The Coming War Over Energy in the Gulf of Aden
This report examines the principal actors and forces reshaping the Gulf of Aden’s strategic landscape, with attention to how energy security, not ideology, is driving the decisions that matter most.
The Chokepoint That Explains Everything
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at its narrowest barely 30 kilometres wide, separates the coast of Djibouti and Eritrea from the coast of Yemen. Before the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began on 28 February 2026, roughly 20% of the world’s oil moved through the Strait of Hormuz and a substantial portion of it eventually passed through Bab el-Mandeb on its way to Europe and the Americas. The closure of Hormuz, brought about by Iranian retaliation to those strikes, transferred enormous strategic weight onto the Red Sea corridor and, by extension, onto every port, airfield, and anchorage between Sudan’s coast and the Somali peninsula.
The logic is simple: when the eastern door shuts, the southern door becomes indispensable. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which runs 1,200 kilometres from Abqaiq to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, has been pushed to its limits. The UAE’s existing Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline, connecting Habshan to the port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman at a capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day, became a lifeline within days of the Hormuz closure. Abu Dhabi has since announced the accelerated construction of a second West-East pipeline, intended to double Fujairah’s export capacity to roughly four million barrels per day and scheduled to be operational by 2027. The UAE has simultaneously departed from OPEC, giving itself the flexibility to ramp production and market share independent of collective agreements, while positioning Fujairah as a global energy hub to rival the Rotterdam model.
All this places the Gulf of Aden at the centre of the world’s energy rerouting calculation. Iran, aware that its principal strategic leverage has long rested on the threat to Hormuz, now watches as its rivals build the infrastructure that will eventually make that leverage obsolete. The race to control the alternative corridor is well underway.
Yemen: The Fracture in the Middle
Yemen is not a footnote to the Gulf of Aden story. It is the story. The country sits directly across the strait from Djibouti and Somaliland, its southern coastline running parallel to the entire length of the Gulf of Aden. Whoever governs, or governs effectively, the Yemeni coast controls the northern shore of this vital passage.
The Houthi movement, which holds much of North Yemen and the capital Sanaa, remains an Iranian-backed force with demonstrated capacity to strike shipping lanes with ballistic missiles and drone swarms. Between 2023 and 2025, Houthi attacks on commercial vessels caused global insurance premiums to spike and forced dozens of shipping companies to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. The ceasefire that accompanied the broader US-Iranian talks in April 2026 has quietened but not ended that threat. Houthi commanders have stated openly that they retain the option to resume attacks, and the weapons infrastructure that enabled those strikes remains intact.
South Yemen presents a different and, in many ways, more consequential problem. The coalition that intervened in 2015, nominally Saudi and Emirati in composition, has effectively collapsed as a joint enterprise. By December 2025, the two Gulf powers were fighting each other’s proxies across Yemen’s eastern provinces. Saudi Arabia conducted airstrikes on Mukalla port in Hadramawt, targeting what Riyadh described as UAE-linked weapons shipments bound for the Southern Transitional Council, the separatist movement that Abu Dhabi has backed since 2019. The Saudi strikes destroyed positions staffed by forces that were, in name, members of the same coalition. The UAE subsequently announced a full withdrawal of its forces from Yemen.
The eastern provinces of Hadramawt and Mahra are the reason this intra-Gulf rupture matters for energy. Hadramawt holds Yemen’s most significant oil and gas reserves. Its long Arabian Sea coastline offers potential export terminals that could serve a future southern Yemeni state. The province of Mahra borders Oman, offering an alternative energy and transit corridor that Saudi Arabia has long sought to bring under its own influence, bypassing both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. The UAE, by contrast, has pursued Hadramawt and the southern coast as part of a broader maritime network linking Red Sea access points to the Horn of Africa. These are not incidental disagreements. They are disputes about who will control the economic future of the Arabian Peninsula’s southern rim.
The UAE’s Arc of Ports
To understand Abu Dhabi’s strategy in the Gulf of Aden, one must look at a map and draw lines between the installations it controls or has invested in. From Assab in Eritrea, where it maintained a military base during the Yemen war, to Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea, where it has stationed approximately 3,500 troops, and to the port of Berbera in Somaliland, where its state-linked company DP World holds a 30-year, 65-percent concession acquired for $442 million in 2016. The UAE has built what amounts to a maritime perimeter around the entrance to the Red Sea.
In Berbera, the investment has been transformational. DP World has developed a modern deep-water port with capacity to handle container and bulk cargo that no other Horn of Africa facility can match outside of Djibouti.
A road network linking Berbera to the Ethiopian hinterland, constructed at a cost of $400 million, was designed to give landlocked Ethiopia an alternative to its overwhelming reliance on Djibouti’s Chinese-managed facilities. The UAE committed $2.3 billion in support to Ethiopia in recent years, including in renewable energy and infrastructure, in part to anchor Ethiopia as a commercial partner oriented toward Berbera. Alongside the port, a military airfield with a four-kilometre runway, the longest in the Horn of Africa, capable of hosting heavy cargo aircraft, fighter jets, and drones, has been quietly upgraded over the course of several years. Open-source satellite imagery, analysed by researchers including intelligence analyst Ted Risch, documented significant construction at Berbera Airport from late 2025 onward, including hardened aircraft shelters and logistics facilities.
In Sudan, the UAE’s footprint is even larger. Its estimated $22 billion in non-security investments represents approximately 90% of all Gulf state capital deployed in Sudan, covering port infrastructure, agricultural land leases, mining, and energy projects. The significance of Sudan’s 850-kilometre Red Sea coastline, long underused as an export corridor, has grown considerably since the Hormuz closure. Port Sudan, which serves as the outlet for South Sudanese oil exported via the Bashayer pipeline, has moved from peripheral importance to strategic centrality within months.
Sudan: A Country Being Pulled Apart for Its Coastline
Sudan’s civil war, now entering its fourth year, is commonly described as a conflict between two generals. The reality is that it has become a proxy contest in which the prize is not political power so much as territorial control over resources and maritime access. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan leads the Sudanese Armed Forces from Port Sudan, the wartime capital. General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, leads the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary organisation that evolved from the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide.
The UAE has reportedly supplied the RSF with weapons, according to findings by UN experts, investigative journalists, and the Sudan Conflict Observatory. These included drone technology that the RSF deployed against Port Sudan in consecutive strikes in May 2025, hitting fuel depots, power infrastructure, and airport facilities. Sudan’s government responded by severing diplomatic ties with Abu Dhabi and declaring the UAE an “aggressor state.” The UAE denies the allegations. The distinction may matter legally; it matters less strategically. Abu Dhabi’s interests in Sudan are documented, substantial, and tied precisely to the assets the RSF controls or contests: gold mines in Darfur, agricultural land, and the potential for RSF-governed territory to provide guaranteed access to Sudanese resources outside the authority of a central state that the UAE regards as Islamist-aligned and therefore hostile to its regional project.
Saudi Arabia has taken the opposite side, backing Burhan and the SAF. Riyadh hosted Burhan in the spring of 2026, providing financial and logistical support, while co-sponsoring peace initiatives through the Jeddah talks. Riyadh’s calculation is straightforward. A functional Sudanese state, anchored by a regular army and capable of governing its Red Sea coast, is preferable to a fragmented Sudan in which the RSF, dependent on Emirati financing, controls strategic ports. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 investments along its own Red Sea coast, including the NEOM project and tourism infrastructure, require a stable maritime neighbourhood. An RSF-controlled Port Sudan would be neither stable nor oriented toward Riyadh’s interests.
The United States has attempted to play a mediating role through the so-called Quad framework, involving Washington, Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi. The fundamental contradiction within that grouping is that two of its four members are actively backing opposing sides in Sudan’s war. Effective mediation will require Abu Dhabi to genuinely reorient its Sudan policy, something it has shown no clear inclination to do.
Meanwhile, Russia has used its relationship with the RSF and its mercenary Africa Corps network, operating through Libya, to supply the paramilitaries with fuel and weapons. Between April and October 2024, Russia supplied approximately 2.8 million barrels of diesel and gasoline to Sudan, accounting for nearly half of its imports in that period. Moscow’s longer-term ambition in Sudan is a naval base on the Red Sea, an aspiration first discussed during the al-Bashir era that has never entirely gone away. Iran, not to be left out, has separately negotiated a new alliance with the SAF government, reportedly supplying Sudanese forces with Mohajer-6 drones and discussing its own potential Red Sea basing rights. Sudan’s coast has become a bidding war.
Somaliland: The Pivot the World Ignored Until Now
No development in the Gulf of Aden theatre has concentrated minds more sharply than Israel’s recognition of Somaliland on 26 December 2025. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar signed the declaration, making Israel the first UN member to formally recognise Somaliland’s independence since the territory broke from Somalia in 1991. Netanyahu framed the move within the Abraham Accords framework, linking it explicitly to Red Sea security and Israel’s national interests.
Analysts were not slow to understand the geometry of the decision. Berbera sits approximately 300 to 400 kilometres across the Gulf of Aden from Houthi-controlled Yemen. Israeli officials, cited by Israeli media in late December 2025, stated that the recognition gave Israel a broader strategic margin, particularly in the air domain, and expanded its Red Sea presence. Berbera’s four-kilometre runway, built during the Soviet era to handle strategic bombers and long since upgraded, can accommodate any aircraft in the Israeli inventory. Its proximity to Bab el-Mandeb makes it the most capable potential forward base Israel has ever had access to in its southern strategic arc.
The UAE’s role in facilitating the Israel-Somaliland relationship has been described by analysts as that of a “silent partner.” Abu Dhabi hosted high-level discussions between Israeli and Somaliland officials throughout 2025, leveraging its existing relationships in both Hargeisa and Jerusalem. The Abraham Accords framework, which normalised UAE-Israel ties in 2020, provided the diplomatic scaffolding. The result is what has been called a “Berbera Axis”: a convergence of Emirati commercial infrastructure, Israeli security interest, and Somaliland’s long-frustrated drive for international recognition, brought together by the shared logic of controlling the southern approach to the Red Sea.
Somaliland’s president has not ruled out granting Israeli companies access to Berbera port, and has confirmed the existence of a “strategic relationship” in security terms, though formal basing arrangements remain, as of this writing, under negotiation. The AFRICOM commander, General Dagvin Anderson, visited Hargeisa in November 2025 and toured Berbera’s port and airfield capacity.
US interest is driven partly by the desire for redundancy: Washington’s principal Horn of Africa base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, is uncomfortably adjacent to a Chinese military facility, making a capable alternative of obvious value. A bill before the US House of Representatives, the Republic of Somaliland Independence Act, introduced in June 2025, would direct the US to extend formal recognition. Somaliland has offered Washington military basing rights at Berbera alongside exclusive access to lithium, coltan, and other critical minerals. As of June 2026, the bill remains in committee.
The opposition to these developments is also substantial. Saudi Arabia condemned Israel’s recognition and has joined scores of Arab and Muslim countries in opposing it. Riyadh sees the UAE-Israel axis around Somaliland as a direct threat to its interests: if Somaliland’s recognition empowers secessionist movements, Yemen’s southern separatists, over whom the UAE has influence, gain ideological ammunition. Turkey has similarly condemned the recognition, with President Erdogan calling it “illegitimate.” Ankara has significant investments in Somalia, including a large military base in Mogadishu and management of the Aden Adde International Airport, and announced plans to deploy a deep-sea energy drilling vessel to Somalia’s coast in early 2026. China firmly backs the “One Somalia” principle, unwilling to legitimise any recognition that might create precedent for Taiwan or Tibet. Somalia itself, governing from Mogadishu with Turkish military support, has been left increasingly isolated from the decisions being made about its own territorial claims.
Israel’s Southern Strategy
For decades, Israel’s strategic thinking about the Red Sea was dominated by Eilat and the threat to its southern port. The Abraham Accords changed the relational landscape of the region, and the Houthi attacks on Israeli-linked shipping from 2023 onward sharpened the focus on Bab el-Mandeb as both a vulnerability and an operational theatre. A 2025 memo from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies framed the Red Sea explicitly as “a distinct strategic arena where geopolitical and economic maneuvering, rather than security alone, is a fundamental component of Israel’s national security strategy.”
Somaliland recognition operationalises that doctrine. Berbera is not simply a useful airfield. It is a position on the opposite shore from the Houthis, within drone and aircraft range of their coastal infrastructure, logistically linked to the UAE’s existing presence in the same facility, and accessible to US and Israeli naval assets operating in the Indian Ocean. A forward intelligence and surveillance capability at Berbera would give Israel round-the-clock visibility over Bab el-Mandeb in a way no other current arrangement permits. The potential for combat aircraft based at Berbera to conduct rapid strikes against Houthi coastal positions, or to intercept Houthi drones before they reach the Red Sea shipping lanes, is precisely why Israeli officials cited “enhanced military capabilities, especially in the air domain” as a rationale for the recognition.
The risks for Somaliland are real. Berbera is within range of Houthi missiles. Saudi Arabia, which funds significant humanitarian activity in the Horn of Africa and controls financial relationships important to Somaliland’s broader development, has made clear its displeasure. The Arab League, the African Union, and IGAD, none of which recognise Somaliland, would find in a formal Israeli basing agreement fresh cause to harden their opposition. Somaliland’s diplomats understand this calculus, and the negotiation over terms, conditions, and the size of any potential Israeli presence is being conducted with evident care.
The United States: Present but Uncertain
Washington’s engagement with this strategic landscape is characterised by genuine interests, limited bandwidth, and competing pressures. The US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began in February 2026 unleashed the regional dynamics described above. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, host to approximately 4,000 American personnel and a principal hub for AFRICOM counterterrorism operations, sits at the top of the Bab el-Mandeb and is directly exposed to any deterioration in Gulf of Aden stability.
American interests are clear in outline. The US wants the Bab el-Mandeb open, the Houthis degraded, Iranian influence contained, energy markets supplied, and the Horn of Africa stable enough not to require expensive intervention. It wants access to Berbera as a hedge against Djibouti’s vulnerabilities, and it wants the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, functional enough as partners to share the burden of regional management. None of these interests are easily reconciled with one another. Backing the Berbera Axis places Washington closer to the UAE-Israel alignment and further from Riyadh at precisely the moment Saudi-UAE tensions are most open. Effective Sudan mediation requires Abu Dhabi’s genuine cooperation, which in turn requires Washington to apply pressure on a partner whose energy production has become even more critical since Hormuz was disrupted.
The Trump administration has expressed interest in Sudan mediation, with Special Envoy Massad Boulos engaged in shuttle diplomacy, but the internal contradiction of the Quad framework, where two members back opposing Sudanese factions, limits what any envoy can accomplish without a prior adjustment of Emirati policy. The Somaliland legislation in Congress, though stalled, signals real political appetite in Washington for a more committed Horn of Africa posture. How the administration reconciles that appetite with its Gulf relationships will be one of the defining tests of its regional diplomacy.
The Fracture Lines: A Summary of What Is at Stake
The energy war in the Gulf of Aden is not yet a shooting war between major powers, though it involves several ongoing shooting wars by proxy. Its logic is the competition to control the infrastructure through which oil and gas will flow once the Hormuz corridor is rebuilt, and the question of which external powers will own, lease, or garrison the ports and airfields that line the alternative route.
The UAE has built the most comprehensive architecture: port concessions from Berbera to Bosasso to Aden, an energy pipeline designed to bypass Hormuz entirely, investments in Sudan’s most contested territories, and a trilateral alignment with Israel and Somaliland that is reshaping the security geometry of the Horn of Africa. Saudi Arabia is pushing back at every turn, backing state armies in Sudan and Yemen, opposing Somaliland’s recognition, and finding itself in the unfamiliar position of being on the same side as Turkey and Qatar against its former closest ally.
Israel has made its most consequential regional move in years, parlaying its Abraham Accords relationships into a strategic foothold at the most critical maritime juncture in the Eastern Hemisphere. Iran, degraded but not eliminated, retains its ability to threaten both Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb through its Houthi proxies, and remains a wildcard in Sudan’s trajectory. Russia is positioning itself along every contested coastline it can access. China is building quietly, backing Somalia and opposing fragmentation, while maintaining its base in Djibouti alongside the Americans it is competing with.
Sudan’s 850-kilometre Red Sea coast remains the most underestimated strategic prize in this contest. Port Sudan is already a node in the energy rerouting that the Hormuz closure accelerated. If the RSF prevails and the UAE’s influence over Sudan’s eastern territories consolidates, Abu Dhabi will control or strongly influence ports at both ends of the Gulf of Aden: Berbera in the south and Port Sudan in the north, with Socotra and Aden between them. That would represent a degree of maritime strategic depth that no non-superpower has assembled in this region in living memory.
Policy Recommendation
Washington cannot manage this corridor through bilateral relationships alone, and it cannot afford to let the UAE-Saudi fracture deepen without consequence for its own position. The single most actionable step available to the US is to formalise the Somaliland relationship on its own terms rather than allowing it to be wholly defined by the UAE-Israel axis. Extending formal recognition to Somaliland, contingent on a transparent and jointly negotiated basing and port access agreement, would give the US a durable presence at Berbera independent of third-party mediation. It would reduce Washington’s almost total dependence on Camp Lemonnier, a facility whose proximity to Chinese military infrastructure represents a known and worsening vulnerability. It would also give Hargeisa a powerful counterweight against the financial and diplomatic risks that come with Israeli association, making Somaliland a more stable and sovereign partner rather than a subsidiary of someone else’s strategic project.
Alongside this, Washington must resolve the internal contradiction of the Quad framework by making clear to Abu Dhabi that continued arms flows to the RSF are incompatible with the mediation process. The US cannot simultaneously position itself as Sudan’s peacemaker and tolerate the arming of the force that struck Port Sudan. On Sudan, coherence is not a diplomatic nicety; it is the minimum condition for any outcome that does not hand Russia or Iran a permanent Red Sea foothold. These two steps, a direct Somaliland commitment and a clear Sudan red line with the UAE, would not resolve the energy competition in the Gulf of Aden. Nothing will resolve it quickly. But they would position the US as a principal actor with a coherent posture rather than a referee who has lost the confidence of both sides.
The Shape of What Comes Next
The Gulf of Aden is not on the edge of war in the conventional sense of a declared conflict between recognised states. It is, rather, in the middle of a war that is already being fought through port concessions, proxy militias, diplomatic recognitions, pipeline construction contracts, and airfield upgrades.
The instruments are those of statecraft and commerce as much as of arms. But the stakes are those of hard conflict: who supplies the world’s oil after Hormuz is rebuilt and the new normal is negotiated, who controls the chokepoints that cannot be bypassed, and who is present, militarily and commercially, in the places that will matter most.
The actors in this competition have made their moves visible, even when they prefer not to acknowledge them. The UAE’s port network, Israel’s Somaliland recognition, Sudan’s civil war as a contest for coastline, Yemen’s fractured south as an arena of Gulf rivalry, and Washington’s halting effort to manage relationships that are pulling in incompatible directions: these are not separate stories. They are chapters in the same account of how the world’s most strategically sensitive waterway is being divided by powers who understand that energy security in the twenty-first century is ultimately a question of who controls the water through which it moves.
The answers to that question are being written now, one port deal, one airstrike, and one diplomatic recognition at a time.
*Research and analysis prepared for the Atlas Institute. Sources include reporting and analysis from Foreign Policy, Middle East Eye, the Atlantic Council, Horn Review, Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Jerusalem Post, the Arab Center DC, and original open-source intelligence. All facts reflect conditions as of June 2026.*
