WASHINGTON — On June 3, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a stark assessment to the U.S. Congress regarding the devastating civil conflict that has ravaged Sudan for three years. Characterizing the war as an entrenched "proxy conflict," Rubio openly pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), accusing both regional powerhouses of actively frustrating American-led diplomatic efforts to bring the bloodshed to an end.

Rubio’s public remarks merely stated aloud what many geopolitical observers and diplomats had known for months: a conflict that began as a domestic power struggle between rival factions has fundamentally transformed into a wider regional war. By drawing in outside powers and spilling across national borders, the Sudanese crisis has become the epicenter of a much larger, sweeping transformation in international security.

For much of the past century, Western policymakers and strategists have treated the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as entirely distinct strategic theaters, separated by the natural barrier of the Red Sea. Today, that artificial distinction is rapidly evaporating. Military calculations, conflicts, and political maneuvers on one side of the narrow body of water increasingly dictate events on the other.

This dangerous entanglement has deepened dramatically following the decision by the United States and Israel in February to launch military operations against Iran. That campaign has driven a deeper wedge between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh—capitals that were already at odds over economic and security visions—while weakening the American-anchored security architecture in the region and underscoring the critical economic necessity of securing the Red Sea for global shipping.

The Clash of Gulf Ambitions in a Shared Space

Over the past decade, the United Arab Emirates has operated as the most aggressive external player in the Horn of Africa. Abu Dhabi has established a network of ports and military bases, extended substantial financial packages to key political allies, and involved itself extensively in Sudan’s civil war.

However, the recent war involving Iran, coupled with the sudden breakdown of the Emirati-Saudi security partnership in Yemen last December, has left Riyadh profoundly unsettled. Saudi leaders are increasingly anxious about the UAE’s growing security ties to Israel, less confident in Washington’s ultimate protection, and determined to assert control over the geopolitical security picture of the Red Sea.

Consequently, Saudi Arabia has leaned into a counter-alignment with Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan, extending these diplomatic partnerships directly into the Horn of Africa. Riyadh is actively attempting to counter factions in the Horn backed by the UAE or Israel, even as it struggles to manage immediate threats from Iran and its regional proxies. Among the most pressing of these threats are the Houthis, who have seized and consolidated control over Yemen’s strategic Red Sea coast.

At the same time, the risk of direct interstate conflict is escalating. Tensions are rising dangerously between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which are backed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, and Ethiopia, a close partner of the UAE. Compounding this is the distinct possibility of another direct war erupting between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

A renewed war between Ethiopia and Eritrea along the Red Sea would almost certainly metastasize into a broader regional conflagration, overlapping directly with the ongoing disaster in Sudan. Such a conflict would not only be severely aggravated by the existing Emirati-Saudi rift, but it could also permanently cement that divide.

For years, many Middle Eastern governments viewed the Horn of Africa as a low-stakes geopolitical chessboard where they could compete for influence at relatively little cost. But as wars in the Middle East and the Horn become inextricably linked, a single, highly volatile security sphere is rapidly coalescing. Unless leaders on both sides of the Red Sea recognize how deeply interconnected their security dilemmas have become, instability will continue to ricochet back and forth, making overlapping conflicts increasingly intractable.

The Erasure of a Separation of Powers

In many respects, the growing entanglement between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East represents a return to historical norms. Over millennia, the Red Sea served as a bridge rather than a barrier, connecting present-day Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Yemen. People, goods, and cultural traditions moved fluidly across the water. Linguistic ties remain visible today: Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia, and Tigrinya, widely spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, are both Semitic tongues. Christianity also spread early to what is now northern Ethiopia, establishing one of the world’s oldest continuous Orthodox traditions.

Historical connections ran deep and bidirectional. In the sixth century, an Aksumite ruler based in modern-day Ethiopia briefly conquered parts of Yemen. Soon after, the Prophet Muhammad dispatched some of his earliest followers across the Red Sea to seek refuge with a Christian Aksumite king. Islam later spread across the water and along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast.

From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire ruled territory on both sides of the Red Sea, while Omani rulers built a sprawling maritime empire linking the Arabian Peninsula to the East African coastline. These historical lifelines persisted well into the modern age. When the Saudi kingdom conquered the Hejaz region on the western Arabian Peninsula in the early twentieth century, elites in the port city of Jeddah sent their families across the Red Sea to Port Sudan for safety. Similarly, when full-scale war erupted in Khartoum in April 2023, many Sudanese citizens fled across the same waters to find refuge in Jeddah.

This fluidity began to change in the twentieth century, as European colonialism and modern nationalist movements hardened the borders and severed governance links across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Economic ties persisted—such as the flow of Persian Gulf capital into African economies, and African labor and exports heading the other way following the 1970s oil boom. Middle Eastern states also intervened directly in conflicts during that era, such as the regional war between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Yet the political gulf between the Arabian and African shores widened significantly after the end of the Cold War. The 1990–91 Gulf War fundamentally reshaped the Middle East and expanded the U.S. military footprint, granting Gulf states a temporary reprieve from managing their immediate African neighborhood. Simultaneously, polities in the Horn began to fracture. Somalia’s state collapse led Somaliland to claim independence in 1991, regime change in Ethiopia prompted the secession of Eritrea in 1993, and decades of civil war in Sudan eventually culminated in South Sudan’s secession in 2011.

Throughout this period, the United States made fraught and often counterproductive efforts to manage these convulsions in the Horn of Africa, rarely acknowledging the systemic links between its policies in the Middle East and those in the Horn. While Gulf states focused overwhelmingly on threats emanating from Iran and the Levant, the Horn largely turned inward.

Regional leaders in East Africa, such as Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, primarily sought influence across the African continent rather than across the Red Sea, championing pan-African bodies like the African Union. Influential political and religious elites in Ethiopia and Kenya—the region’s two strongest states—harbored little institutional attachment to the Arab world. When Sudan partitioned, the process was spearheaded by the African Union with Western backing, while the Arab world largely remained on the sidelines.

The Horn Circles Back into the Middle Eastern Orbit

The profound geopolitical tremors of the Arab Spring shattered this separation, drawing the Horn of Africa back into the Middle East’s direct sphere of influence. A pivotal turning point arrived in 2011, when Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first non-African head of state to visit Mogadishu in nearly two decades, signaling Ankara’s intent to project power into East Africa.

The regional uprisings also destabilized Yemen, culminating in the Houthi movement’s takeover of much of the country in 2014. The subsequent military intervention launched by Saudi Arabia and the UAE against the Houthis in 2015 instantly elevated the strategic importance of the Horn. The Gulf coalition required new military bases, logistics hubs, and foreign troops to sustain its campaign. The UAE established a military base on the Eritrean coastline, while Sudan’s regime under Omar al-Bashir deployed tens of thousands of troops from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into Yemen to fight alongside Saudi and Emirati forces.

Concurrently, Middle Eastern capitals grew increasingly skeptical of long-term U.S. security commitments. The Obama administration’s widely publicized "pivot to Asia" and concurrent diplomatic outreach to Iran accelerated a frantic regional scramble by Gulf states to secure their own interests. Competition among Middle Eastern rivals intensified rapidly.

A 2017 intra-Gulf crisis, culminating in the blockade of Qatar, spilled directly into Africa as competing regional patrons pressured leaders in the Horn to choose sides. The UAE made increasingly ambitious political investments, backing Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmed with a $3 billion financial package in 2018 and providing crucial military support when his government faced a severe armed rebellion in the Tigray region.

The catastrophic outbreak of civil war in Sudan in 2023 permanently fused the security architecture of the Horn with that of the Middle East. When mass protests threatened to topple Bashir’s regime in 2019, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh backed the military junta that seized power. After the two generals leading that junta turned their guns on each other in 2023, the UAE emerged as the primary external patron of the Rapid Support Forces, though Abu Dhabi has consistently denied the extent of its military interventions.

Saudi Arabia, possessing historic ties to the RSF, initially attempted to mediate between the warring factions. However, the sheer scale of the UAE’s intervention ultimately pushed Riyadh to throw its weight behind the Sudanese Armed Forces, transforming Saudi Arabia into the military junta’s most vital international ally.

Spillover and Fractured Alliances

Over the past year, these localized disputes in the Horn have bled back across the Red Sea, fracturing alliances closer to home. Tensions between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh over Sudan contributed directly to the unraveling of their joint coalition against the Houthis. In December 2025, Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognized government of Yemen formally demanded that the UAE withdraw its forces following a surprise military offensive near the Saudi border executed by Emirati-backed separatist forces.

That same month, Israel became the first nation to formally recognize the independence of Somaliland. While Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and numerous African nations fiercely condemned the move, the UAE maintained a calculated silence, deepening existing fault lines within the Gulf Cooperation Council.

This widening Emirati-Saudi rift severely crippled any cohesive Gulf response to the outbreak of war between the U.S.-Israeli coalition and Iran in February. While Saudi Arabia sought to insulate itself through new regional security pacts and diplomatic alignments, the UAE doubled down on its security partnerships with the United States and Israel. Although both Gulf capitals attempt to downplay the depth of their rivalry in public, the cascading effects are blatantly visible across the Red Sea.

Saudi Arabia has significantly deepened its diplomatic and military involvement in both Sudan and Somalia, operating in close coordination with Egypt and Turkey. This external backing has fueled recent battlefield gains for the Sudanese Armed Forces and emboldened military leaders in Khartoum to repeatedly reject American-backed truce proposals.

Simultaneously, the Somali federal government has expanded its security partnerships with key Saudi allies, including Pakistan. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia and Egypt remain staunchly opposed to Ethiopia’s ongoing quest to secure a sovereign coastal port and naval presence on the Red Sea, leading both capitals to bolster ties with Ethiopia’s Red Sea neighbors. Riyadh’s determination to control maritime security has only intensified since U.S.-Israeli strikes prompted Iran to throttle the Strait of Hormuz, forcing Saudi Arabia to divert the bulk of its critical oil exports through the vulnerable Bab el Mandeb Strait.

A Growing Regional War Zone

The aggressive expansion of Middle Eastern involvement in the Horn has dramatically heightened the risk that internal conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia will merge into a massive regional war zone. The continuous influx of Emirati military support to the RSF—allegedly routed through neighboring territories—has poisoned relations between Khartoum and Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia, meanwhile, accuses the Sudanese military of harboring thousands of fighters loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF effectively annulled a 2022 peace agreement and launched large-scale offensives against the Ethiopian national army with quiet backing from Eritrea, plunging the region back into active warfare. By early October, the Ethiopian army had managed to retake Tigray’s regional capital, but the advance threatens to push the fighting directly north toward the tense Eritrean-Ethiopian border, pitting Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a proxy showdown against the UAE.

In Somalia, domestic political struggles have become inextricably tied to the Middle East’s wider security conflicts. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland—strategically positioned near the vital Bab el Mandeb Strait—alarmed Cairo, Ankara, and Riyadh. In response, Mogadishu signed a formal defense cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia in early 2026 while abruptly canceling existing security and economic pacts with the UAE.

The UAE, for its part, has heavily entrenched itself in Somaliland by developing military infrastructure and revamping the major port of Berbera. Abu Dhabi has also established a military outpost and seized operational control of the port of Bosaso in the semiautonomous Puntland region, which remains at loggerheads with Somalia’s federal government.

Compounding these dangers, Houthi forces in Yemen have expanded their operations near the Bab el Mandeb Strait, renewing attacks on Saudi territory and reportedly seeking strategic inroads with al-Shabab, the Islamist insurgent group controlling vast swaths of southern Somalia. The Houthi movement has explicitly threatened to attack Somaliland if Israel establishes a military presence there, and U.S. officials report that the Yemeni group is already supplying al-Shabab with advanced weaponry.

The Search for Stability

To a large extent, the expansion of Middle Eastern influence into the Horn of Africa has served to fill a geopolitical vacuum. The broader retrenchment of U.S. diplomacy and foreign aid in Africa has forced Horn leaders to seek alternative partnerships. This void was acutely demonstrated when the United Nations cut off logistical support for the African Union military mission deployed in Somalia to combat al-Shabab—a mission that had successfully held critical territory for over a decade. This withdrawal has accelerated the reliance of the Somali government on Turkey and other foreign allies.

The Horn’s renewed integration with the Middle East is not inherently catastrophic; regional leaders are entirely justified in diversifying their diplomatic and economic partnerships. Investments from state-directed Gulf economies have provided a vital economic lifeline, particularly in critical infrastructure development. Moreover, Middle Eastern capitals can act as effective diplomatic hubs for mediation, as demonstrated in 2024 when Turkey successfully mediated a détente between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Yet, for now, those potential economic and diplomatic benefits are heavily outweighed by the reality that integration is occurring primarily through the distribution of arms and the escalation of proxy warfare. Geography is inevitably reasserting itself, making a complete return to twentieth-century isolation impossible. The greatest danger lies in the persistent belief among certain Middle Eastern governments that they can sponsor warring factions in the Horn without facing direct strategic blowback, and the parallel willingness of local Horn regimes to mortgage their stability for foreign military patronage.

Arresting this dangerous trajectory will require Saudi Arabia and the UAE to forge a cooperative framework to de-escalate conflicts in the Horn before a broader regional war ignites. In Sudan, both Gulf powers must step back from maximalist demands and compel their respective proxies to accept an immediate cease-fire and a transitional civilian government.

Furthermore, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi must coordinate to prevent a catastrophic cross-border war involving Ethiopia. Abu Dhabi must dissuade Addis Ababa from expanding its domestic conflicts into Eritrea and pushing aggressively toward the Red Sea coast, while Riyadh must restrain Egypt, Eritrea, and Sudan from meddling inside Ethiopian territory. Simultaneously, both powers could utilize their leverage to restart quiet negotiations between the federal government in Mogadishu and the administration in Hargeisa over their long-standing dispute.

Regional leaders in the Horn, who possess extensive historical experience in managing hostile interstate relations to prevent total explosion, should immediately convene an emergency summit of heads of state to demand a unified, collective approach to security from their Middle Eastern partners.

An alternative, much darker version of integration remains entirely possible. The UAE and Saudi Arabia could permanently entrench their opposing positions in the Horn even if they achieve a temporary diplomatic patch in their bilateral relations. Other simmering rivalries among Middle Eastern powers—such as the friction between Turkey and Qatar on one side, and Israel and the UAE on the other—threaten to further tear apart the fragile internal fault lines of the Horn.

One way or another, the Horn of Africa’s return to the Middle East theater is an irreversible reality. The critical question facing leaders on both sides of the Red Sea is whether they can muster the diplomatic will to manage competing interests and defuse mounting conflicts, or whether millions of civilians throughout the Horn will continue to pay the ultimate price for wars that refuse to remain contained.