
Since the Iran war began, the two rival coalitions competing in the Red Sea have become even more entrenched. On one side, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have grown closer, with Israel sending interceptor systems and operators to the UAE. On the other side, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have advanced preexisting talks on a regional defense cooperation arrangement that is widely viewed as countering the Israel-Emirati axis. Simultaneously, the gap between the UAE and its traditional Arab partners has widened, exemplified in the Emirati withdrawal from the Saudi-dominated OPEC in early May. The rivalry between Israel and Turkey escalated with a full-blown diplomatic spat on Twitter in April that included Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the Hitler of our time.”
Underlying these trends, the war has exacerbated both sides’ wariness of how the other is pursuing regional influence—animosity that extends to the Red Sea. The war has generally hardened perceptions in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey that Israel is an increasingly belligerent, expansionist, and overall destabilizing regional actor. This same grouping has increasingly extended these characterizations to Israel’s Emirati partners, especially to the UAE’s actions in the Red Sea and the Horn.
The war in Iran has also rendered the very resources these countries are competing over in the Red Sea—economic access points, trade routes, and the strategic depth to protect those assets—vastly more important. Iranian attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure have highlighted the importance of Gulf state efforts to diversify their economies and the export routes that sustain them. The Horn is a focal point in these strategies.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has underscored the importance of maritime chokepoint security more broadly, which has intensified the race for real estate along the Red Sea among African and external actors alike. The war only fuels Ethiopia’s sea access demands by raising fears of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping or the U.S. base in Djibouti. Such attacks would cause catastrophic disruptions for Ethiopia, given its massive overreliance on Djibouti as a trade corridor. Heightened interest in Red Sea chokepoint security has attracted growing regional and international interest in strategically located coastlines along the Horn of Africa near the Bab el-Mandeb, including long-isolated Eritrea and breakaway state Somaliland.
The end result will be a deepening regional proxy conflict, which has already come to incorporate the Sudanese civil war, a potential conflict in northern Ethiopia involving Eritrea, and the Somaliland dispute. Sudan has more than 500 miles of Red Sea coastline at stake in its civil war. The Somaliland recognition issue is becoming dominated by who will get access to its 500-mile coastline. Ethiopia has a greater incentive to pursue a trade corridor via Eritrea, Somaliland, or Sudan, while Eritrea and Egypt have an increased incentive to dig in and contain Ethiopian influence. In this context, non-African actors have more incentive to back their various partners in the race for ports and resources.
All this threatens U.S. and European interests in regional stability and economic growth. The Iran war has already put billions of dollars of Gulf investment in the West at risk. Prestigeprojects in the West have been the first casualties of Gulf spending cuts, while the Horn and Red Sea appear likely to remain priorities. Intensified conflict will only create more obstacles to internationally backed peace efforts, including ongoing Sudan peace talks, potential U.S. mediation of Egypt and Ethiopia’s dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and any shot at salvaging the Pretoria Agreement that ended Ethiopia’s Tigray War. The very same countries involved in these conflicts are also key to multilateral maritime security and counterterrorism initiatives in the region.
The United States and its partners should form Red Sea strategies that put guardrails on the unfolding competition to protect these interests. Washington should carefully use its diplomatic leverage to dissuade further regional escalation and protect its immediate interests through more regular and higher-level bilateral engagement with all sides.
Sudan Quad talks—among the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—are an obvious mediation example, but U.S. officials would also be better positioned to undertake more informal efforts, such as ad hoc shuttle diplomacy. Outside of the Quad, U.S. officials can serve as a point of contact between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and its alienated adversaries, such as the UAE and Ethiopia. Renewed U.S. ties with both Ethiopia and Eritrea also position the United States as a potential link between those two estranged archrivals.
Western business diplomacy can also help bring peace to the region. The United States and European partners should play a greater third-party role in economic projects involving the Gulf to diminish the proxy dynamics tied to Gulf capital. Some of these initiatives could be directly tied to regional mediation efforts. For example, joint U.S.-Emirati investments in Sudanese reconstruction could be a piece of a broader Sudan peace deal, which would protect Emirati economic interests in Sudan and secure sorely needed reconstruction funds for Sudan. The United States could also financially back projects that diversify Ethiopia’s commercial sea access options in exchange for Addis Ababa dropping its belligerent pursuit for sovereign sea access.
Western-supported financial institutions, such as the G-20 and International Monetary Fund, should also give greater conditional support to African debt restructuring. “Gulf bailout diplomacy,” which refers to imbalanced and transactional Gulf partnerships with debt-distressed countries, has injected harmful proxy dynamics into regional development. The theme is encapsulated in Emirati engagement with countries surrounding Sudan, where the UAE has offered significant funds to the Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan, all of which have in turn enabled Emirati political and military support for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan.
The United States must buttress this engagement by imposing red lines and consequences for continued external military adventurism in the region. Washington should pair sanctions on the RSF with red lines and potential consequences for SAF backers Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and any others that could seek to exploit RSF sanctions to gain an advantage. The United States should take a similar “pressure with guarantees” approach with Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan, which are all linked with nonstate actors in one another’s territory. While it will realistically take time to unravel all the meddling going on, U.S. officials have numerous tools they can gradually roll out, from conditioning continued economic and defense cooperation to imposing harshersanctions.
While the Iran war may have literally limited the amount of gasoline available in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa, it has poured enough fuel on the regional fire to keep it blazing for years to come. As the number of actors and tension points in the Red Sea continue to proliferate, the United States and others interested in regional stability must engage more effectively. Failure risks a full-blown regional proxy war at a time when the international community is less equipped than ever to deal with the economic, humanitarian, and security fallout.
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