Twenty-Six Kilometres of Coastline, One Enormous Ambition
Jordan possesses just twenty-six kilometres of coastline. That narrow strip at Aqaba, wedged between Saudi Arabia and Israel at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, is the Hashemite Kingdom’s sole window onto the world’s oceans. Yet it is precisely here, in September 2026, that The Economist’s second Regional Ocean Summit will convene policymakers, investors and scientists to shape the ocean agenda across the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea.
The choice of venue is less paradoxical than it first appears. Jordan’s very constraints make it a credible convenor. A country that depends on a single port understands maritime vulnerability in ways that sprawling coastal states can afford to overlook. Aqaba is not merely a conference facility; it is a living case study in what happens when geography grants a nation just enough sea access to comprehend how much it stands to lose.
The timing carries its own weight. The Red Sea corridor, through which roughly twelve per cent of global trade passes, has endured years of disruption. Houthi attacks on commercial shipping forced the rerouting of cargo around the Cape of Good Hope, inflating transit times, insurance premiums and freight costs. The October 2025 Gaza ceasefire brought a pause, but the escalation of the US–Iran conflict in 2026 has reignited the threat. Houthis have announced a renewed ban on Israeli vessels and the Strait of Hormuz itself has been effectively closed since February. For Jordan, whose economy breathes through Aqaba, these were not abstract logistics problems but existential ones. Phosphate exports, the country’s leading commodity, flow overwhelmingly through that single port. When the Red Sea becomes contested, Jordan does not merely observe; it suffocates.
Yet disruption has a clarifying quality. It has concentrated regional minds on questions that peacetime complacency tends to defer. Who governs the Red Sea? What institutional architecture exists to manage competing claims over fisheries, shipping lanes, marine conservation and subsea infrastructure? The answer, for the most part, is not enough. The last time the Red Sea possessed coherent maritime governance was when the Royal Navy, sailing from Devonport, policed it from Aden. Britain’s withdrawal in 1967 left a vacuum that no multilateral architecture has filled. The Red Sea lacks the institutional density of the Mediterranean or the Baltic. A handful of bilateral agreements and ad hoc arrangements do not constitute a regime adequate to the waterway’s strategic significance.
This is where the Aqaba summit acquires its deeper purpose. The Economist’s design is deliberate: the September regional gathering will feed directly into the global World Ocean Summit returning to Jordan in March 2027. The architecture is sequential — regional consensus first, then global amplification. It is a model that acknowledges a simple truth: ocean governance cannot be imposed from Geneva or New York. It must be built from Aqaba, Jeddah, Djibouti and Eilat outward.
The Gulf of Aqaba itself offers a remarkable microcosm of both promise and fragility. Its coral reefs are among the most heat resistant on the planet, a fact that has drawn marine biologists from across the world to study how these organisms withstand temperatures that bleach their counterparts elsewhere. Israeli and Jordanian scientists have collaborated on reef research for decades, one of the quieter but more durable threads of cross border cooperation in a region not famous for it. The reefs are a shared asset, indifferent to the political boundary that bisects the Gulf.
That scientific cooperation points toward a broader possibility. The blue economy — encompassing sustainable fisheries, marine biotechnology, desalination, coastal tourism and offshore energy — represents one of the few domains where regional neighbours with otherwise fraught relations share genuinely overlapping interests. Fish do not respect exclusive economic zones. Pollution plumes do not halt at maritime boundaries. Coral bleaching events do not consult foreign ministries. The ecological interconnectedness of the Red Sea and its gulfs imposes a logic of cooperation that geopolitics alone cannot override.
For Israel, which shares the Gulf of Aqaba, the stakes are starkly visible. The port of Eilat, Israel’s sole Red Sea gateway, ceased operations entirely in July 2025 after an eighty five per cent collapse in activity and the freezing of its bank accounts for unpaid taxes. What took decades to build was undone in twenty months. Israeli desalination technology, among the most advanced globally, has obvious applications across the water scarce littoral. Marine monitoring systems developed for the Gulf of Eilat have scientific value far beyond Israel’s borders. The question is whether the political climate permits the technical cooperation that the ecological reality demands.
King Abdullah has long positioned Jordan as a convening power — a country whose moderate posture and geographical centrality equip it to host conversations that others cannot. Aqaba, a special economic zone already oriented toward tourism and trade, is a natural stage for this role. The Economist’s decision to anchor both the regional and global summits there is an endorsement of that positioning and, implicitly, an argument that the Middle East’s ocean future will be negotiated in the spaces between great power rivalries rather than within them.
The OECD has projected the ocean economy to double in value by 2030, reaching three trillion dollars. The Middle East and Red Sea littoral states are positioned to capture a meaningful share of that growth, but only if they can move beyond the transactional bilateralism that has characterised regional diplomacy and toward something more systemic. September’s gathering will not, by itself, deliver that transformation. No single conference does. But it may establish the vocabulary, the relationships and the institutional habits that make transformation possible.
Twenty-six kilometres of coastline is not much. But it may prove to be enough.