Houthi rebel forces have seized the Yemeni port of Mokha as well as Mayyun Island overlooking the Bab el-Mandab strait. This gives Iran’s most powerful remaining proxy force in the Middle East nearly complete control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coast.
Directly or indirectly, Tehran now has a chokehold on around 12% of global trade that passes through that waterway. It is also maintaining its pressure on the Strait of Hormuz, which has already led to a cut of flows there from about 9 million barrels of oil a day to between 3.7 and 6.4 million.
The day after the Houthis took control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Brics leaders assembled in New Delhi, for their 18th annual summit. Brics is the group of “emerging economies” which formed around Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in 2006, to counter western influence in global institutions. It has since added six permanent members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Indonesia. A further ten countries, Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan and Vietnam joined as “partner countries” in 2025.
According to its own figures, Brics represents 49.5% of the global population, 40% of global GDP and 26% of global trade. But the conflict in the Middle East is exposing deep divisions in the bloc. This is clear from a reading of the New Delhi declaration, which has no mention of the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandab, Yemen or the Houthis. It contains no reference to shipping, to maritime security, or to freedom of navigation.
But Houthi control of Bab el-Mandab leaves Saudi Arabia exposed. Its east-west pipeline across the kingdom, built to bypass Hormuz, terminates on the Red Sea coast the Houthis now overlook. It had been running at full capacity, before being shut down after strikes from Iranian proxies in Iraq and the Houthis’ subsequent seizure of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline.
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Egypt, meanwhile, depends on revenue from the Suez canal. The shipping traffic that underpins this income significantly decreased in early 2024 as the result of an earlier Houthi campaign against shipping lanes in the Red Sea and has struggled to recover since.
The latest Houthi advances are not going to improve the outlook on maritime traffic that insurers have already treated as high-risk for months. The resulting increased costs are likely to continue to deter traffic through the Red Sea.
The UAE suspended all trade and financial transactions with Iran in late August. This move came after Iran allegedly attacked a ship owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company in the Strait of Hormuz and launched two ballistic missiles into UAE territorial waters there.
All this came on top of UAE claims in May that Iran had fired 3,000 missiles and drones at it in the first two months of the US war against Iran alone.
China and India, the world’s largest oil importers, need the Strait of Hormuz open to keep global oil and gas prices low. Both also depend on it as a trade route that the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic is unlikely to replace soon.
By contrast, Russia, whose own exports travel by other routes, is the one Brics member whose economic outlook improves as these Iranian-controlled chokepoints tighten. This is not an accident. In testimony to US lawmakers this month, Russia and China were both singled out as supporters of the Houthis alongside Iran.
Russian personnel in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, have supplied technical and targeting support for attacks on Red Sea shipping. Most weapons smuggling to the Houthis is now apparently routed through Chinese companies – and a satellite firm tied to China’s military has been accused of providing intelligence used against commercial vessels.
For China, supporting the Houthis may be a way to get assurances for the safety of its own ships transiting the Red Sea. For Russia, it’s mostly about being able to use the Strait to increase its profits from oil sales to India and China, the two countries that now account for 80% of all Russian oil exports.
Deep divisions
These divisions – and the obvious inability to speak with one voice on the situation in the Middle East – are eroding Brics’ claim that it speaks for the global south against an order that has ignored it and is unwilling to reform.
Ironically, what drives the erosion of credibility is the rapid and diverse expansion of Brics’ membership – something it takes pains to celebrate. What this did was to import a slew of unresolved conflicts faster than it could handle them.
Key members and partners of the bloc are at serious loggerheads. Iran is effectively in a state of war with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been at odds for years over Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia. India and China, meanwhile, are at on-again, off-again conflict over border disputes along the line of control in Kashmir which intersects with their broader geopolitical competition for influence in Asia and beyond.
China is also engaged in long-running disputes with Vietnam and Indonesia in the South China Sea.
Each enlargement of Brics has lowered the ceiling on what the bloc can agree on and say publicly. Saying nothing at all – beyond expressing “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia” and calling for “exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation” – may be the only survival mode for the bloc.
But a group whose sole remaining source of unanimity is opposition to the US and its allies and that cannot describe a crisis in which its own members stand on opposite sides is hardly likely to become a pole of a multipolar order.
Whether Bab al-Mandab and Hormuz reopen will be settled in Tehran, in Washington, and in the marine insurance market in London. It will not be settled by the 11 governments that spent last weekend calling for maximum restraint.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the Nato Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He also regularly provides advice to governments and international organisations. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.