The Red Sea Region: Where The Rules Are Changing

2025-12-03 07:01:27

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The competition for global influence and control is shifting. One of the places where this dynamic is playing out is the Red Sea region, which encompasses Egypt, Eritrea, Djibouti, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Here, international rivalries, regional ambitions and local politics collide.

Federico Donelli, who has studied these political dynamics and recently published Power Competition in the Red Sea, explains what's driving the region's geopolitical significance.

What defines the Red Sea as a region?

The region stretches from the Suez Canal to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, covering approximately 438,000 square kilometers. The Red Sea borders some of the world's most volatile regions: the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the western shore of the Indo-Pacific area.

Red Sea regional map: Usifo Omozokpea / Author-created with Datawrapper

The Red Sea is rapidly becoming a highly contested zone, where traditional and emerging global powers are vying for influence and control. The decline of Western geopolitical centrality, the rise of alternative powers and the increasing assertiveness of regional actors converge in the Red Sea.

This has created a complex and dynamic arena in which to test future global power hierarchies. The Red Sea region is challenging the liberal international order that emerged at the end of the cold war in 1989. That order is based on:

multilateralism – cooperation among multiple states;
a free market – limited state intervention in the economy;
liberal democracy – political pluralism and individual rights.

These tenets have been eroded by a combination of internal weaknesses and external challenges over the past 20 years.

While competition for global power between the United States and China tends to dominate the headlines, the true laboratories of the post-liberal world order are found in regions where international, regional and local dynamics collide.

The broader Red Sea region is one of them. Others are the Arctic, the South Indo-Pacific and the Balkans.

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