The strategic waters of the Red Sea have transformed into a primary theater for 21st-century power competition, where global ambitions intersect with regional conflicts and local political dynamics. Stretching from the Suez Canal to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, this 438,000-square-kilometer region borders the volatile Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, and western Indo-Pacific, creating a complex geopolitical nexus.
According to international relations expert Federico Donelli, author of ‘Power Competition in the Red Sea,’ the region’s significance stems from its lack of a dominant power capable of imposing order, combined with its immense strategic value as a maritime corridor for global trade and energy transportation. This combination has created an open arena where traditional and emerging powers converge in increasingly assertive competition.
The United States and China maintain military facilities in Djibouti, while Russia has sought access to Port Sudan. Gulf powers including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar have expanded their presence through port investments, infrastructure projects, and military cooperation across Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Turkey, Iran, and Israel have also established significant political, economic, and security ties, linking the Red Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.
Local actors have become active participants rather than passive recipients in this power competition. Governments and non-state entities from Ethiopia to Sudan, Eritrea, Egypt, and Somalia are strategically exploiting global rivalries to advance their objectives—trading military access for security guarantees, seeking infrastructure investments, and leveraging diplomatic alignments to strengthen domestic and regional positions.
This dynamic has created a system of ‘multi-alignment’ where regional players maintain relationships with multiple external powers simultaneously, gaining leverage while increasing overall volatility. The ongoing Sudanese civil war has transformed into a proxy battlefield with rival factions seeking support from competing external players. In Somalia, local authorities negotiate directly with foreign powers like Turkey and Gulf states, often bypassing weak central institutions.
The Red Sea region exemplifies the broader transformation from the liberal international order—characterized by multilateralism, free markets, and liberal democracy—toward a post-liberal order defined by selective engagement, bilateral bargains, and flexible alignments. Here, order emerges from competition rather than consensus, with military presence, infrastructure investment, and political alliances serving as primary instruments of influence.
This arena serves as a microcosm of emerging global politics: fragmented, transactional, and deeply interconnected. The region demonstrates that the future international order will be shaped not only in traditional power centers like Washington, Beijing, Brussels, or Moscow, but equally in strategic locations like Port Sudan, Aden, and Djibouti, where global competition interacts directly with local conflicts and new governance models emerge.