Rivalries in the Middle East keep finding their way to the Horn of Africa

The late Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui once said that the Red Sea is Africa’s most misleading boundary: a narrow strait that divides East Africa from the Gulf in ways that obscure the political and economic ties binding both shores. That observation has aged well, and the consequences have rarely been more visible than now.

Three countries in the Horn of Africa are simultaneously engulfed in major conflicts.

Over 100,000 people are believed to have died in Sudan’s civil war. Somalia’s federal architecture is fracturing even as fighting against al-Shabaab grinds on. Ethiopia is battling multiple insurgencies while teetering on the brink of inter-state war with Eritrea. Ethiopia is also increasingly intervening in Sudan’s civil war alongside the UAE and the Rapid Support Forces. Each of these crises has its own internal logic. But none of them can be understood without looking across the Red Sea to see how rivalries there are projected onto, and actively shape, the Horn of Africa’s own conflicts.

Liam Karr and Michael DeAngelo, analysts at the American Enterprise Institute, have produced the most detailed map of current regional dynamics and their reflections in the Horn of Africa, tracing two emerging alignments of Middle East countries. A UAE-Israel revisionist axis backing Sudan’s RSF, Ethiopia, Somaliland and Puntland and a Turkey-Saudi-Egypt-Qatar bloc backing central authorities, in Sudan and Somalia.

The Horn tucks beneath the Bab el-Mandeb, a narrow chokepoint through which roughly 12 per cent of global trade passes, carrying energy from the Gulf, manufactured goods from East Asia, and other goods bound for and out Europe. It is one of the world’s most consequential maritime corridors and is so strategically important that more than half a dozen global powers—including both China and the United States—pay Djibouti for the privilege of maintaining a presence there.

What happens in the turbulent countries that straddle both shores is, as a result, both local and global. In his recent book Power Competition in the Red Sea, Federico Donelli argues that both shores of the Red Sea are best understood as a cohesive region, shaped by a long history of trade, religion, and migration.

The current entanglement between the Middle East and the Horn of Africa will feel familiar to readers of East African Cold War history, and is the latest iteration of a structural condition that has persisted for decades. Middle Eastern powers have historically sought allies for their rivalries in East Africa, while states in the region seek accomplices to settle their own scores.

Two important things have changed from the Cold War to now; the dramatic weakening of East African states which have historically struggled to control their territories and are now more fractured and war-torn than ever before; and the instruments through which Middle Eastern powers build their influence. This has intensified conflict dynamics in the Horn in a way previously unseen.

The arms shipments and aid packages of the Cold War era have been replaced by something far more durable: sovereign wealth, infrastructure investment, port concessions, drones, and military training agreements that rewire political economies and create constituencies with a material interest in developing and sustaining patron relationships. These ties are not easily unwound by a change of government, a shift in diplomatic weather, or even a well-intentioned peace conference convened by a Western power acting on conscience or national interest.

The American political scientist Jeffrey Lefebvre, writing in 1996, identified the Horn as a “highly penetrated regional subsystem” structurally subordinate to the neighbouring Middle East. He traced five successive rivalries that had each mapped themselves onto the Horn’s pre-existing conflicts. The Arab Cold War of the 1950s and 60s; the Arab-Israeli conflict; the post-1973 moderate-radical split; the Iran-Iraq War; and the secularist-Islamist struggle of the 1990s.

Each iteration found the Horn of Africa’s powers sorting themselves into opposing camps, as they solicited material support from those partners. What Karr and DeAngelo at the AIE are attempting to sketch out today is, by Lefebvre’s periodisation, the sixth iteration: the Abraham Accords-era divide reproduced across the Horn.

The logic of alignment — local actors seeking external patrons; external actors seeking leverage against their foes — would have been immediately recognisable to Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Faisal and Menachem Begin’s foreign policy planners. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, throughout the Cold War, provided support for Sudan and Somalia, while Ethiopia formed part of Israel’s “periphery doctrine” strategy to break Arab encirclement through cooperation with Turkiye and Iran, creating a strategic triangle that surrounded the Middle East.

Back then the most Middle Eastern states could offer, still in the early stages of post-independence state-building, was military training, aid, scholarships, and assistance in procuring arms for East African governments. These were valuable resources for officials in Khartoum, Mogadishu, and Addis Ababa, but when the strings attached became too cumbersome, they could be discarded. There was always another team you could quickly sign up to. Siad Barre and Jaafar Nimeiri, Somalia and Sudan’s former military leaders, even shed their earlier Soviet-leaning socialist sympathies in the 1970s-80s, pivoting sharply toward Western and Gulf patrons as they recalibrated their foreign policy to ensure regime survival.

The instruments which give those Middle Eastern countries influence in the Horn of Africa today, however, are much stickier.

The African Centre for Strategic Studies has mapped $75 billion in Turkish and Gulf investment across East Africa’s twelve countries between 2016 and 2025. The UAE accounts for around 60% of that investment. Turkiye has emerged as the region’s most active security partner, supplying drones and providing military training.

Israel has entered the fray through its recognition of Somaliland, a move that aligns with its broader regional contest with Iran and its allies. This decision risks extending that rivalry into the Horn of Africa, where the Houthis have already threatened to target any Israeli presence. Such threats cannot be easily dismissed. Signs of Israel’s security-driven engagement are already emerging and Somaliland officials have refused to rule out the possibility of an Israeli base.

It is important to note, however, that much of this support is vital to the states in question, from human capital formation to investment and humanitarian assistance. Yet these relationships are asymmetrical and offer little protection against the negative externalities that come with it.

The more important point though is not the scale of the investment, it is the form. Turkish drones have reshaped battlefields and military doctrines in Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. Emirati capital has kept Egypt, Chad and Ethiopia financially afloat in moments of acute turbulence over the last decade. Abu Dhabi’s supply chains kept Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces armed even as it had come under repeated Iranian attack. In recent months, Ethiopia has emerged as a key conduit for Emirati supplies to the RSF, even allowing it to launch a major offensive on the Sudanese town of Kurmuk from within Ethiopian territory. It also reportedly hosts an RSF training base.

The relationships that have formed across the Red Sea over the past two decades are not transactional, Cold War-style arrangements that a skilled African actor can play off against rival patrons and exit at will, but structural entanglements. Anas al-Gomati, a Libyan analyst who tracks the supply chains Abu Dhabi has built with local actors in Libya, Puntland (an autonomous region of Somalia), Somaliland, and Chad to keep the RSF supplied in Sudan, has described these relationships as a “high-stakes game of geopolitical Jenga,” where “each player – whether in Khartoum, Benghazi, or Abu Dhabi – is both a critical support and a potential point of collapse.”

Somalia in 1977 expelled the Soviets in the middle of the Ogaden War and pivoted to Washington. Consider Mogadishu today. Since 2018, the federal government has twice tried to push the UAE out of the country over its ties to the self-governing regions of Puntland and Somaliland, canceling port contracts and military cooperation deals. Each time, however, it has found that officials in Puntland and Somaliland have ignored those decisions.

The revenue from UAE-operated ports in Somaliland’s Berbera and Puntland’s Bosaso, which sit along the Gulf of Aden, have become central to keeping those administrations fiscally afloat. In practice, these economic ties carry more weight than the formal claims of Mogadishu, which has been unable to reassert effective control since the collapse of the state in 1991. The UAE’s 30-year concession in Berbera, backed by a $400 million investment, further entrenches this arrangement. Somaliland’s former President Muse Bihi put it plainly in 2018: “We have relations of business and economic ties with them, so we are allies with them.”

These investments have created constituencies — military commanders, politically connected businessmen, local contractors — whose interests in maintaining patron relationships outlast governments and survive political realignments.

The distinction between the two Middle East coalitions matters and should not be flattened. The UAE, Israel and its allies function as map-revisers. Their investment strategy is deliberately oriented toward sub-state and breakaway entities, because recognition-hungry actors offer better concession terms and greater structural dependency. Once major infrastructure is in place, the political economy of the host territory is rewired around it.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar operate differently, backing central authorities and preferring the grammar of sovereignty, opting to build central state capacity. Ankara in particular has proved to be a more dynamic player, marshalling a much wider set of tools, from FDI to scholarships and culture, to build deeper and more durable relations.

Yet despite their divergent aims, the net result of the operations of both these coalitions is fragmentation of East African states. One by directly investing in fragments; the other by hardening central authorities against the accommodations that might reintegrate them.

A former Turkish official who worked in the region told me that Ankara for example had erred by concentrating its influence in Somalia’s federal government rather than spreading it across the country’s autonomous states, a move that alienated peripheral actors and opened the door for its rivals, the UAE, and more recently Israel in Somaliland, to build leverage in those regions in ways that undermine a more coherent state-building project.

Somalia is what this regional competition produces when it congeals with local actors: several competing centres of power, fractious relations, and different external patrons for each. Sudan shows what that competition looks like when it is still in ferment and Ethiopia is an example of a state which, by aligning itself with the UAE, has basically picked a side.

Liam Karr and Michael DeAngelo at the American Enterprise Institute have argued, persuasively, that the United States has for too long allowed its Middle East allies to pursue their Horn of Africa rivalries in ways that undermine broader American interests, and that Washington remains the only actor with the relational capital to operate across both coalitions and rein this in. Whether Trump, or any other US president will, however is another question.

Judd Devermont, drawing on his experience running Africa policy at the National Security Council under Biden, explained in a recent Substack post how Washington often refrains from challenging Gulf partners in Africa when it depends on their cooperation on other priorities. In that hierarchy, Africa, he argues, consistently sits fourth or fifth on the US–Gulf coordination agenda. As a result, US concerns in Africa are frequently deprioritised, even when the policies of its Middle East allies produce harmful outcomes. For example, the US has accused the RSF of committing genocide in Darfur and sanctioned nearly all of its leaders, but has taken no action against their primary patron, the UAE, a key Middle Eastern partner.

Devermont’s instinct toward an inclusive conference model — African agency at the centre, external actors in a supporting role — is a good idea. It could force officials in East Africa to think more carefully about resolving their disputes constructively, rather than seeking advantage through the backing of an external patron.

The harder structural question is why any major Middle Eastern power would accept such a format when current arrangements, working directly through intermediaries seeking well-connected and wealthy patrons, better serve their food security strategies, port networks, and regional influence, and do so with far less accountability.

Diffusing the tensions in the Horn of Africa is urgent, given the scale of suffering across the region’s extremely distressed states. But these rivalries will, in all likelihood, find their seventh iteration. The onus, as pointed out by Ken Opalo, a prominent Kenyan academic, is for the region’s leaders to choose peace, so they can redirect the fruits of their foreign engagements to more productive enterprises. The alternative, Opalo adds, is the “real danger that Horn states will lose the initiative both domestically and regionally; and become mere hosts of intra-Gulf conflicts.”