The Suez Canal connects the Red Sea with the Mediterranean and is one of the main arteries through which trade flows between Asia and Europe. It is the place where 30% of the world's container ships and 12% of those transporting oil and gas travel. At the southern end of the Red Sea is Bab al-Mandab, a strait that separates the African coast from the Arabian Peninsula. In some sections, the navigation width is only 29 kilometers, and the depth, 300 meters. It is the ideal area for acts of piracy, and for the past three months, the place chosen by the Houthi militias to launch missiles and drones at ships passing through the area.
On the night of Thursday into Friday, fighter jets from the United States and the United Kingdom bombed Houthi bases in Yemen, leaving five dead and a dozen wounded in a country as warlike as it is poor, which in some ways is still a medieval society The north of this country is controlled by the Houthi militias, of the Shiite religion, financed and armed by Iran, and they have resisted attacks from half a dozen countries and organizations such as Al-Qaida.
Since the slaughter of Israelis on October 7, the Biden Administration has acted in the Gaza war with two objectives. The first, to soften (without apparent success) the harshness of the Israeli response on the Palestinians, almost 24,000 dead. The second is to avoid any intervention that could lead to the extension of the conflict. With the Houthis he has transgressed this rule. The attack on its bases in Yemen is a warning, but also an admission of powerlessness in the face of such a combative enemy. The resources used to protect maritime traffic (deploying the navy costs money) have not prevented large transport companies going from Asia to Europe from switching to a safer route. The alternative is the one that borders the African continent and takes them to the Cape of Good Hope. It means between one and two more weeks of travel and an increase in insurance and fuel costs.
The prices of transporting a 40-foot container (the most commonly used measurement) have doubled and tripled in the last two months. Even so, they are still at half the prices they reached after the pandemic. The risk is now that these costs will have an impact on inflation in consumer countries, as the IMF has already warned.
The Houthis say they are acting out of solidarity with the Palestinians. The war in Gaza has reinvigorated the warrior ideal of these militias. And it has allowed them to take advantage of the notoriety that the conflict gives them to gain negotiating power in their own country, which has been politically blocked for years.
But the Houthis are small. They would be nothing without Iran, one of the regional powers, emboldened because they have found allies in China and Russia who are bringing it out of isolation. It is Tehran that guarantees the firepower of the modernized Houthi arsenal. The Iranians are reluctant to regionalize the Gaza conflict. But they are masters at pressuring the United States and the Gulf monarchies with the boarding of oil tankers. They did it in the Strait of Hormuz. And now they practice it through the Red Sea. The result is the short-circuiting of the global supply chain, in which they do not participate because they have been affected by Western trade sanctions for two decades.
The global supply chain is a product of the 1980s, when the increase in computing power of Western companies made it possible to monitor the activity of their subsidiaries and suppliers in real time, no matter how far away they were. The maritime transport of goods through containers has facilitated the material flow in this system and the basic condition of its existence has been the open seas.
the seas Bruce Jones, a security expert at the Brookings Institution explains how these seas have changed in recent times. How the invasion of Ukraine by Russia caused serious disruptions in maritime traffic in the Black Sea, essential for the flow of food and fertilizers. Or how closely the Nordic countries perceive the breath of the Russian fleet (and even the Chinese) in the North Seas. What is happening now in the Red Sea sharpens this feeling that globalization has become fragile. That at any moment there can be delays in deliveries, an unforeseen jump in prices, distortions that prevent the existence of just-in-time chains...
The United States has guaranteed the operation of these supply chains in recent years. He has ensured control of the critical points, these straits with names that seem to have emerged from the novels of Emilio Salgari. In fact, the protection of the seas has been consubstantial to the Pax Americana since its beginnings. The US Navy anthem The Shores of Tripoli refers to the Battle of Derna, on the coast of Libya, which took place in 1805 and pitted the Americans against pirates supported by the Ottoman Empire. Today this dominance is far from absolute, as it has been for seventy-five years. China has built a navy in the Pacific on par with the American one, and very few European countries have a navy in a position to control these critical points. The seas, in short, are no longer ours
