The transformation of the Red Sea into a highly fragmented arena governed through indirect proxy networks presents a structural challenge for the United States, requiring Washington to shift from a symptom-oriented maritime approach to an integrated strategy that connects Middle East and Africa policies.
The Red Sea today functions as one of the clearest examples of a changing regional order: fragmented, externally penetrated, and increasingly governed through indirect forms of influence.
For the United States, the transformation of the Red Sea poses a strategic challenge that is often underestimated. The appropriate level of US engagement is an important debate, as the Red Sea cuts across a myriad of Washington's interests: the security of a critical shipping lane, the trajectory of counterterrorism partnerships, and the behavior of state and non-state actors with whom the United States already has ties.
Washington tends to approach the Red Sea through separate policy lenses: maritime security, counterterrorism, containment of Iran, Gulf partnerships, and African stability. Yet on the ground, these separate domains increasingly converge in the same political arena. What we observe today between the Gulf and the Horn of Africa is not simply growing interaction, but a deep and structural entanglement. The relationship itself is not new: the two shores of the Red Sea have long been connected by trade, migration, religion, and security linkages. What has changed over the past decade is the intensity, scope, and strategic depth of these interactions. The Gulf-Horn nexus has become denser, more militarized, and more consequential for the regional balance of power.
The current phase of entanglement accelerated after the mid-2010s, driven by three dynamics in particular. The internationalization of Middle Eastern rivalries projected competition among Gulf actors into the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Conflicts such as those in Yemen and Sudan did not remain confined to their national borders. They became arenas in which regional powers pursued influence, access, and leverage. At the same time, states and political actors in the Horn increasingly repositioned themselves, using external partnerships to secure resources, strengthen regimes, and hedge against domestic and regional rivals. This coincided with the transformation, and in some cases partial retreat, of Western engagement, which opened space for new actors and more fluid alignments. As a result, the Red Sea evolved from a connective space into a contested strategic arena.
The form of this entanglement matters as much as its intensity. It is multi-layered, spanning military facilities, port infrastructure, and financial flows, alongside less visible channels of political mediation and ideological affinity. It is also marked by a mix of competition and selective cooperation among external actors. Gulf states may compete for influence in one theater while coordinating pragmatically in another. African governments may welcome external capital while resisting external control. Local authorities may use foreign partnerships to increase their bargaining power vis-脿-vis central governments. The result resembles less a stable hierarchy than a fluid field of overlapping relationships and a form of heterarchy.
A useful way to understand this order is through the concept of proxy governance. Proxy governance refers to the tendency of external actors to operate indirectly, through local partners, rather than through direct intervention. Such practices extend support for governments, regional authorities, security institutions, business networks, and, in some cases, non-state or armed actors.
Governing through proxies differs from traditional alliance politics: it is more transactional and more adaptable, and far less bound by formal commitments. It allows external actors to pursue influence without assuming the full political costs of direct involvement. For external sponsors, this approach offers a rational way to extend influence while limiting exposure and cost, which is a logic no different from that historically pursued by Western powers in the same region. On the other side, it also allows local actors to internationalize their own struggles, attracting resources and recognition from outside powers. Yet this flexibility tends to reinforce fragmentation rather than resolve it: external support rarely enters a neutral domestic landscape. It empowers some actors over others, shifts local balances of power, and can harden internal divisions.
Proxy governance deepens the internal fragmentation within states in the region, creating asymmetries in political and military capacity. It also externalizes domestic conflicts, linking local disputes to broader geopolitical rivalries, and feeds the emergence of overlapping and competing security orders, where authority is fragmented rather than centralized. In such an environment, instability can be managed or instrumentalized, rarely resolved. For external actors, this managed instability can be functional. For regional states, it complicates long-term consolidation.
This creates a conceptual problem for US policy. Washington often treats Red Sea instability as a crisis to be managed only after it becomes visible: a shipping disruption, a civil war, an Iranian-linked security challenge. Each of these issues matters. But taken separately, they obscure the deeper transformation of the region. The Red Sea is not simply a route through which global commerce passes. It has become a wider political space in which Gulf capital, African state fragility, armed actors, and external rivalries interact.
A US strategy focused narrowly on freedom of navigation or episodic crisis response is a symptom-oriented approach that does not address root causes. Maritime security cannot be separated from political fragmentation onshore, just as counterterrorism cannot be isolated from state weakness and external patronage. Gulf partnerships, meanwhile, are not automatically stabilizing, since some Gulf policies may intensify competition among local actors. And Africa policy and Middle East policy can no longer be run as separate tracks, given how integrated the strategic theater itself has become.
The real danger for Washington is doing too much through the wrong intermediaries, outsourcing regional strategy to partners whose interests overlap with US priorities only partially and contingently. Gulf states are indispensable actors in the Red Sea space. They have resources, access, and influence that the United States cannot ignore. But their agendas are not identical to Washington's. Some prioritize regime security, port access, ideological competition, or leverage over rival Gulf actors. Others may support local partners in ways that deepen fragmentation. A more effective US approach would require cooperation with Gulf partners without allowing them to define the entire strategic frame.
Washington needs, first, to treat the Red Sea as a single strategic theater linking the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, North Africa, and the wider Indian Ocean. None of this calls for another bureaucratic slogan; rather, it means recognizing that decisions made in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, Ankara, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Mogadishu, Port Sudan, Djibouti, Addis Ababa, and Cairo increasingly interact within the same regional system. A policy divided between Africa bureaus, Middle East bureaus, counterterrorism offices, and naval commands will struggle to understand dynamics that cut across these categories.
A second priority is investing more seriously in conflict prevention and regional diplomacy. The United States should support African-led and regionally legitimate diplomatic frameworks, but it should also be realistic about the limits of existing institutions. Where Gulf involvement is unavoidable, Washington should push for greater transparency around external support to local actors and discourage policies that militarize domestic competition. Patient diplomacy matters here, not only naval deployments.
Finally, the United States should resist reducing the Red Sea to a corridor. Corridors matter because shipping, energy flows, and military access matter. But the security of a corridor ultimately depends on the political order surrounding it. A Red Sea policy that protects vessels while neglecting the conflicts, patronage networks, and fragmented authorities along the coast will remain reactive. It may deter immediate threats, but it will not address the conditions that generate recurring crises.
The Gulf-Horn entanglement is a structural condition of the emerging regional order, not a temporary phase. Even a more restrained US posture would still have to contend with this reality: outside actors cannot simply be kept out of the Red Sea, nor can the region be returned to an earlier strategic configuration. What matters instead is how any actor, the US included, can operate in a space where influence is indirect, authority is fragmented, and local conflicts are increasingly connected to wider rivalries.
Proxy governance helps explain why instability persists even when major powers claim to support order, and why local conflicts so often acquire regional significance. It also points to a deeper limit: the Red Sea cannot be stabilized from the sea alone. For the United States, the task ahead is to understand the region that has taken shape in its partial absence, not to recover the one that has slipped away.
