The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis

[Deeq A.]

The Red Sea Crisis Goes Beyond the Houthis
To Avoid a Spiral of Violence, America Must Help Stabilize the Greater Horn of Africa

By Johnnie Carson, Alex Rondos, Susan Stigant, and Michael Woldemariam

The Red Sea is in crisis. At the center of the storm are Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have unleashed a wave of attacks on ships traversing one of the world’s most pivotal maritime straits, putatively in support of Hamas’s war against Israel. The Houthi gambit in the Red Sea is imposing serious costs on global trade, as did the problem of Somali piracy, which reached its peak in 2010. The United States and some of its allies have stepped in to militarily suppress the threat, bombing Houthi positions inside Yemen. But although this episode is illustrative of the difficulties of Red Sea security, the crisis extends far beyond the trouble emanating from Yemen.

The political violence and state fragmentation that fueled the Houthis’ rise in Yemen is now wreaking havoc across the broader Horn of Africa. A metastasizing web of intrastate and interstate conflicts stretching from Sudan to Somalia could bring unprecedented chaos across the Horn, creating space for extremist militant networks and countries hostile to Western interests and a free and open Red Sea. Preventing the situation from growing even worse will require a broad-based diplomatic coalition to deescalate the Horn’s multiple conflicts. But such an effort cannot succeed without aggressive U.S. diplomatic support. An American-led push would have to deter destabilizing interventions on the part of outside parties such as the United Arab Emirates and Iran, which have extended military support to warring actors in places like Sudan. It would also need to avert a regionwide famine, the threat of which is most acute in Sudan and Ethiopia. Taking on these daunting tasks will require a boost of diplomatic outreach by senior U.S. officials, including U.S. President Joe Biden. If the region’s interconnected crises worsen, parties hostile to U.S. interests and a free and open Red Sea may gain strategic advantage in this important maritime corridor.

A REGION AT WAR
Multiple wars are causing deep instability in the Horn of Africa and contributing to the crisis in the Red Sea. From 2018 to 2019, popular revolts toppled long-standing authoritarian regimes in Ethiopia and Sudan, but both states have since descended into astonishing levels of violence. A two-year war between Ethiopia’s federal authorities and forces from the Tigray region killed over 500,000 people and displaced millions more. The November 2022 agreement that ended that conflict is under increasing strain as many of its most contentious provisions await implementation. Ethiopia’s two biggest regions—Oromia and Amhara—are suffering from intractable insurgencies, and talks to peacefully resolve the conflict in Oromia ended in failure in November. Although the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, remains stable, insecurity is a constant across much of the rural hinterland

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