Red Sea Geopolitics: The colour of war?

February 15, 2024

DHAKA – Today’s Red Sea skirmishes raise multifaceted concerns, which range from the war in Gaza widening and awakening old wounds, to geopolitical frontlines being rewritten by shifting chokepoints.

Occupying Gaza snuggles with Eretz Israel (Greater Israel), a non-negotiable Zionist goal from 1897. Institutionalised by establishing a “Palestine Office” in 1908, today, Israel is one step away from fulfilling that goal, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu channels a lesson he learned from his mentor, Menachem Begin: inflict a Palestinian nakba.

Netanyahu widened the Gaza war by actually unleashing it. By decapitating Hamas, he mobilised Hezbollah (Iran’s Shia militia in Lebanon), while activating two other Iranian militias: Yemen’s Houthis (who are attacking ships in the Red Sea) and Iraqi/Syrian Kataib Hezbollah (which killed three Tower-22 US servicemen along Jordan-Syria borders last month and quickly dissolved itself upon Iranian instructions, but were still mercilessly bombed by the US).

Ever since the Shah of Iran was evicted in January 1979 (the Central Intelligence Agency once restored him in 1953), Iran and the United States have been at loggerheads. Iran’s 1980s war with another US supporter, Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, revived Shia-Sunni tensions and stirred an extant Middle East cauldron. Gaza enters this stew as a “wild-card” component.

The Middle East supplies one-fifth of today’s oil flows. Passage through the 21-mile-wide Straits of Hormuz makes it a chokepoint for trade. Red Sea attacks shifted that chokepoint from Iran’s frontier to Bab-el-Mandeb, an equally narrow stretch connecting the Gulf of Aden from Africa to the Red Sea. Half of all Asia-Europe trade passes through