The Red Sea Council Egypt Wants Would Lock Out America

When Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty stood alongside his Eritrean counterpart Osman Saleh in Cairo this week and demanded rapid activation of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Council, the announcement was framed as a call for regional stability. It was anything but. Beneath the diplomatic language about collective security and sovereign equality lies a calculated effort to reshape the Red Sea’s security architecture in ways that would systematically exclude the United States and, by extension, its Israeli partner, from any legitimate role in policing the world’s most commercially vital chokepoint.

The Red Sea Council, established in January 2020, groups eight states bordering the waterway: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti. As a collective security mechanism, it is a fiction. Yemen is currently a battlefield, its northern half controlled by Iranian-backed Houthis who have spent the past two years firing missiles at international shipping. Sudan is engulfed in one of the world’s most savage civil wars, its government in no position to coordinate anything beyond its own survival. Somalia’s central authority barely extends beyond Mogadishu. The council has been functionally dormant since its founding precisely because so many of its members are either incapacitated or controlled by hostile actors.

Cairo knows this. Yet it continues to invoke the council’s dormant framework not to produce genuine security outcomes but to establish a legal and diplomatic principle: that the Red Sea belongs to its littoral states, and that outside powers, however they cloak their presence, have no legitimate role there. The joint Egyptian-Eritrean communique made this explicit, rejecting any attempt by “non-littoral parties” to impose security arrangements or force maritime access in violation of international law.

The immediate target of this language is Ethiopia. The GERD crisis has made Cairo and Addis Ababa strategic adversaries, and Eritrea’s own grievances with Ethiopia run even deeper. Locking Ethiopia out of any formal Red Sea role serves both countries’ interests directly. Addis Ababa’s demand for sovereign sea access, advanced through its disputed memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, is the kind of precedent that Egypt and Eritrea have every reason to strangle in its crib.

But the phrase “non-littoral parties” does not mention Ethiopia by name because it is not only about Ethiopia. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other Western navies operating in the Red Sea are also non-littoral. Israel, whose commercial lifeline runs through Bab el-Mandeb, is also non-littoral. Cairo’s sovereignty-based framework, if given institutional legitimacy through the council, would provide a legal vocabulary for challenging the presence of every outside power that Washington considers indispensable to keeping the Suez Canal open and Israeli shipping secure.

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of Egypt’s position that Cairo has yet to explain. The Suez Canal generates roughly eight billion dollars annually for the Egyptian state. That revenue was devastated by Houthi attacks beginning in late 2023, and it was American and allied naval power that pushed back against those attacks. Egypt benefited directly from the very security presence its diplomacy is now positioning to delegitimize. The Sisi government cannot simultaneously depend on US naval deterrence against Iranian proxies and build the legal architecture to exclude American ships from security decision-making in the same body of water.

Washington has so far treated Egypt’s Red Sea diplomacy as background noise, content to let Cairo posture about sovereignty while the Sixth Fleet continues its operations. That complacency deserves reconsideration. Institutional frameworks have real consequences even when they begin as paper declarations. The Red Sea Council, if activated on the terms Cairo is now championing, would establish a precedent that non-littoral powers require the council’s blessing before conducting security operations in the waterway. That is a precedent Iran’s strategists would exploit immediately and a constraint no American administration should accept.

The United States should clarify, formally and publicly, that its naval operations in the Red Sea flow from treaty obligations, UN Security Council resolutions, and freedom of navigation principles that no regional council can override. It should condition future security and economic assistance to Egypt on Cairo’s refraining from using multilateral architecture as a mechanism to challenge US operational freedom. And it should make clear to Saudi Arabia, whose participation gives the council its only serious institutional weight, that Riyadh’s endorsement of an exclusionary Red Sea doctrine would complicate the bilateral relationship both governments have invested heavily in repairing.

Cairo’s grievances with Ethiopia are real and its desire for maritime stability legitimate. But a Red Sea architecture built to keep outside powers out will, in the end, primarily succeed in keeping security out.