The Red Sea route, through which more than 10% of world trade circulates, is extremely important for global transactions and precisely for this reason it is very vulnerable. For this reason and because the geography favors that the ships that cross it are threatened, as is happening these days with the attacks of the Houthi militias in the south – in the Strait of Bab el Mandeb -, or blocked, as has happened on several occasions. at its northern end – in the Suez Canal.
Until now, Houthi harassment, in the form of drones, missiles and weapons of heterogeneous origin, has not managed to interrupt traffic, but it has forced the world’s largest shipping companies, allergic to this type of risk, to stop using this corridor and to An international naval force led by the United States has been formed to protect the route and, ultimately, prevent a de facto blockade from occurring. But problems for navigation in the Red Sea are not new, although in the past they have occurred in the Suez Canal, the other critical point of global trade in the region.
The fact that the canal is key has turned it into a throwing weapon on several occasions and has caused it to be subject to a couple of total blockades for war reasons. The first of these occurred on the occasion of the nationalization of the channel decreed in 1956 by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
At that time it was in British and French hands. Nasser had requested funding from the Western powers to build the Aswan Dam but, failing to obtain it, he decided to undertake nationalization. The United Kingdom and France then resorted to military force that allowed them to prevail. However, the victory on the battlefield was not such in the political arena, because the US and the USSR, the two superpowers, opposed the armed solution in a reminder that the world had changed a lot since the end of the Second World War and that European countries no longer had the colonial weight of yesteryear.
Nasser got his way and retained control of the canal but, in the midst of the armed conflict, the Egyptians had sunk 40 ships in the canal to make it useless. In total, the passage through Suez was interrupted for seven months in which the Red Sea route, hostilities aside, became unusable for world trade, a situation that was resolved already in 1957.
But the great blockade took place a decade later, on the occasion of the Six-Day War (1967), which pitted Israel against Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. The war, in which the Israelis were victorious, was very brief, but normality, on the other hand, took a long time to return. In the first hours of the armed conflict, the Egyptians had blocked both ends of the canal and placed explosives to disable it, while a group of fifteen merchant ships was caught in the crossfire.
The blockade lasted for eight years, during which the tension and acrimony of diplomatic positions between both sides prevented finding a solution to open the passage. And not to rescue the ships that had been left in the canal, most of which had to be de-balled after having been subjected to the rigor of the region’s climate for all that time.
The economic consequences were disastrous. The Egyptian economy suffered because 4% of GDP came from the fees ships paid to pass through Suez; Oil routes were disrupted and some producing countries had problems getting crude oil to Western countries, which, in turn, increased their purchases of these products from the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the very structure of maritime transport changed, because European ships were forced to go around the African continent, which led shipping companies to the conclusion that it was cheaper to send fewer and larger ships in order to save fuel, a trend accentuated with the oil crisis of 1973. When, in 1975, the canal was reopened, those large ships could not pass.
A third blockade still occurred, although not due to armed confrontations. The latter can be considered almost an anecdote, but at the same time it is another reminder of the importance of the route. On March 23, 2021, the Taiwanese container ship Ever Given ran aground and was stuck in the Suez Passage, an incident that was resolved in just six days. However, the world economy is currently much more globalized than at the time of the Arab-Israeli wars and the pandemic has already exposed the problems of global supply chains. In this context, the Ever Given recalled that weakness in the same way that the Houthis do today in the southern Red Sea.