In the middle of the 29 kilometer wide passage of Bab el-Mandeb (whose name in Arabic literally means “the gate of tears”), sailors see the coasts of Djibouti and Yemen. Within sailing distance. Within missile range.
In this small bottleneck of global trade a game is playing out whose ramifications go beyond the demands of the Houthis. Well beyond the tragedy in Gaza. From the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Beyond the Iranian-Saudi rivalry. While the year has just begun against a backdrop of human tragedies, it is the global maritime geopolitical balance that is wavering.
A landscape that was largely defined, at the end of the Cold War, by the open seas of the Pax Americana. After all, one of the great strategists in American history was Admiral Mahan, who built his strategic thinking around an unfinished country (the last continental states — Arizona, New Mexico — to integrate the Union did so just before the First World War): for him, everything was at stake at sea. Based on this vision, the United States developed a strategic approach articulated around the irrefragable link between prosperity and security, trade flows and freedom of navigation.
UN conventions, but also control of the seas, ensured relative global peace, where pirates and corsairs had generally had their day. Supply chains are built on fluid and interconnected maritime corridors. The pandemic, by throwing a screwdriver into the engine of global supply, has revealed already obvious vulnerabilities: just remember the container ship misadventure Ever Given in March 2021, that a sandstorm had pushed across the Suez Canal.
This tourniquet, for six days, on a vital commercial artery, had been costly — 10 billion per day worldwide. Because any interruption, any jolt can reverberate from the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Panama Canal to the Straits of Magellan and Davis, from the Strait of Malacca to that of Taiwan.
Disrupted maritime traffic
On the rise since the beginning of the 21st centurye century, maritime piracy has always helped to reshape the routes of commercial ships. It led to the reorganization of convoys, adaptations by shipowners and increases in insurance premiums.
But things have changed in the post-pandemic world. For two years, the tremors linked to the war in Ukraine have disrupted maritime traffic in the Black Sea: Ukrainian grain has difficulty leaving the port of Odessa. Sanctions against Russia have reorganized energy corridors to the east and South America, and led to the appearance of “ghost fleets”, an increase in the transfer of goods from ship to ship (ship-to-ship [STS]) in the open sea to conceal its origin.
Growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait and the China Sea are becoming more and more acute – in a context where the superiority of the Chinese navy was established by Admiral Davidson before a Senate committee in 2018 and where a report of the Congressional Research Service of May 2023 reports the reduction in the technological advantage of the United States Navy.
At the start of 2024, Houthi attacks on merchant ships add to the fragility of the world maritime order. Forty percent of ships, including those of container ship owners like the Mediterranean Shipping Company, Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, have given up on the Suez passage. They are now opting for the Cape of Good Hope route, extending the journey from 7 to 14 days and tripling the shipping cost.
Some production has adapted, such as the Tesla factories in Berlin and the Volvo factories in Ghent, which are temporarily ceasing their activities for lack of parts necessary for assembly. While they did not appear to be targeted, three groups arming chemical tankers and oil tankers (Hafnia, Torm and Stena Bulk) and oil companies (BP in December, Shell at the end of the week) announced that they were giving up on the canal route. of Suez, immediately affecting the price of Brent.
Because there is no real alternative. The Cape of Good Hope, key to trade from Asia to Europe, is substantially extending journey times – even if the recent acquisitions of additional ships by Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd are absorbing the consequences of these extended routes for the moment. .
Drought as an obstacle
The Panama Canal is struggling with climate change and drought. There, there is no longer enough water in the locks to allow the passage of vessels with deep drafts, and the cargo is already transported by rail from one ocean to the other, while the Strait of Magellan is experiencing (according to analyzes by the Windward firm) a 142% increase in maritime freight. The Northeast Passage is in Russian hands and the Northwest Passage remains marginal in the equation. And with the election on Saturday of President Lai Ching-te in Taiwan, whom Beijing sees as a “separatist”, the Taiwan Strait is even more tense.
These tensions reveal different visions of maritime spaces, even if the American navy remains the only one able to move quickly and simultaneously on all the seas of the world. But by attacking civilian buildings with military-grade equipment, the Houthis are changing the game. By using drones 100 times less expensive than the anti-missile systems of the Americans and the British, by gradually expanding the danger zone far into the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, they raise the relevance of the responses implemented to protect the flows . In an era of increased protectionism and nationalist retrenchment, the United States may be increasingly less ready and able to meet the growing cost of protecting global maritime commerce.
These tensions accentuate the risk of decoupling of the economy between the BRICS bloc and the Western world, detected by the World Trade Organization in a 2022 report and reiterated last year by the firm Container xChange. With the key being a dissociation of secure trade routes, the appearance of alternative payment systems. Two distinct areas and as many areas of friction, of conflict, devoid of the international regulatory mechanisms familiar from the last 80 years.
A symptom of this escheat, the Galaxy Leader, a building flying the flag of the Bahamas and captured on November 19, 2023, is now a tourist attraction on which the Houthis parade. At the dock, off the coast of Al-Salif, at the Gate of Tears, it is the symbol of the world’s imbalance.