This text belongs to 'Penínsulas', the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends every Tuesday. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Spain will participate in the mission to protect naval traffic in the Red Sea announced last night (Spanish local time) by the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Lloyd J. Austin, in the face of the insistent attacks by Yemen's Houthi militias against vessels commercial vessels that cross the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. Western warships to protect merchant ships entering and leaving the Red Sea through the Gate of Tears (poetic translation of the Arabic expression Bab-el-Mandeb). Western warships, mostly, to guarantee the free operation of the Suez Canal, a colossal human work of the 19th century that shortened naval communication between Europe and Asia. The security of one of the world's main trade routes is at stake. The United States, United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands and Seychelles will participate in Operation Prosperity Guardian, as announced last night by the North American Secretary of Defense. The Gaza war enters a new phase.
We talked about the Gate of Tears last week. The crisis has accelerated in less than seven days. Everything has gone very quickly. Given the repetition of attacks, the world's main shipping companies have instructed their captains to head towards the Cape of Good Hope to avoid the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. The alternative route is the one inaugurated by the Portuguese navigator Vasco de Gama at the end of the 15th century, surrounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the African continent. In the accelerated 21st century, returning to the Portuguese route means more time and more fuel, with an increase in expenses that could be estimated at 40%. Higher rates. Increased prices of products. More inflation. The ‘Penínsulas’ radar captured the issue last Tuesday. I think we approached it well.
To date, the shipping companies that have given orders to avoid the Red Sea are six: Maersk (Danish), MSC (Italian-Swiss), Hapag Lloyd (German), Cma-Cgm (French), Evergreen (Taiwanese) and OOLC, belonging to the Chinese group Cosco. The British oil company BP also announced yesterday that it was suspending navigation through the Red Sea. More than fifty merchant ships already changed routes last weekend. We could be at the beginning of a truly serious trade crisis. La Vanguardia is following the issue daily. The risk of strangulation of the Red Sea opened the front page on Sunday, the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian is once again the main headline on the front page today, and an article by Jordi Torrent, head of strategy at the Port of Barcelona, published last Wednesday, offered very interesting clues about what is happening in one of the critical points of international maritime traffic.
In a week everything has accelerated. The alarm lights have been turned on as a result of the repeated offensive actions of the Houthi militias. Just yesterday a Norwegian tanker was attacked. The Shiite rebels in Yemen have not caused any shipwrecks, for now, but they have caused damage and fires to various vessels attacked with drones, missiles and seaplanes. The Houthis maintain that their attacks are limited to merchant ships destined for Israeli ports (the only Israeli port on the Red Sea is Eliat), but Iranian digital media, such as Iran Observer, speak openly of an offensive which may cause a rise in inflation in the West.
12% of world maritime trade passes through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Suez Canal, the two ends of the Red Sea. 30% of global container trade, 11% of global grain and oilseed traffic, and a good part of the oil and gas shipments from the Persian Gulf destined for Europe circulate through both channels. 12% of the world's oil shipments and 8% of liquefied natural gas shipments circulate through Bab-el-Mandeb, whose width is thirty kilometers. Fertilizers and chemicals also feature prominently. And pay attention to this fact: 30% of airplane fuel also passes through the Gate of Tears.
At this time, several American warships are heading to the area. The aircraft carrier 'Eisenhower' and its attack group have moved from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Aden, and three American destroyers have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar towards the Red Sea in the last week. The Iran Observer portal (a source of Iranian propaganda) pointed out yesterday that the Houthis could respond to this naval coalition with attacks on the Saudi oil fields.
As we noted last week, the Houthis are not a distinct ethnic group in Yemen. They are Arabs of the Zaydi creed (one of the branches of Shiism, the second great family of Islam, to which Iran belongs), who in 2004 began to rebel against the government of Yemen, considering it too close to Saudi Arabia and the United States. They are called Houthis because their first leader was Sheikh Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, assassinated shortly after the revolt began. After several years of civil war, the Houthis control the western edge of Yemen. The western shore of the Gate of Tears is yours. They have been armed by Iran, but experts in the area question whether their discipline and effectiveness are comparable to Hezbollah, the Shiite armed movement that operates in southern Lebanon, perfectly synchronized with the Tehran regime.
The Red Sea thus becomes the third critical point of the Gaza war. Main setting and epicenter of the drama: the Gaza Strip, bombed day and night by Israel. Second scenario: the border between Israel and Lebanon, with Hezbollah skirmishes, which do not lead to a frontal attack by express decision of Iran. On that front there is also news: the Netanyahu Government is preparing a tough offensive against Hezbollah to move the border thirty kilometers further north, according to The Times newspaper, citing Israeli military sources. Third scenario: stress in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, risk of destabilization of global maritime trade and Western response through an alliance of naval forces. The three scenarios are connected. A new inflationary spiral could ruin Joe Biden's expectations in the North American presidential campaign, which is already difficult for the Democratic Party at this time. The most immediate loser, however, would be Egypt, the country that collects Suez Canal fees. Evidently, Europe would also be greatly harmed, with six months remaining until the renewal of the European Parliament and the subsequent election of a new European Commission.
In 1980, shortly after the Islamic revolution in Iran, attacks by the Revolutionary Guards on oil tankers sailing through the Persian Gulf put tension in the Strait of Hormuz, a key gateway to the global hydrocarbon trade. Oil prices rose again and some Western countries suffered especially, including Spain, greatly weakened by the oil crisis of 1973. Adolfo Suárez, stalked by multiple adversaries once the first and most difficult stage of the crisis was over. transition, went into decline due to the nightmare of Hormuz. Pedro Sánchez may have to spend Christmas thinking about Bab-el-Mandeb. We will see how Spanish participation in the Prosperty Guardian operation takes shape.
“The time has come for Geography's revenge,” wrote Robert Kaplan eleven years ago, when the utopia of a flat world, governed exclusively by digital connections, faded.
It is not the first time in recent years that global maritime trade has had to resort to the African route as an alternative to the Suez Canal. During the spring of 2021, a gigantic container ship called 'Ever Given' ran aground in the canal, completely blocking maritime traffic for six days. Previously, during the toughest moments of the Covid-19 epidemic, with a sharp drop in commercial demand, many merchant ships returned from Europe to Asia via the African route. There was no rush.
It is also not the first time that the waters of the Gulf of Aden come into tension. The collapse of the State in Somalia caused a strong growth in piracy in the first years of the new century. Groups of fishermen organized to hijack boats, while respectable Western countries took advantage of the chaos to dump toxic waste in Somali waters. In 2009, 86 pirate attacks occurred in the waters of the Gulf of Aden. On October 2 of that year, the Basque fishing boat 'Alakrana' was kidnapped 120 miles off the southern coast of Somalia, with 35 crew members on board. The kidnapping lasted 47 days and was resolved with the payment of a ransom of 2.5 million euros. Shipowners began to hire private security on ships and Operation Atalanta was reinforced, the European Union's first naval deployment aimed at preventing piracy. The world's major countries further strengthened their military presence in the Indian Ocean.
It wasn't just about controlling piracy. It was a strategic struggle for military protection of the naval routes that link the Suez Canal with the Strait of Malacca (Malaysia-Singapore-Sumatra), the routes that go from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. The United States, France and the United Kingdom maintain a strong naval deployment between the Bab-el-Mandeb and Hormuz straits. In 2017, the People's Republic of China inaugurated its first naval base abroad, on the coast of Djibouti, a former French colony in the Gulf of Aden, very close to the Gate of Tears. Officially it is a logistical support base for Chinese contingents monitoring piracy and Chinese troops participating in UN missions in Africa. A powerful French listening base and a United States military base with four thousand soldiers also operate in Djibouti.
