No man's sea

There is a stretch of water between the Horn of Africa and the southern tip of Arabian Peninsula that is approximately 26 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. It has a name: Bab-el-Mandeb, Arabic for "Gate of Grief", and for most of recorded history, that name was merely poetic. Today it reads like a forecast.

This strait is the passage of twelve per cent of world trade. Geography made it important. History made it contested. And now, in the development which has had a thousandth part of the attention it merits, the great powers of the world are marking out the shores of it, not by war or treaty, but by the more enduring weapons of bases, ports and well-calculated diplomatic recognition.

In December 2025, Israel formally recognised Somaliland – the self-declared republic that has governed itself since 1991 without a single seat at the United Nations. The move was presented as an act of principle on behalf of a democracy that the world had forgotten. It was, not by chance, also a foothold on the African side of Bab-el-Mandeb. This had been a long time coming and Israel already had intelligence on the ground long before a flag was raised. The relationship did not start with recognition. It was the invoice.

The UAE saw this logic sooner than most. Abu Dhabi has built the most advanced maritime architecture of any middle power in the region, from the deep-water port at Berbera, refurbished to handle heavy transport aircraft and naval operations, its runway being more than four kilometres long, to a chain of facilities across Socotra, the coast of Yemen, and the Gulf of Aden. It did not announce a doctrine. It simply built things. Thirty-year contracts were being made, infrastructure was being generously financed, and a corridor of influence was being built bit by bit when the world was elsewhere.

Turkey understood the assignment too. In Camp TURKSOM near the city of Mogadishu, the largest Turkish military base abroad, more than sixteen thousand Somali soldiers have been trained from 2017 to early 2024. The Turkish companies have taken over the airport and the seaport in Mogadishu. It is building a space facility in the North of the Capital, which will offer the first extension of its ballistic reach into the western Indian Ocean. Ankara is no longer just a power of the Mediterranean. It has arrived at the Horn.

China arrived earlier. Beijing opened its biggest foreign military base in Djibouti, a port city, which lies directly opposite Somaliland across the strait since 2017. Djibouti, which was a stronghold of the West, has shifted towards Beijing. Russia is establishing a naval base in Port Sudan. The US, which is seeing its Djibouti influence waning, has now started openly lobbying to have Somaliland recognised as a counter-strategy. What Washington term diplomacy, Beijing encirclement. What Beijing refers to as infrastructure, Washington refers to as expansion. Both are correct.

Nowhere in this accounting do the people of the Horn appear as agents. It was not the international law or moral suasion that secured Somaliland its recognition, it was geopolitical utility. Foreign powers are playing chess on the coastline of the Somali federal government who is denied port revenues and diplomatic legitimacy that it believes belongs to it. Among the parties who have not been troubled with the idea of consulting are the populations on the most strategically important waterway in the world.

The meaning of Bab-el-Mandeb is Gate of Grief. The name is old. The sorrow, it turns out, is being reborn by absolutely modern hands: quieter than colonial administrators, more patient than cold warriors, no less sure of the fact that these shores belong to whoever first arrives there.

No man's sea. Everyone's prize.