A corridor two dozen kilometres wide at its narrowest point carries a large share of the trade between Asia and Europe. Everyone on its shores knows it.
The Bab el-Mandeb strait is narrow enough that a ship passing through it is
within reach of the shore on both sides. North of it lies the Suez route to
Europe; south of it, the Indian Ocean. Around it sit states whose fortunes have
very little in common except that they all border the same water.
Why the corridor concentrates power
Chokepoints reward whoever can threaten traffic more than they reward whoever
can protect it. Protection requires navies, bases and sustained expenditure.
Disruption requires far less. That asymmetry is the single most important fact
about the security politics of this stretch of coast, and it explains why the
insurance market reacts faster to events here than any government does.
The actors and what they want
The Gulf states treat the corridor as the seaward extension of their own
economies. Their diversification plans, from logistics hubs to tourism and
financial services, assume that goods and people move freely through it.
Djibouti has converted its position into a business model, hosting foreign
military facilities from several countries at once and running the port that
gives landlocked Ethiopia most of its access to the sea.
Ethiopia, with a population above a hundred million and no coastline, has
made access to a port a stated national priority. That ambition touches the
sovereignty of neighbours, which is why it has been treated in the region as a
security question rather than a commercial one.
Yemen, divided by war, contains the actors with the greatest ability to
interrupt traffic and the least to lose from doing so.
The Horn is not a spectator
The African shore is often written about as the unstable side of a corridor
managed from the Arabian side. That reading misses how much of the region's
politics is now shaped by investment decisions taken in Gulf capitals: port
concessions, agricultural land, telecoms, and the financing of rival factions in
neighbouring conflicts.
A strait does not create a region. But when the alternative route round the
Cape adds two weeks to every voyage, it creates a shared interest strong
enough to behave like one.
What this means for the map
This group appears in the Atlas as a single unit because the coastline links
states that the conventional regional categories separate: the Gulf sits in the
Middle East, the Horn in sub-Saharan Africa. Read through the corridor instead,
the connections between them are the most consequential thing about either.
