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Confederates in Ethiopia: American industrial warfare and Egyptian imperialism in central Africa

May 6, 2017 by James A. Fargher

By James A. Fargher

Loring’s recollections of his time in Ethiopia provide a fascinating glimpse into one of the 19th century’s intra-African wars, fought in an area of the world virtually unknown to Europeans and Americans at the time.

The 1874-1884 Egyptian-Ethiopian War is one of the 19th century’s more obscure conflicts. One of the most surprising aspects of the conflict is that it involved a group of ex-Confederate officers who had been hired by an Ottoman viceroy to conquer an empire in central Africa. These Confederate veterans had fought in the US Civil War, in part to preserve a social system based on the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. However, along with some Union officers, less than five years after the fall of the Confederacy they found themselves posted over 6,000 miles away from home, in new uniforms and leading columns of African troops into the Ethiopian highlands.

Though technically a self-governing province of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was ruled by the ambitious Khedive Ismail (1863 – 1879) who dreamed of elevating his kingdom to the stature of one of the great European powers. In order to do so, he planned to push Egypt’s borders south to Lake Victoria and to encompass everything above the Equator between the Sahara Desert in the west and the Indian Ocean in the east.[1] This included consolidating Egypt’s grip over the vast territory of Sudan, which was already ruled as an Egyptian colony, and establishing Egyptian hegemony over the east coast of Africa from Suez to Somalia.

Ismail became convinced that the new methods of warfare pioneered by the Americans could make his vision a reality by modernising the Egyptian army. Egypt was the wealthiest and most developed state in northeastern Africa in the 1870s, but less powerful empires and kingdoms in the region, including Ethiopia, were still capable of meeting the Egyptian challenge. The armies of Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia, for example, vastly outnumbered Egyptian expeditionary forces. Ismail recognised that he would need to introduce technological innovations and reforms into his army before he could begin his conquest of the African interior. The khedive was therefore somewhat ahead of his time, as contemporary Europeans continued to look to the wars of the 18^th century for guidance on all matters tactical and strategic.[2]

The Khedive was originally introduced to the idea of hiring American officers to reorganize his army when he met Thaddeus Mott, an ex-Union artillery officer, and adventurer in the sultan’s court in Constantinople in 1868.[3] Mott regaled Ismail with testimonies about the advances the Americans had achieved in technology and tactics during the US Civil War that he convinced the Khedive to hire American veterans to oversee the modernisation of Egypt’s armed forces. In 1870, the first of these military overseers, ex-Confederate officers Henry Hopkins Sibley and William Wing Loring, arrived in Egypt on the recommendation of General William Tecumseh Sherman.[4]

Initially, these men were put to work designing coastal fortifications and lighthouses, with later arrivals helping to conduct surveys of the African territory already under Egyptian control.[5] In 1874 the Khedive launched an invasion of the ancient Christian empire of Ethiopia, Egypt’s principal rival in northeastern Africa, with his armies led in part by American officers.

One of these officers, William W. Loring, published a memoir of his experience in the Ethiopian War. A North Carolinian, Loring sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War and was put in command of an army in northwestern Virginia. He subsequently served in the western theatre until the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865. In 1870, he was appointed by the Khedive as Inspector-General of the Egyptian army, and in 1875 he was promoted to become the chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian military expedition in Ethiopia.

Loring’s recollections of his time in Ethiopia provide a fascinating glimpse into one of the 19th century’s intra-African wars, fought in an area of the world virtually unknown to Europeans and Americans at the time.[6] Twice, Egyptian columns marched deep into the interior of Ethiopia, once from the Red Sea coast and once from the Sudan, only to be met by an overwhelming number of enemy forces. Although the Egyptians were better equipped than their medieval Ethiopian counterparts, who were often armed with swords and chainmail, they operated on extended supply lines deep inside enemy territory. On both occasions, the Egyptian columns were crushed by the sheer weight of Ethiopian numbers.

American officers played a small but noteworthy role in orchestrating these campaigns. At the Battle of Gura in 1876, for example, William Loring may have altered the course of the war by taunting his Egyptian commanding officer into action. Confronted by an Ethiopian detachment which outnumbered his column, the Egyptian commander was goaded by Loring into leaving the safety of a local fortress and marching out to meet the Ethiopians in the open plain.[7] The ensuing battle was a disaster as the Egyptian column was overwhelmed, forcing a general retreat. The war subsequently lapsed into a stalemate until the British admiral Sir William Hewett brokered a final peace treaty in 1884.[8]

Egypt’s attempts to conquer Ethiopia were effectively extinguished after the Battle of Gura. The involvement of US Civil War veterans in the Egyptian-Ethiopian War has ended only as a fascinating footnote in the history of Egypt’s failed attempt to forge an African empire. The legacy of these American officers, however, is intertwined with the memory of Egyptian imperialism which continues to overshadow regional relationships in northeastern Africa in the present day.

James is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Laughton Naval Unit specialising in British imperial and naval history.

Notes:

[1] Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (London: Abacus, 1991), 77.

[2] Margaret MacMillan, ‘Thinking About War Before 1914,’ Lecture, Humanitas Lectures from University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 10 February 2014.

[3] Cassandra Vivian, Americans in Egypt, 1770-1915: Explorers, Consuls, Travelers, Soldiers, Missionaries, Writers, and Scientists (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2012), 171.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 172.

[6] William Loring, A Confederate Soldier in Egypt (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1884).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Bennet Burleigh, Desert Warfare: Being the Chronicle of the Eastern Soudan Campaign (London: Chapman and Hall, 1884) 235.

Feature image: Miniature toy figures depicting the Egyptian confrontation with Ethiopian warriors (1875), available here: https://agrabbagofgames.wordpress.com/2017/01/12/a-ridge-too-far-the-egyptian-invasion-of-ethiopia-1875/

Book Review – Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

April 26, 2017 by Bradley Lineker

By: Bradley Lineker

Review: Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), trans. Elizabeth Manton. ISBN: 9781408890264. Price: £16.99

Introduction

Utopianism has long been discredited in political thinking. According to theorists like Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, the pursuit of perfection has invariably ended in tyranny, disaster, and death. Yet, on the first page of Rutger Bregman’s[1] new book, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There, there is a quotation by Oscar Wilde: ‘progress is the realisation of utopias’,[2] which asks us to think otherwise.

Bregman’s purpose, he tells us, is to ‘unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our mind’,[3] to get us to think not only about the world in different ways, but also about what we want it to look like. The book’s broad argument is relatively simple: previous utopias have only been blueprints about how the world should be, and not what it could be; a journey planned out to the minute and metre instead of relying just on a compass bearing. ‘And I do mean horizons in the plural[,]’ Bregman tells us, ‘conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy[.]’[4] This isn’t a new argument. However, it is precisely the lack of utopian thinking that has stopped our politics from imagining different possibilities; according to Bregman, life and society have become schematized. It is the things that structure our society and political culture that Bregman is seeking to deconstruct, so to create space for new and alternative thinking. In this way, the book offers a snapshot of market liberalism; depicting it not as the well-oiled system that it pretends to be, but as an uneven cobbled-together mass of contradictory ideas and forces.

On this account alone, the book is remarkably successful in getting its reader to rethink stock ideas and phenomena. It particularly shines when considered as a well-packaged, and eminently readable, alternative think-tank digest. This is not to say that all Bregman’s positions are completely sound – plenty of work remains to be done on these areas – but that’s not necessarily the purpose of the book: the point is to get people thinking. This is a book about ideas and the aim of this review is to offer an open-handed discussion about the things that have been presented. Therefore, the first half of the review will assess the book as it is, breaking down the book’s core arguments into three thematic areas before the second half offers some points of discussion.

The Book’s Structure

The book is broken down into 11 breezy chapters (including the epilogue), of about 30 pages each. These cover a variety of topics, ranging from the support of universal basic income, to the absurdity of measuring by GDP, then on to the nature of employment in the post-capitalist world, before finally outlining how ideas can change the world. The translation from the original Dutch is close-to-perfect, and the prose is breezy, warm and accessible.

A word of note, though, the book has been designed to be a flowing external commentary of the work of other researchers in the areas Bregman has chosen to cover, and should not be read as anything else. It is also western-centric, which Bregman openly acknowledges. In fact, only the ninth chapter deals with the world ‘outside the gates of the land of plenty’[5] in any meaningful way, and, even then, it’s a loose chapter on the pitfalls of international development and the international border system.

Basic Income

Basic Income perhaps represents, more than anything else, the flagship of Bregman’s work so far – indeed he tells us that someone once called him ‘Mr Basic Income’[6] – so this idea unsurprisingly constitutes the first third of the book. Bregman outlines several examples about the utility and logic behind basic income, the most important being the ‘Mincome’ experiment, where in the 1970s people in the Canadian province of Manitoba were given ‘free’ cash instead of benefit entitlements. Through these examples, Bregman not only compellingly demonstrates their effectiveness but also addresses several of the key concerns around the utility of basic income. For instance, ‘people are concerned that if there was a basic income, then people would stop working, but in the Mincome experience the opposite seemed to happen.’[7] According to Bregman, this is attributed to three basic premises: (1) people often know what’s best for themselves,[8] (2) people want to succeed[9] and, (3) free from the mental demands of poverty (the ‘scarcity mentality’[10]), people make better decisions. He situates the debate over poor relief as to whether a life without poverty is ‘a privilege you have to work for, [or] … a right we all deserve.’[11] However, instead of letting his argument rest on moralism, he says that such a policy ‘meets the left’s demands for equality and the right’s demands for a smaller state’,[12] as it eliminates the need for a vast, weighty welfare system predicated on ‘control and humiliation.’[13] Such a tactic – of appealing to both sides of the political spectrum – is a signature of Bregman’s attempt throughout the book to bring together blocks of political opinion and point them in new directions – and it’s very welcome. In sum, Bregman’s arguments for basic income are well-considered, skilfully-constructed and offer a compelling avenue of debate on policy-making moving forwards.

Economic Measuring, Jobs and the Second Machine Age

The next third of the book looks at general economic measuring, jobs and his proposed 15-hour week. Bregman is right to criticize the current structure and timetable of the modern workforce,[14] however his proposed remedy isn’t entirely persuasive. The current timetabling of work arguably arose from the factory floor, and while Bregman does touch on this, he doesn’t do a good enough job of demonstrating how this was a method for a particular moment in time. Much the same as his treatment of GDP,[15] it may have been beneficial to show how current working patterns are also the result of fulfilling past needs – so to better persuade the unconvinced reader that they are outdated. Instead of this diagnosis, then, more attention is given to Bregman’s prescription, which consists of a 15-hour working week.[16] While he shows that, logically, shorter working weeks aren’t necessarily less productive, and they would undoubtedly lead to benefits to overall health and happiness, more is needed to reconfigure established traditions, such as a clear demonstration of the total redundancy of the current status quo. Seen next to the ready-packaged-policy of basic income, it is hard to see immediate uptake for a 15-hour week. This is particularly true, he argues, when governments are much more likely, for example, to make ‘labour costs, such as healthcare benefits … paid per employee rather than per hour.’[17]

However, his arguments about the need move beyond GDP as a measurement of a how a country are doing are compelling. For instance, a CEO who ‘recklessly hawks mortgages’ adds more to the GDP than a ‘school packed with teachers.’[18] Indeed, as he states ‘if I were the GDP, [the] ideal citizen would be a compulsive gambler with cancer who’s going through a drawn-out divorce that he copes with by popping fistfuls of Prozac and being berserk on black Friday.’[19] One of his more powerful sections is his argument on the ways we gauge profitability: as we don’t measure the long-term benefits of good education, we picture state services as a continual drain on our resources, and not something that rightfully should grow with our economy.[20] In a word, we don’t consider education as the investment that it should be seen as. Therefore, in his eyes, we need a ‘dashboard of indicators’ that include money and growth, but also a sense of community, service, the nature of jobs being created, pursuit of knowledge, social cohesion and free time.[21] While Bregman’s arguments are well put forward throughout this section, he doesn’t go far enough with these ideas. The dominance of GDP as a measurement of a state’s health says so much about the relationship between the state and businesses which the author, unfortunately, doesn’t explore.

A World Without Borders and Education

There is a rhythmic progression to this book, in that it moves from almost-policy (Basic Income) to over-the-horizon ideas (the 15-hour working week), to the truly utopian – a world without borders. Bregman tells us that ‘borders are the single biggest cause of discrimination in all of world history’.[22] He outlines a number of moral[23] and economic arguments[24] about the benefits of a world without borders and even conducts a six-page deconstruction of the usual arguments against migration,[25] but it would take a brave political leader in today’s climate to turn this into policy. But, as Bregman says, the point is to create new avenues of thinking and alternative utopias.

However, of greater interest, one of Bregman’s more interesting and incisive sections, on education, is slightly hidden away in a chapter entitled ‘why is doesn’t pay to be a banker’. Echoing recent trends of analysis, Bregman rigorously outlines how corporate culture has channeled ‘thousands of bright minds … to increase profits instead of find[ing] the cure for cancer.’[26] In particular, he argues that tax cuts in Reagan-era America spurred bright graduates to go into finance, rather than teaching or engineering.[27] Furthermore, he argues that all the big debates in education are about format or delivery, ‘education is presented as a lubricant to help you glide more effortlessly through life.’[28] Instead of looking at values, or addressing the problems in our societies that need solving, our education systems focuses on competencies. Alternatively, according to Bregman, we should be asking ‘which knowledge and skills do we want our children to have in 2030?’ This would give them a platform to create new futures, rather than carry on the same tired patterns of today.[29] It is these sections that the book particularly shines, and it is a pity that there aren’t more of them.

Points of Discussion: the need for narrative?

Overton’s window, as Bregman tells us, is a theoretical device that depicts political positions that are popular with voters versus those that are unpopular. He then goes on to state that populism has shifted the window to the right, skewing what we typically consider to be the political centre ground.[30] In a world where the internet has only made people cling ever more tenaciously to their beliefs,[31] how do ‘new ideas defeat old ones’?[32] Bregman doesn’t offer many answers here, as his account only looks to describe the problem as he sees it and to offer new avenues of debate. Inescapably, the failure of today’s progressive politics is more than just lacking a utopia to aspire to – there is a need to construct a coherent, easy-to-digest, narrative for why the world (and our societies) are the ways they are.

Part of an answer to this question lies with identity, something else the book doesn’t directly address. For a long time, left-wing movements across Europe refused to engage in the ‘dirty’ debate of national identity, and this abdication has provided right-wing movements with unquestioned authority and legitimacy in dictating what is best for a country – and what isn’t. George Orwell famously wrote, for instance, for the need of socialism in the UK to consider the intrinsic nature of Britishness as a positive force, before it could become successful as a project.[33] Indeed, in an interview about the book, Bregman himself says: ‘We associate nationalism as [an] inward-looking [ideology], which is about protecting what you already have. In the ‘90s there was this notion of the Netherlands being a ‘guide-country’, being the most tolerant on earth. You can feel patriotic on entirely progressive ideas.’[34] This is perhaps best shown with the United Kingdom post-Brexit, as it faces a breakdown in the ways that people self-identify as British or English/Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish, European or non-European. The question isn’t whether progressive politics comes to terms with national identity, but how.

A key theme running throughout the book is the debate between free trade and protectionism, which has gathered renewed relevance since the election of President Donald Trump and Brexit. The fascinating subtext beneath this ongoing debate is, unfortunately, only hinted at by Bregman in his epilogue,[35] as it has typically been the forces of the right that have generally reaped the biggest rewards from the rapid expansion of free trade and open markets; yet, the ‘alternative-right’ as they are called in the US, or ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK, have reaped the rejection of these principles, to form a new right-wing populism with a protectionist outlook. Bregman’s contribution here is to point out that the left lost the trial of strength against the neo-liberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, and now is losing the battle of ideas against the protectionism of Trump and Brexit.

Here, as the author hints at earlier in the text,[36] the neo-liberal project has been grossly negligent in creating the programmes needed to balance out the effects of free trade. As Bregman says, the coal miners, steel workers, and car manufacturers have been neglected for generations, and whole stretches of Europe are now in a ‘post-industrial’ malaise. This is why protectionist alternatives look so appealing after all, even if they make less sense in today’s world. Such a narrative is simple and easy to understand – so what is the progressive alternative narrative of why things are the way they are? A state-based programme of redistribution is certainly a good starting point, but in order for people to support it as policy, it needs packaging in an equally potent narrative. As Bregman tells us, after all, people typically vote ‘less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society’.[37]

An alternative way to frame these ongoing debates is changing how a state sees its role in the lives of its citizens: treating them as people to be nurtured, rather than as things to be managed and controlled. Bregman himself shadows this approach when he references the economic debate between Keynes and Hayek/Friedman. If we take basic income as an example, such joined-up thinking within the state – not of management, but of development – would help avoid the pitfalls of state involvement that we have seen elsewhere. If we look at the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) a few generations after the initial idealists set it up in 1948, we have a bloated system that is chronically mismanaged, underfunded and under-planned-for (where is systematic government planning for higher education bursaries for doctors and nurses, for example?), under-appreciated by its users, and which desperately needs renewal (not replacement, mind you). It is possible that such a fate would befall basic income if the same joined-up thinking that is lacking in regard to the NHS, wasn’t developed in conjunction with it.

Conclusion

This is a book that does have flaws. With hindsight, and taking nothing away from what Bregman puts forward, it may have been prudent to begin with the financial crisis, how the chosen strategy after 2008 was, as he paraphrases, like ‘standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.’[38] As Bregman implies, this decision wasn’t because of cognitive dissonance, but that there weren’t enough different ideas to lead change.[39] This is the single most compelling part of his rationale for the need for alternative political thinking, yet it is buried away in the tenth chapter. Framing the book in this way would have led to a stronger discussion of the rejection of ‘technocratic’[40] politics by many people in the form of Trump and Brexit, and then to what needs to be done to address this. That being said, Bregman is correct in saying that the left is always the strongest when speaking from a position of hope[41] and this is missing from their narratives at the moment. By packaging these ideas within a utopian framework – as he does – it certainly generates the type of approach that needs to be taken.

As stated many times through this review, this book does not contain all the answers – and it never has any pretensions to do so. ‘Utopias’, or so Bregman tells us, ‘offer no ready-made answers, let alone solutions. But they do ask the right questions.’[42] The same could be said of this book. It achieves its aim of creating new avenues of debate, encouraging the reader to think past certain established orthodoxies. Yet, as Bregman himself intimates at the end of his epilogue, there is so much more left to be done before such new progressive politics achieve the critical mass to become a credible alternative to what we see today.

Bradley is currently a fully-funded doctoral candidate in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He has extensive experience working as a consulting research analyst with the UN, DFID, and the private sector, on areas ranging from Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Syria. Bradley is currently using this experience to base his PhD research, which examines the nature of humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan. He has also written on neo-patrimonial networks in the Angolan civil war, state-capture in Mozambique, and the concept of liberty during the French Revolution.

Notes:

[1] Among other things, Rutger Bregman is a historian and works as a journalist for De Correspondent, The Guardian and The New York Times.

[2] Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Translated by Elizabeth Manton. Title page.

[3] Ibid. Page 11

[4] Ibid. Page 21

[5] This is the title of the ninth chapter

[6] Ibid. Page 238

[7] Ibid. Page 37

[8] Ibid. Page 32

[9] Ibid. Page 44

[10] Ibid. Page 57

[11] Ibid. Page 97

[12] Ibid. Page 45

[13] Ibid. Page 44

[14] Ibid. Page 127-133

[15] Ibid. Page 116

[16] Ibid. Page 142-143

[17] Ibid. Page 148

[18] Ibid. Page 107

[19] Ibid. Page 105-106

[20] Ibid. Page 121

[21] Ibid. Page 123

[22] Ibid. Page 217

[23] Ibid. Page 220

[24] Ibid. Page 216

[25] Ibid. Page 221-227

[26] Ibid. Page 167

[27] Ibid. Page 168-169

[28] Ibid. Page 170

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid. Page 254

[31] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 234-236.

[32] Ibid. Page 239

[33] Orwell, George, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume 12, A Patriot After All 1940-1941 (Secker and Warburg 1986-7) pg. 393

[34] Bregman, ‘Capitalism will always create bullshit jobs’: Owen Jones meets Rutger Bregman. Interview, 9^th March 2017. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsutNKH7KiE

[35] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 225

[36] Ibid. Page 46

[37] Ibid. Page 240

[38] Joris Luyendijk as cited in Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 243

[39] Bregman, Utopia for Realists. Page 243

[40] Ibid. Page 248/249

[41] Ibid. Page 261

[42] Ibid. Page 14

Feature Image credit: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58ad7ae48419c2dd18e2e88f/t/58bae3e0b8a79bbdc66eb35e/1488643061715/

International Naval Bases in the Horn of Africa: A New Scramble?

March 20, 2017 by James A. Fargher

By: James A. Fargher

A slow-motion struggle for control over the waters of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden is quietly being waged in the Horn of Africa. Global and regional powers alike are jostling for position along one of the world’s most important trade routes. The retreat of Great Britain and France, the traditional European maritime powers, from the area and the determination of Iran and China to increase their influence in the region has turned the Horn into one of the latest theatres for naval competition. Much like their 19th-century colonial forebears, these new maritime powers have helped to spark something of a scramble for African ports.

The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have been used as a trade route between East and West since ancient times, although until the modern era it was impossible to complete the journey uninterrupted. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, however, revolutionised the pattern of world trade by permitting ships to transit directly between the two seas.

Almost as soon as the canal opened, the world’s maritime powers sought to dominate this new oceanic highway. Egypt, followed shortly afterwards by Britain, France, and Italy rushed to lay claim to the handful of deep-water ports in the region. [1] The acquisition of a harbour by one power had to be matched by the others, lest they fall behind in the race for strategic positions. Each power would then follow this up by laying claims over surrounding countryside to create buffer zones aimed at keeping rival naval bases at arm’s length. [2]

The cycle of territorial expansion was fuelled by mutual suspicion and jealousy and only ended in the late 1880s after the collapse of Egypt’s abortive colonial empire in Africa. The remaining three European powers agreed to establish a status quo by signing demarcation treaties delineating the borders between their possessions.[3] These borders have remained in effect, forming the modern boundaries of Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and its unrecognised breakaway province Somaliland.

After the Second World War, the Europeans began withdrawing their naval forces from the area and relinquishing their colonial possessions. Today, only France has maintained a presence in the region. Even after the colony of Djibouti achieved independence in 1977, the French kept a military garrison outside the capital – the last European outpost in north-eastern Africa.

During the Cold War, the new world powers attempted to fill the vacuum left behind by the Europeans. The Americans maintained a small communications facility in Asmara, then an Ethiopian port, until the pro-Western monarchy was overthrown in 1974 by the Soviet-backed Derg coup.[4] The USSR subsequently established a small base near the Ethiopian coast, consisting of three docks and a storage facility. The base was abandoned following the dissolution of the USSR.

Following the 11 September attacks, the US returned to the region and built a Naval Expeditionary Base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti in 2003. The camp was intended to act as the local headquarters for counter-terrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and Yemen as part of Washington’s War on Terror. Indeed, Camp Lemonnier continues to be used primarily to conduct anti-terrorist airstrikes with its squadrons of UAVs and F-15 fighters.[5] Nevertheless, the base has also become a key position for projecting US power along the southern entrance to the Red Sea.

Other maritime powers have followed suit. In 2011, the Japanese Ministry of Defence confirmed that it was establishing a base for Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Forces (JMSDF) in Djibouti. Ostensibly, the base was built to allow JMSDF units to provide assistance to Japanese nationals in Africa during emergencies, such as evacuating citizens trapped in South Sudan in 2016. However, Japan has also deployed Kawasaki P-1 patrol aircraft to the base – aircraft which are designed for intelligence-gathering and conducting anti-submarine warfare (ASW).

China too, as part of its strategic expansion, began constructing a naval base in Djibouti in 2016. The so-called ‘logistics support base’ is part of China’s ‘String of Pearls’ initiative, which aims to secure ports in the Middle East and Africa which will guarantee Chinese access to raw materials. This Chinese naval base is also undoubtedly part of a wider Chinese strategy to expand its power-projection capability and influence in key areas. In response to the Chinese, Japan announced in 2016 that it would be expanding its own base to accommodate C-130 transport aircraft and armoured vehicles.

Moreover, Iran has attempted to establish a permanent naval presence in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to increase its own regional influence. For the first time in its history, the Islamic Republic deployed a small flotilla of surface ships to the Red Sea in 2011.[6] Iranian submarines have since been sent on patrols through the sea, and Iran even formed a Gulf of Aden anti-piracy task force in 2014.[7]

Iran is also suspected of using Red Sea ports to smuggle weapons to Hamas in Gaza via Africa.[8] These rumours, along with overt Iranian attempts to support the Houthi insurgency in the ongoing Yemeni civil war, have caused Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to look for bases in the region to counteract Iran’s growing influence. As of January 2017, Saudi Arabia has finalised an agreement to construct a military base in Djibouti. Satellite imagery acquired by defence analysis firm IHS Jane’s indicates that the UAE, on its part, is constructing a large naval base in Assab, one of Eritrea’s main seaports, complete with a combat air wing. In February 2017, the UAE also secured a lease agreement with Somaliland to construct a military base in the port city of Berbera, once the protectorate capital of British Somaliland.

The geography of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden region means that it will remain a strategic chokepoint as long as trade continues to flow between Europe and Asia. As rising global and regional powers expand their blue-water capabilities, they have triggered a race for naval bases in the Red Sea region. In this way, the modern struggle for ports mimics the scramble for African territory held amongst the European powers in the late 19th century.

James A. Fargher is a doctoral candidate in the Laughton Naval History Unit in the Department of War Studies, specialising in British naval and Imperial history.

Notes:

[1] Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 1820-1881 (Oxford University Press, 1959), 141.

[2] Diary Entry, 20 January 1885, The Gladstone Diaries, 275.

[3] ‘Agreement between the British and French Governments with regard to the Gulf of Tajourra and the Somali Coast,’ in Ian Brownlie and Ian Burns, African Boundaries: A Legal and Diplomatic Encyclopaedia (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1979), 768.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Shashank Bengali, ‘US military investing heavily in Africa,’ Los Angeles Times, 20 October 2013.

[6] ‘Israel anger at Ian Suez Canal warship move,’ BBC News, 16 February 2011.

[7] ‘Iran Navy counters pirate attack against oil tanker in Red Sea,’ BBC News, 4 Mach 2014.

[8] Stratfor, ‘Eastern Africa: A Battleground for Israel and Iran,’ Report, 29 October 2012.

Feature image credit: http://www.africom.mil/media-room/article/25177/cutlass-express-15-us-djibouti-building-partnerships

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