Egyptian soldiers who surrendered to the Sudanese Rapid Support Force at
the Merowe military base, April 19 2023 [photo credit: @RenaissanceDam]
Red Sea Blues
Since Yemen’s Huthi forces began attacking cargo liners in the Red
Sea in retaliation for Israel’s war in Gaza most shipping giants have
decided to suspend their operations and reroute their vessels around the
Cape of Good Hope. As a result Suez Canal revenues declined by 44 percent in January compared to the same month last year.
The Suez Canal connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, a vital
route responsible for 12 percent of global trade. It is also one of the main sources of the hard currency that Cairo so desperately needs, along with worker remittances and tourism. Although the tourist sector has witnessed a steady recovery since the pandemic, its future remains uncertain should
regional instability persist. Further underlining the damage to the
economy of lost Suez revenues, remittances sent home by Egyptian expats
have also declined by 29.9 percent according to the Central Bank’s report in the first quarter of the fiscal year
Successive Egyptian regimes have treated the Red Sea like a strategic
backyard, where maritime traffic flow is a matter of life or death for
the state’s income and regional influence. Egypt fought Britain, France,
and Israel in 1956 to gain control of the canal. During the Yom Kippur
War in 1973, the Egyptian navy closed Bab el-Mandab strait to impose a
blockade against Israel.
Cairo is thus unsurprisingly extremely concerned
by the Huthi intervention in the regional turmoil that has seen attacks
launched against ships destined to or affiliated with Israel, before
the campaign expanded to target other ships affiliated with the
countries conducting air and naval strikes in “self-defence”, i.e. the
US and Britain. Despite the importance of international shipping to the
Suez Canal, Egypt has been powerless to halt the Huthi attacks; its
regional decline is now on full display, with little recourse to change
it.
Growing tensions with Ethiopia
Although Egypt and Ethiopia have official diplomatic relations, the
two have developed a rivalry over the past decade, which has morphed
into outright hostility at least in diplomacy and public rhetoric with
the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) the major irritant.
The Nile River is the primary source of water for Egyptians. Over the
past decade, Egypt has tried and failed to stop Ethiopia from building
the dam which Egyptians perceive as a strategic threat to their water
resources. Ethiopia, for its part, sees GERD as essential for its
development efforts and denounces Egypt’s share quota of Nile water as
an unjust relic of the colonial era.
After several rounds of prolonged negotiations, the Egyptian government announced last December that talks over the dam had failed,
asserting that “Egypt reserves its right, under international charters
and accords, to defend its water and national security in case of any
harm.” Given the critical importance of the Nile waters to the
well-being of Egypt it was an assertion more mild than menacing.
A controversial agreement
On the first day of 2024, in the latest evidence of Egypt’s declining influence, a pact
was declared and signed by Addis Ababa and the breakaway statelet of
Somaliland, whereby the latter would grant landlocked Ethiopia access to
the Red Sea.. This was followed by talks to strengthen military cooperation between the two. The exact details of the agreement have not been publicly disclosed, but the declaration was enough to arouse the anxieties of the Egyptian regime.
Egypt immediately sent a
senior diplomatic delegation to discuss the matter with Somalia’s
president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry was
also dispatched to Eritrea. Cairo is trying to mobilise its (rather depleted) diplomatic arsenal in support of Somalia, inviting President Mohamud to Cairo for a two-day visit,
during which Sisi declared “Egypt will not allow any threat to Somalia
or its security.” The following month, Eritrea’s President Isaias
Afwerki was also invited to Cairo for talks.
Cairo is also behind the Arab League’s denunciation
of the pact, a largely hollow move since the league has zero impact on
policymaking in any of its member states. One explicit example is the
United Arab Emirates. While the league does not recognise Somaliland,
the statelet enjoys close military, diplomatic, and economic relations with the Emiratis. Dubai Ports World operates in Somaliland, part of the UAE’s quest for maritime hegemony.
There was a time under Nasser when Egypt was a regional hegemon
challenging the world order. Under his successors Sadat and Mubarak, it
was a regional hegemon serving the world order. Today under Sisi Egypt
is still largely relevant to the world order but only because it remains a country “too big to fail” – nothing less, and nothing more.