Saudi Arabia Leads 14-Nation Maritime Coalition to Secure Red Sea

Saudi Arabia has moved to build a 14-nation maritime defense coalition to secure the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait against Houthi missile and drone attacks and against piracy, with Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia and Nigeria among the states committing to joint naval operations, combined training and intelligence-sharing. The proposal, reported on 31 July 2026, would give Riyadh a formal leadership role in a waterway it borders for some 1,800 kilometres but has so far declined to police militarily.

The corridor has been contested since November 2023, when Ansar Allah began striking commercial shipping in support of Gaza. The group seized the car carrier Galaxy Leader and its 25 crew on 19 November 2023, sank the fertiliser-laden Rubymar in March 2024 and the bulk carrier Tutor in June 2024, and in July 2025 sank the Magic Seas and the Eternity C in attacks that killed seafarers and left others held ashore. Traffic collapsed as a result: Suez Canal revenue fell from a record 10.25 billion dollars in 2023 to roughly 4 billion in 2024, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has put Egypt's losses at about 7 billion dollars for that year alone. In normal conditions the canal carries close to 12 percent of world trade.

Two Western-led missions already operate there, the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian launched in December 2023 and the European Union's Operation Aspides in February 2024. Saudi Arabia stayed out of both to protect the truce track it has pursued with Sanaa since the UN-brokered ceasefire of April 2022, making a Riyadh-led force a marked shift. It builds on the Council of Arab and African States Bordering the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, which Saudi Arabia founded in Riyadh in January 2020 with Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, Yemen and Jordan.

The Gulf stake is direct. QatarEnergy suspended LNG tanker transits through Bab el-Mandeb in January 2024, rerouting European cargoes around the Cape of Good Hope and adding roughly two weeks to each voyage, a diversion still shaping freight and insurance costs across the region.