By Sefa Yürükel
INTRODUCTION
The Bab el Mandeb Strait, approximately thirty kilometres wide, is one of the most critical geostrategic chokepoints of global maritime trade, connecting the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea. This ancient waterway, whose name means “Gate of Tears” in Arabic, has preserved its strategic importance for centuries as the transit route for approximately twelve percent of world maritime trade and eight percent of global oil shipments. By virtue of its geographical position, the strait functions as a natural bridge between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, making it a nodal point that all great powers from the Portuguese to the Ottomans, from the British to the Americans, have sought to control (Dresch, 2000; Al Salim, 2024).
This strategic significance is by no means confined to the commercial dimension. Bab el Mandeb constitutes an indispensable outpost for the security of the Suez Canal, a key jewel for the control of the Red Sea basin, and the gatekeeper of the passage to the Indian Ocean. This region, which was one of the principal arenas of the influence struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now hosts a far more complex power struggle (Blanchard, 2024). Recent developments have exponentially increased the strategic importance of Bab el Mandeb. The naval blockade imposed by the Ansar Allah movement in Yemen after 2023 has had a seismic effect on global supply chains; the military logistics base established by the People’s Republic of China in Djibouti has redefined the balance of power in the Red Sea; and the asymmetric capacity acquired by the Iran led Axis of Resistance in the region has called into question the traditional naval supremacy of Western powers (Ahmad, 2024; Sun and Zoubir, 2023).
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF YEMEN AND THE ORIGINS OF THE HOUTHIS
Comprehending the existential foundation of the Ansar Allah movement today requires a meticulous examination of the sectarian, tribal and colonial strata in the depths of Yemeni history. Due to its geographical location, Yemen has historically both served as the gateway to global maritime trade and earned a reputation as one of the territories where external powers have faced the greatest difficulty in asserting control, owing to its rugged mountain ranges (Dresch, 2000; Lackner, 2024).
The Ottoman Empire first set foot in Yemen in 1538 with the aim of preventing Portuguese expansionism in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. This process, which began with the capture of Aden by the Ottoman fleet under the command of Hadım Süleyman Pasha, also marked the commencement of a Turkish presence in Yemen that would endure for approximately four hundred years. However, the religious, political and economic struggle between the Ottoman sultans and the Zaydi imams, who governed an independent imamate in their own territory, transformed the region into a centre of insurrections lasting for centuries (Dresch, 2000). In the region under Ottoman administration at the end of the 19th century, the struggle for dominance was so arduous and caused such great tragedies that laments were composed in the memory of the Anatolian people for “the grim lands of Yemen from which none return.”
During the period when the Ottomans were fighting the Zaydi imams in the northern mountains, the British Empire occupied and colonised the strategic port city of Aden in the south in 1839 in order to secure the Indian Ocean trade route (Dresch, 2000). Following the complete withdrawal of the Ottomans from the region at the end of the First World War, North Yemen transformed into an independent Zaydi kingdom, while South Yemen remained a British colony until the 1960s. During the Aden Emergency, which began in 1963 against British rule in the south, guerrilla groups such as the Egyptian backed National Liberation Front and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen engaged in bloody clashes both with the British and among themselves. With the British withdrawal on 30 November 1967, South Yemen became the first and only Marxist state in the Arab world, leading to the transfer of Cold War dynamics onto Yemeni soil (Dresch, 2000; Reiner and Weissenburger, 2024).
In North Yemen, the civil war that began in 1962 with the overthrow of Imam Muhammad al Badr by Republican officers evolved into a proxy war in which Egypt supported the Republicans and Saudi Arabia supported the Royalists. The loss of nearly seventy thousand Egyptian troops in the Yemen quagmire has been recorded as historical proof of Yemen’s resistance to foreign interventions (Dresch, 2000). As a result of the end of the Cold War and the economic necessities created by the dissolution process of the Soviet Union, North and South Yemen united on 22 May 1990 to form a single republic, facilitated by the groundwork provided by joint oil exploration and sharing agreements in the Marib al Jawf region.
This unification, however, did not eliminate the country’s tribal fault lines; on the contrary, it deepened them. Yemeni society was shaped particularly around the influence of the Hashid and Bakil tribal confederations in the north, and state authority often remained in the shadow of tribal leaders (Dresch, 2000; Hamidaddin, 2022). Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh managed to remain in power for over thirty years by inciting tribes against one another and distributing state resources through patronage relations. Yet this style of governance hollowed out state institutions and deepened the structural weaknesses that have dragged Yemen into its current conflict environment (Lackner, 2024; Reiner and Weissenburger, 2024).
FROM ZAYDI AWAKENING TO MILITARY RESISTANCE: THE BIRTH OF ANSAR ALLAH
The emergence of the Houthis on the stage of history as a modern political and military force must be understood as a collective reaction to the Yemeni state’s systematic socio economic marginalisation of the Zaydi population in the north and to the Wahhabi Salafi ideological expansionism seeping in from Saudi Arabia (Hamidaddin, 2022; Zabarah, 2024). Although Zaydism is accepted as the school closest to Sunni Islam among the Shia sects in the Islamic world, it represents a deeply rooted tradition of faith and jurisprudence that has persisted for over a millennium in the mountainous regions of northern Yemen (Zabarah, 2024).
During the 1980s and 1990s, Salafi clerics financed by Saudi Arabia’s oil revenues initiated an intensive missionary activity in the Saada governorate, considered the heartland of Zaydism. The aim was to transform the local population through the opening of madrasas, the distribution of scholarships, and the construction of mosques (Hamidaddin, 2022; Zabarah, 2024). Perceiving this situation as an existential threat to their belief system, Zaydi intellectuals and clerics founded a cultural revival movement named al Shabab al Mu’min, or the Believing Youth, in 1992. The primary objective of the movement was initially entirely non violent, consisting merely of organising summer camps and educational programmes to teach young people Zaydi history, culture and jurisprudence (Zabarah, 2024; Hamidaddin, 2022).
The turning point that radically altered the course of the movement was the assumption of leadership by the charismatic leader Hussein Badreddin al Houthi, who descended from Sayyid lineage, in the late 1990s. Hussein al Houthi blended the Zaydi tradition of resistance with the ideological influence of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, adapting it to the global political context of the era and thus imparting a sharp anti imperialist character to the movement (Hamidaddin, 2022; Abdulghani, 2023). The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Sanaa government’s close cooperation with Washington began to be condemned in increasingly harsh terms in Hussein al Houthi’s sermons. During this process, the leader endowed the movement with its famous “Sarkha” slogan: “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam” (Hamidaddin, 2022).
Perceiving this development as a direct threat to his regime, President Ali Abdullah Saleh issued an order for the arrest of Hussein al Houthi, and in the clashes that erupted in Saada in 2004, Hussein al Houthi was killed by the Yemeni army. Yet the killing of their leader, far from ending the movement, on the contrary, bound it even more tightly together around a myth of martyrdom (Hamidaddin, 2022; Knights, 2023). Under the leadership of Hussein’s brother, Abdulmalik al Houthi, the group officially adopted the name Ansar Allah and waged six major guerrilla wars against the Yemeni army between 2004 and 2010. In this process, the movement expanded its tribal alliances, attained a professional military structure, and became one of the most decisive actors in Yemeni politics (Knights, 2023; Al Muslimi, 2023).
THE FALL OF SANAA AND THE DE FACTO STATE BUILDING PROCESS
When the wave of the Arab Spring reached Yemen in 2011, the doors to a new era were opened for the Ansar Allah movement. The weakening of the Saleh regime and the country’s drift into political uncertainty created favourable conditions for the movement to emerge from its strongholds in Saada and expand (Lackner, 2024; Al Muslimi, 2023). In September 2014, riding the wave of widespread public anger generated by the state’s neoliberal policies to lift fuel subsidies, the Houthis, forming a tactical alliance with the loyalist units of their old foe Ali Abdullah Saleh within the army, captured the capital Sanaa (Lackner, 2024; Reiner and Weissenburger, 2024).
This alliance has been recorded as one of the most striking examples of the political science maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” However, Saleh’s attempt in 2017 to betray the Houthis and move closer to the Saudi led coalition led to a bloody end to the alliance (Lackner, 2024). By killing their former ally Saleh in December 2017, the Houthis rendered their political power in the north absolute and demonstrated that they would permit no other actor to have a say in the region (Knights, 2023; Al Muslimi, 2023).
Although the Ansar Allah movement is not today a sovereign state recognised internationally in the Western sense, it exhibits a fully fledged de facto state structure through the mechanisms of public order, taxation and administrative control it has established in the north. The institutional architecture of the movement bears a hybrid character in which the official organs controlling the civilian bureaucracy are interwoven with clandestine, militia based decision making mechanisms operating behind the scenes (Al Muslimi, 2023; Knights, 2023). Ansar Allah has closed off the state’s most important source of revenue by militarily preventing the Aden based internationally recognised government from exporting oil. While this has rendered even civil servant salaries unpayable, the movement has managed to keep its own economic wheels turning through the revenue obtained from the telecommunications sector and the customs of Hodeidah Port (Al Muslimi, 2023). Supporting its military force, estimated to have reached three hundred and fifty thousand personnel, with a Preventive Intelligence Service that oversees the loyalty of the movement’s own political and bureaucratic cadres, Ansar Allah has also established an extensive Political Bureau structure to integrate local tribal leaders into the system (Knights, 2023; Winter, 2023).
THE ASYMMETRIC NAVAL BLOCKADE IN THE RED SEA AND ITS GLOBAL EFFECTS
The Gaza War, which began with Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood operation against Israel on 7 October 2023, triggered a chain of events that radically altered the strategic equation of the Red Sea. The Ansar Allah movement announced that, in response to Israel’s massacres in Gaza, it would target all commercial vessels linked to Israel transiting the Red Sea and the Bab el Mandeb Strait (Ahmad, 2024; Blanchard, 2024). Although this declaration was initially considered a bluff by many Western analysts, it was soon understood that the reality was far graver.
The asymmetric naval blockade imposed by the Houthis is characterised as the most serious threat to global maritime trade lanes since the Second World War (Ahmad, 2024; UNCTAD, 2024). Using UAVs, unmanned surface vessels, anti ship ballistic missiles and shore launched cruise missiles, they attacked hundreds of commercial and military vessels transiting the Red Sea, sinking some of them (Ahmad, 2024; Winter, 2023). The world’s largest maritime trade companies were forced to abandon the Suez Canal route and reroute their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, circumnavigating the African continent (Maersk Group, 2024; UNCTAD, 2024). This situation led to astronomical increases in global logistics costs and severe disruptions in supply chains.
When the economic effects of the blockade are expressed in figures, the picture becomes even more striking. There have been very sharp increases in container shipping rates worldwide. In the period between December 2023 and February 2024, spot container prices on the Shanghai to Europe route increased by an average of two hundred and fifty six percent (UNCTAD, 2024; Chin and Gallagher, 2024). It has been reported that more than half of exporters in the United Kingdom were affected by the crisis and that container leasing costs increased by three hundred percent (UNCTAD, 2024). Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, estimates that the crisis caused a capacity loss of between fifteen and twenty percent across the sector (Maersk Group, 2024).
While risk perception mounted for vessels continuing to transit the Red Sea, insurance costs also multiplied. Insurance costs for shipping in the Red Sea skyrocketed tenfold within a single month, jumping from 0.07 percent of the vessel’s value to 0.7 percent (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024). For some Israel linked vessels, an increase of two hundred and fifty percent in insurance premiums was observed, and some vessels even became uninsurable (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024). The diversion of most vessels around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa instead of the Suez Canal, due to security concerns, directly impacted operational costs. The rerouting of each voyage via the Cape of Good Hope incurs approximately one million dollars in additional fuel costs per voyage. This detour adds approximately eleven thousand nautical miles and ten to fourteen days of extra time to the journey. The cargo transit time for a product from China to Europe has extended from twenty five days to thirty five days, an increase of forty percent (Chin and Gallagher, 2024; Maersk Group, 2024).
The impact of the blockade has not been limited to corporate balance sheets but has also deeply shaken national economies. Between October 2023 and May 2024, the passage of goods worth approximately one trillion dollars was disrupted due to these attacks (UNCTAD, 2024). Suez Canal revenues, vital for the Egyptian economy, have declined from an annual 9.4 billion dollars to 7.2 billion dollars (Ahmad, 2024; Blanchard, 2024). Due to the eighty five percent drop in commercial activities at Israel’s southern port of Eilat, the port management has been forced to declare bankruptcy (Ahmad, 2024).
The military operations conducted by Western powers to protect maritime trade have also created an enormous economic burden. The United States and its allies have been compelled to use expensive air defence missiles, ranging in cost from one million to 4.3 million dollars each, to shoot down Ansar Allah’s cheap Shahed type drones worth approximately twenty thousand dollars (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024). The total cost of the US led Operation Prosperity Guardian alone is estimated to be between 1.8 billion and 4 billion dollars (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024; Blanchard, 2024). In summary, Ansar Allah’s blockade has generated inflationary pressure with a domino effect on the global supply chain by creating three to four fold increases in container prices, tenfold leaps in insurance premiums, and millions of dollars in additional fuel expenses per voyage.
Although the air strikes of the Western alliance have partially degraded Ansar Allah’s military arsenal, they have failed to break their will to attack. Throughout this process, the US military has been forced to expend air defence missiles costing billions of dollars to intercept Ansar Allah’s kamikaze drones costing a few thousand dollars, a situation that has introduced the concept of “economic asymmetry” into military literature in a new dimension (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024). Moreover, Ansar Allah has dealt a heavy blow to the Pentagon’s myth of technological superiority by shooting down at least seventeen advanced US MQ 9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (Knights, 2023; Winter, 2023). Having halted its attacks with the temporary peace plan reached in Gaza in October 2025, the movement resumed its naval operations in the Red Sea with the outbreak of the new Iran war on 28 March 2026.
THE LONG RANGE THREAT AGAINST ISRAEL
The Ansar Allah movement has joined the war by directly targeting Israeli territory, despite being the member of the Axis of Resistance geographically farthest from Israel. Long range ballistic missiles and UAVs launched from Yemen have penetrated Israel’s layered air defence shields such as Arrow and Iron Dome, causing civilian casualties and widespread panic in metropolises like Tel Aviv, Eilat and Ashdod (Knights, 2023; Blanchard, 2024). In particular, a drone strike that hit Tel Aviv in July 2024 sent shockwaves through the Israeli security bureaucracy (Ahmad, 2024).
Israel’s response to this threat has taken the form of its air force repeatedly bombing Houthi infrastructure at the ports of Hodeidah and Ras Qantib as well as Sanaa Airport (Knights, 2023; Blanchard, 2024). However, the Israeli security bureaucracy acknowledges that, unlike its meticulously prepared infiltration and intelligence operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon on its border over the years, it has far fewer intelligence and operational assets at its disposal against Ansar Allah. The movement’s flexible structure, woven with subterranean tunnels, mobile launch platforms and a highly dispersed logistics network, renders Israel’s deterrence efforts largely ineffective (Knights, 2023; Winter, 2023). Israeli military sources note with concern that the Houthis’ missile and UAV capabilities are improving with each passing month (Blanchard, 2024).
THE IRAN, HEZBOLLAH AND AXIS OF RESISTANCE CONNECTION
The Ansar Allah movement, rising from the rugged northern mountains of Yemen, has today become one of the most unpredictable and resilient actors in the regional security architecture. The movement stands out as one of the most autonomous and determined members of the Iran led Axis of Resistance, and its relationship with Tehran is based on an organic geopolitical alignment of interests against common adversaries, rather than a unilateral chain of command (Abdulghani, 2023; Wehrey, 2024).
Iran provides the Ansar Allah movement with ballistic missile components, UAV technology, fuel, intelligence and financial support. Yet this assistance has long since transcended the simple dimension of weapons transfers. Through the training and technology transfer provided by Iranian engineers, the foundations of an indigenous military industrial complex within Yemen have been laid (Winter, 2023; Abdulghani, 2023). The Houthis have now become capable of producing their own ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and naval drones. This situation increases the movement’s operational sustainability by reducing its external dependency (Winter, 2023; Knights, 2023).
Lebanese Hezbollah plays a critical role in the development of Ansar Allah’s military, intelligence and institutional tactics. Hezbollah’s asymmetric warfare doctrine, developed over the years against Israel, along with its vast experience in tunnel warfare tactics, missile and UAV technologies and their concealment and mobilisation, is being transferred to the fighters in Yemen (Johnston et al., 2024; Abdulghani, 2023). As for relations with Hamas, they have evolved into a concrete military alliance, particularly during the Gaza War, through joint operations rooms and tactical coordination (Bokhari and Senzai, 2023).
The Ansar Allah movement certainly lacks the capacity to destroy Israel militarily. However, from the perspective of asymmetric warfare doctrine, it is observed that they are waging the most cost effective struggle within the Axis of Resistance against Israel’s regional expansionism (Wehrey, 2024; Abdulghani, 2023). The Red Sea blockade has crippled Israel’s southern port of Eilat, imposed billions of dollars in additional costs on the Israeli economy, and demonstrated to the entire world the weakness of Western states’ military protection capacity in the region (Ahmad, 2024; Blanchard, 2024).
CHINA’S MILITARY PRESENCE IN DJIBOUTI: A NEW BALANCE OF POWER IN THE RED SEA
The People’s Liberation Army of China’s logistics support base in Djibouti officially became operational on 1 August 2017, entering the records as China’s first overseas military base in its modern history. This strategic step is the most concrete indicator of Beijing’s will to protect its economic and strategic interests in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean within the scope of the Belt and Road Initiative (Sun and Zoubir, 2023; Chaziza, 2023). This facility, termed a “logistics support base” in official discourse, in reality hosts a far more comprehensive military capacity (Sun and Zoubir, 2023).
Djibouti, by virtue of its strategic location, is one of the most critical geopolitical points in the Horn of Africa, controlling the entrance to the Red Sea. This small African nation, with a population of approximately one million, holds the distinction of being the country hosting the highest number of foreign military bases in the world. Alongside the US Camp Lemonnier base, France’s military presence inherited from the colonial era, Japan’s maritime self defence forces base, and Italy’s military installations, the Chinese base has turned this small piece of territory into a microcosm of the great powers’ military rivalry (Sun and Zoubir, 2023; Chaziza, 2023).
China’s presence in Djibouti represents a strategic departure from Beijing’s traditional policy of “non interference.” The stated justifications for the establishment of the base include providing logistical support to counter piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, maintaining a ready force for the evacuation of Chinese nationals stranded in the region, and protecting investments under the Belt and Road project (Sun and Zoubir, 2023; Wang and Zhang, 2024). The primary strategic function of the base, however, is to secure China’s sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean and to enable regional power projection by establishing a permanent military presence in the Red Sea (Wang and Zhang, 2024; Chaziza, 2023).
The distance between the Chinese base and the US Camp Lemonnier base is a mere thirteen kilometres. The positioning of the military installations of two superpowers at such a close distance reveals the intensity of the strategic rivalry in the Red Sea (Sun and Zoubir, 2023). China is increasing its economic influence through the extensive infrastructure investments it has made in Djibouti, offering an alternative financing and development model to the West for regional countries through port modernisation and railway projects. This economic engagement also reinforces China’s diplomatic influence, allowing it to build a comprehensive strategic partnership with regional countries that goes beyond the military dimension (Chaziza, 2023; Chin and Gallagher, 2024).
China’s position during the Houthi blockade has been particularly noteworthy. While Beijing stressed the need to preserve freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, it criticised the US and UK airstrikes on Yemen and called for restraint. The fact that Chinese flagged commercial vessels were not targeted by the Houthis is assessed as a concrete outcome of the diplomatic dialogue Beijing has established with regional actors (Chin and Gallagher, 2024; Wang and Zhang, 2024). This demonstrates that, unlike Western powers, China is pursuing a strategy based on diplomatic and economic tools rather than military intervention in the Red Sea crisis.
THE RED SEA STRATEGIES OF RUSSIA AND CHINA: THE EURASIAN AXIS AGAINST THE ATLANTIC BLOC
The Red Sea crisis constitutes the southernmost strategic link of a broad conflict line stretching from Ukraine through the Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and Iran to Yemen. On this front, the rivalry between the Atlantic bloc and the Eurasian powers is becoming increasingly acute. While the Atlantic bloc, led by the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel, opts for military intervention under the pretext of preserving freedom of navigation on maritime trade routes, Russia and China are acting with different strategic calculations (Melkumov, 2024; Chaziza, 2023).
The Russian Federation views the Red Sea crisis as an opportunity to expose the weakness of Western hegemony. Moscow criticises the Western powers’ military operations in Yemen using its veto power in the UN Security Council, and reinforces the discourse of a transition to a multipolar world order (Melkumov, 2024). Russia’s attempts to establish a naval base on the Red Sea coast in Sudan are a concrete indicator of Moscow’s desire to increase its military presence in the region (Melkumov, 2024).
China, on the other hand, is pursuing a more cautious and multidimensional strategy. While strengthening its military presence in Djibouti, Beijing is simultaneously increasing its economic investments in regional countries under the Belt and Road project (Chin and Gallagher, 2024; Wang and Zhang, 2024). China’s balanced position in the Houthi crisis allows it to maintain its relations with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, which elevates China to the position of a potential mediator. The normalisation agreement brokered by Beijing between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 is the most striking example of China’s diplomatic influence in the region (Chaziza, 2023; Wang and Zhang, 2024).
GLOBAL POLARISATION AND THE CODES OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
The crisis in the Red Sea has laid bare the deep structural crisis of the existing regional security architecture. The inability of the US led military coalitions to deter the Houthis heralds a fundamental transformation in the security paradigms of the twenty first century (Blanchard, 2024; Wehrey, 2024). The economic efficacy of asymmetric warfare has proven that using a four million dollar missile against a twenty thousand dollar drone creates an unsustainable cost asymmetry in the long term (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024). The limits of technological superiority have revealed that advanced air defence systems cannot provide complete protection against low tech threats (Schifrin and Warsi, 2024; Knights, 2023). The necessity of a diplomatic solution demonstrates that, due to the failure of military intervention, direct or indirect negotiations with the Houthis have become inevitable (Blanchard, 2024; Wehrey, 2024).
Yemen’s Houthis are putting up a steadfast resistance at the final link of the broad front where the Atlantic system and the Eurasian powers clash, in the Bab el Mandeb Strait (Wehrey, 2024; Abdulghani, 2023). This movement, inspiring hope to the entire world from the Eurasian ranks which they have openly and resolutely joined, appears set to remain a long term actor for the imperial centres of power that is nearly impossible to resolve through military means, by taking concrete action while the whole world reacts to Israel’s Gaza massacre merely in words (Bokhari and Senzai, 2023; Wehrey, 2024).
China’s military presence in Djibouti, Iran’s regional influence and the Houthis’ asymmetric capacity have transformed the Red Sea into a multi actor strategic rivalry arena (Sun and Zoubir, 2023; Chaziza, 2023). In the coming period, the increase in China’s economic and military presence in the region will create a new balance of power in the Red Sea; the Houthis’ de facto state status may evolve towards limited international recognition; investment in alternative trade routes may accelerate; and the strategic importance of the Suez Canal will be redefined in connection with Egypt’s economic stability (Ahmad, 2024; Chin and Gallagher, 2024; Al Muslimi, 2023).
CONCLUSION
The Ansar Allah movement, rising from the rugged northern mountains of Yemen, is on course to go down in history as a model of resistance that upends the strategic calculations of imperial powers, just as was the case at Gallipoli a century ago (Dresch, 2000; Wehrey, 2024). The success of this movement stems not only from its military capacity but also from its ability to detect the contradictions and vulnerabilities of the global system. By seizing one of the lifelines of world trade and leaving Western powers helpless, the Houthis exhibit one of the most striking examples of asymmetric warfare in the twenty first century (Ahmad, 2024; Schifrin and Warsi, 2024).
The naval blockade at the Bab el Mandeb Strait has indisputably proven that the security of global trade routes is no longer under the control of a single hegemonic power. China’s military presence in Djibouti, Iran’s regional influence and the Houthis’ asymmetric capacity have transformed the Red Sea into one of the most concrete arenas of struggle in the multipolar world order (Sun and Zoubir, 2023; Wehrey, 2024; Ahmad, 2024). The Red Sea crisis, one of the most tangible indicators of the dissolution of the Western centric global system and the transition to a multipolar world order, will continue to offer a rich case study for the discipline of international relations.
Yemen’s Houthis, the last representatives of a valiant warrior tradition that seems to have sprung from bygone eras, will continue to remain a long term actor for the imperial centres of power that is nearly impossible to resolve through military means, by taking concrete action while the whole world reacts to Israel’s Gaza massacre merely in words (Bokhari and Senzai, 2023; Wehrey, 2024). China’s rising presence in the strategic equation of the Red Sea, the unexpected resilience of the Houthis, and the deepening fault lines of the global power struggle are among the most important indicators of this historic juncture in which the international system is being reshaped.
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Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.
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