U.S. Seeks to Counter China in the Red Sea

Chronic insecurity and a governance vacuum in the Red Sea have cast doubts over Washington’s policy in the region, one of the most important strategically important corridors for global trade and energy security.

Indeed, U.S. strategy in the Red Sea has been highly ambiguous and hesitant ever since China announced its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This ambiguity has opened the door to other major actors such as China and Russia, as well as regional powers such as Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, to play a greater role in the waterway.

In the shadows of Yemen’s frozen but unresolved conflict, the Sudanese civil war, Egypt’s dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, instability in Somalia, and Israel’s massacres in Gaza, the U.S. has failed to prevent Yemen’s Houthi rebels from launching regular attacks on international shipping, disrupting vital global supply chains as well as threatening to damage to vital undersea communications cables.

The situation has prompted many international shipping companies to suspend their passage through the Red Sea, including top firms that account for more than half of the world’s global seabound cargo.

All this suggests that Washington’s strategy in the Red Sea has reached a dead end. American and British airstrikes against the Houthis have achieved neither their political aims nor their economic goal of easing the flow of international trade and restoring stability to supply chains. Indeed, multiple local and global factors are at play against Washington’s efforts to protect commercial shipping in the region.

So how will the U.S. determine its priorities in the Red Sea from now on, and to which partnerships will it give precedence?

Disrupting Houthi attempts to threaten global shipping through the corridor is Washington’s most urgent priority in the Red Sea at this moment. But a second and longer-term goal is to counter China and prevent it from gaining influence in the region. This, too, would be served by controlling international shipping through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab.

The U.S. is likely to engage in growing military competition with China in the Red Sea, in the coming years, reminiscent of its Cold War rivalry in the region with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the U.S. is turning its Red Sea policy in a new direction, focused on a security perspective. Indeed, the American strategy there is likely to lean heavily on military means, a tool the U.S. excels at deploying in its foreign policy.

Yet existing American military forces in the Red Sea basin is struggling to respond to current crises, leading the U.S. to step up its presence. In addition to the Camp Lemonnier base in southwestern Djibouti, Washington has announced that it will build five new military bases in Somalia, where American forces will be deployed and provide training to Somali forces, according to a memorandum of understanding between the Somali Ministry of Defense and the American Embassy in Mogadishu.

It is noteworthy that this U.S. move in Somalia came after Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with the breakaway region of Somaliland, giving Ethiopia access to the Red Sea via the port of Berbera in return for recognizing the region’s independence.

It is also clear that renewed political and military contacts between Somalia and the U.S. took place with approval and even encouragement from Türkiye, which is also increasingly involved in the Horn of Africa. The recent improvement in relations between Washington and Ankara, particularly since Türkiye joined NATO, has led not only to bilateral cooperation between them, but also to cooperation more globally.

At the same time, France’s position in Africa is weakening, and the U.S. wants to demonstrate its desire to cooperate more closely with Britain and Turkey. There is little doubt that Russian-Turkish rivalry in the Black Sea due to the Ukraine war have also fueled this.

Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to increase its focus on security in the Red Sea, as well as in the Indian Ocean and southwest Asia. In doing so, it will seek to counter China, control international trade, and to combat terrorism, piracy, arms smuggling, and irregular migration.

The bottom line is that the U.S. sees any attempt to place China at the heart of global trade networks as aimed at undermining the current international system – a system so far dominated by the U.S.