When Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty stood alongside his Eritrean counterpart Osman Saleh in Cairo this week and demanded rapid activation of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Council, the announcement was framed as a call for regional stability. It was anything but. Beneath the diplomatic language about collective security and sovereign equality lies a calculated effort to reshape the Red Sea’s security architecture in ways that would systematically exclude the United States and, by extension, its Israeli partner, from any legitimate role in policing the world’s most commercially vital chokepoint.

The Red Sea Council, established in January 2020, groups eight states bordering the waterway: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti. As a collective security mechanism, it is a fiction. Yemen is currently a battlefield, its northern half controlled by Iranian-backed Houthis who have spent the past two years firing missiles at international shipping. Sudan is engulfed in one of the world’s most savage civil wars, its government in no position to coordinate anything beyond its own survival. Somalia’s central authority barely extends beyond Mogadishu. The council has been functionally dormant since its founding precisely because so many of its........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)