African View
Nov 24, 2023
The Red Sea Council which consists of countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Eritrea, Yemen, Sudan, Djibouti, and Somalia is in charge of securing the path of the Red Sea for vessels. However recent incident with the Houthis’ Seizure of an allegedly Israeli affiliated ship has created doubts on its capability to live up to the task at hand.
Its members had three and a half years to devise a realistic plan for carrying out their primary mission, yet this was neglected for whatever reason, thus raising questions about why the Council formed in the first place. The Houthis earlier announced their intent to scale up operations against Israel out of solidarity with Hamas, including in the Red Sea, but the Council took no tangible action in response. This represents an unacceptable disregard of their members’ stated duty in securing this waterway.
This has created a pretext for the western to put it upon themselves to secure the waterway. Which is expected to ultimately exploit to their own interest. The US and its NATO allies with bases in Djibouti might create some sort of rift for non-western countries like China and potentially create unexpected security challenges for Eritrea and Sudan.
According to the report, the Council’s neglect of its raison d'être in securing this waterway per its founding mission inadvertently created the pretext that NATO might soon exploit for militarizing the Red Sea, which could lead to future problems for some of its members. This was entirely avoidable and is completely due to them failing to do what everyone expected of their group. Instead of jointly protecting this body of water, they pursued ulterior goals in hindsight, which emboldened the Houthis to seize that ship.
Source Andrew Korybko
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