Egypt’s Red Sea Council and the US Exclusion Test

When Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and his Eritrean counterpart Osman Saleh signed a maritime cooperation agreement in Asmara on May 16, 2026, the joint statement they released did more than name their two governments as partners. It declared that the “security and governance of the Red Sea remain the exclusive responsibility of the littoral states” and rejected any role for “non-littoral parties” in arrangements for the waterway. Read narrowly, the language is regional housekeeping. Read against six years of U.S. and allied naval operations off Yemen, and against Egypt’s own dependence on those operations to keep the Suez Canal viable, the doctrine points elsewhere. The Red Sea Council that the statement invokes is the framework Egypt is now using to push the United States, Israel, and other outside navies out of the waterway’s security architecture.

Cairo has framed the campaign as a sovereignty claim. The framework doing the work is the Council of Arab and African Coastal States of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, a body of eight littoral states that has existed mostly on paper since its founding charter was signed in Riyadh on January 6, 2020. Egypt’s effort is to give that council institutional content on its own terms, terms that would, if the broader region accepted them, raise the cost of every non-littoral naval deployment in the Red Sea.

The 2020 Council Egypt Is Filling With Content

The council’s founding charter describes it as a “joint action system for coordination and cooperation,” not a military alliance. Its eight members are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti, and its headquarters sits in Riyadh. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, announcing the charter in 2020, was explicit that the body would not build any new military force and would rely on the defensive capabilities members already had. The structure is a venue, not a command.

What Egypt is now attempting is to give that venue teeth. The May 16, 2026 joint statement followed an October 2024 announcement that Cairo, Asmara, and Mogadishu had formed a joint committee to coordinate Red Sea policy, a step that Cairo took in the same year Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland to lease access to the port of Berbera. The pattern is consistent. Egypt has been layering bilateral and trilateral agreements on top of the dormant eight-state framework to build a regional consensus that the Red Sea is, in legal terms, the property of the eight governments that border it. The bilateral Egypt-Eritrea maritime transport and shipping line agreement signed in Asmara is the latest layer.

None of the parties to these agreements disputes that the Red Sea is, in some sense, a regional waterway. The question is what follows from that. Egypt and Eritrea have decided that what follows is a monopoly on legitimate security decision-making, a monopoly that would apply to the U.S. Navy, the Royal Navy, the French Navy, the Israeli merchant fleet, and anyone else they define as outside the littoral eight. The framework is being built in pieces, and each piece, taken alone, is defensible as regional diplomacy.

The ‘Non-Littoral Parties’ Doctrine

The phrase doing the work is “non-littoral parties.” It appears in the May 16, 2026 joint statement and in Egyptian diplomatic language across the spring of 2026, and it is the diplomatic equivalent of a wide receiver running a precise route. The phrase does not name Ethiopia, the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, or France. It names a category, and the category covers all of them.

Non-littoral parties have no right to engage in arrangements related to the Red Sea.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, joint statement with Eritrean counterpart Osman Saleh, Asmara, May 16, 2026, as reported by Al-Monitor.

The category is the point. International lawyers who study maritime law will recognize the move as an attempt to build a regional customary norm that security in a particular waterway is the exclusive province of its coastal states. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea grants coastal states rights over territorial waters and exclusive economic zones, and it preserves the right of innocent passage for foreign vessels, but it does not give coastal states a veto over foreign naval operations in international waters. Egypt is now attempting to write that veto, regionally, by treating the Red Sea Council’s hypothetical acceptance as the standard for legitimate action. The point is not what the council decides. The point is what accepting the council’s authority would imply for the next non-littoral deployment.

The publicly named target is Ethiopia. On May 16, 2026, Egypt’s foreign ministry also announced that Abdelatty had stressed to Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki that the “governance and security” of the Red Sea must remain the “exclusive responsibility” of its littoral states, a formulation that closes the door on any Ethiopian naval or commercial presence negotiated through Somaliland. The United States and Israel are the unstated targets, and the doctrine is built to reach them.

Israeli shipping through Bab el-Mandeb is the most exposed of those unstated targets. Israeli commercial vessels have transited the southern Red Sea through the Houthi campaign that began in late 2023, and Israeli-linked traffic has at times been singled out for attack. A regional doctrine that requires council blessing before any non-littoral security operation in the waterway would, in practice, give hostile members a veto over Israeli commercial movement. The doctrine is portable. Once accepted regionally, the same logic could be applied in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, or the Persian Gulf, and the same hostile members would have a template to invoke.

Egypt’s Dependence on the US Navy It Is Excluding

Egypt’s diplomatic posture on the Red Sea and its dependence on U.S. naval power to keep the waterway open are now in direct contradiction. The Suez Canal generated $3.991 billion in revenue in 2024, according to the Suez Canal Authority, down 66% from $10.25 billion in 2023. Canal authority head Osama Rabie attributed the collapse to Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. It was the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian, launched in December 2023 as a multinational naval mission, that pushed back against those attacks and helped reopen transit.

Pentagon figures, as cited in U.S. Central Command statements, count about 1,500 merchant ships that have safely transited the Red Sea since the U.S. operation began. Egyptian state media quoted President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in May 2026 as saying that Egypt had incurred about $10 billion in Suez Canal losses over the Gaza war period, a figure consistent with the canal authority’s 2024 revenue collapse. The arithmetic is awkward for the sovereignty claim. Egypt’s most valuable waterway is being defended by the very navies its diplomacy is now positioning to delegitimize, and the Egyptian state has responded by routing more crude through the SUMED pipeline as a parallel hedge.

The table is the doctrine in plain text. Eight of the council’s members are defined as legitimate. Everyone else is defined as a foreign presence whose security role would, if the framework were accepted, require the council’s permission. The eight include Yemen, where the Houthi movement controls the capital and most of the Red Sea coast, and Sudan, which is in the fourth year of a civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Both governments are weakened, and the council’s leverage inside each is limited. That imbalance is not an accident. The doctrine is most useful to the members who have the least capacity to enforce it and the most to gain from binding outsiders.

The U.S. Navy’s Red Sea operations have been run from the U.S. Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain, and supported by the U.S. Sixth Fleet, with carrier strike groups and other units rotating through the theater since the start of the Houthi campaign. Those operations are not controversial in the U.S. defense establishment. They are a textbook freedom-of-navigation mission against an Iranian proxy. The Egypt-Eritrea doctrine does not challenge them by name. It builds a regional vocabulary that could, in the next crisis, be used to characterize the same operations as illegitimate intrusions.

Egypt benefits from the same U.S. presence it is rhetorically delegitimizing, and the benefits are visible in the canal authority’s own revenue figures. The Sisi government cannot depend on Sixth Fleet deterrence against Iranian proxies and, in the same breath, build the legal architecture to exclude American ships from security decision-making in the same body of water. The contradiction has not been publicly addressed by Cairo, and the absence of an answer is itself an answer. Israeli planners tracking the same Egyptian diplomatic moves have already begun adjusting to the possibility that Israeli shipping will be the first casualty.

The Ethiopia Trigger

The trigger for the spring 2026 push is Ethiopia, not the United States. The two countries have been strategic adversaries since 2011, when Addis Ababa broke ground on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, on the Blue Nile. Egypt relies on the Nile for more than 90% of its water, and the dam, which Ethiopia inaugurated in September 2025, is treated in Cairo as an existential threat. The Red Sea is the second front of the same dispute.

Ethiopia’s vulnerability is geographic. The country has been landlocked since Eritrea’s independence in 1993, and its principal trade route runs through Djibouti. The memorandum of understanding Addis Ababa signed with Somaliland on January 1, 2024, granting Ethiopia access to the port of Berbera in exchange for a possible future recognition of Somaliland’s independence, was a direct attempt to break out of that constraint. The deal drew condemnation from Somalia, which considers Somaliland part of its sovereign territory, and it has stalled under international pressure and Turkish-mediated talks between Mogadishu and Addis Ababa. The Egypt-Eritrea doctrine gives Cairo a regional tool to argue that any Ethiopian port access negotiated through Somaliland, or any Ethiopian naval deployment in the Red Sea, requires the council’s blessing.

Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nebiat Getachew said on May 15, 2026 that Egypt was attempting to “obstruct” Ethiopia’s Red Sea access, and that Ethiopia “will continue working to secure sea access through a peaceful and sustainable path.” The accusation is not the whole story. Egypt’s doctrine, applied to Ethiopia, looks like a containment policy. Applied to the United States, it looks like something else: a regional precedent that any non-littoral power, including the U.S. Navy, can be told to leave on the council’s terms. The same language, the same council, two different fights, and Washington has been treating the second one as background noise.

A Council Held Together by Saudi Weight

The framework Egypt is building is held together by the institutional weight of Saudi Arabia, the only member with the diplomatic standing to convene a council of this kind. The 2020 founding charter made Riyadh the headquarters, and Prince Faisal bin Farhan was the charter’s public face. Saudi participation gives the council its only serious weight. Egypt’s push to activate the council cannot succeed without Saudi endorsement, and Riyadh has not publicly aligned itself with the May 16, 2026 formulation.

The other six members are in different states of disrepair. Yemen’s government does not control its Red Sea coastline, which is largely held by the Houthis. Sudan is in a civil war that has emptied the government of any capacity to project maritime policy. Somalia’s federal authority barely extends beyond Mogadishu. Jordan and Djibouti are stable but small. Eritrea, with roughly 1,200 kilometers of Red Sea coastline including the strategic port of Assab, is the council’s most reliable military partner and the closest ideological fit with Egypt on Red Sea policy. The council is a legal and diplomatic vehicle, and its drivers are Egypt and Eritrea. The other members are passengers, and the bus only moves if Saudi Arabia lets it.

What the Architecture Would Do

The risk is not that the Red Sea Council will deploy a fleet. It will not. The risk is that the council’s framework, if endorsed by its members, will establish a regional norm that non-littoral powers require the council’s blessing before conducting security operations in the waterway. That is a norm Iran’s strategists would exploit immediately. The Houthi movement, which has been firing at international shipping since late 2023, would have a regional legal vocabulary to characterize Western naval operations as violations of council authority. The U.S. Navy’s task would not change, but the diplomatic cost of doing it would rise.

The United States should treat the May 16, 2026 statement as a strategic test, not as background noise. The first move is to clarify, formally and publicly, that U.S. naval operations in the Red Sea flow from treaty obligations, UN Security Council resolutions, and freedom-of-navigation principles that no regional council can override. The second is to make clear to Saudi Arabia, in private, that Riyadh’s endorsement of an exclusionary Red Sea doctrine would complicate the bilateral relationship both governments have invested in repairing. The third is to condition future security and economic assistance to Egypt on Cairo’s refraining from using the council as a mechanism to challenge U.S. operational freedom. None of this is a public break.

None of this requires a confrontation with Cairo. The Sisi government has real interests in the council: containing Ethiopia, balancing Turkish and Gulf influence in the Horn, and giving Egyptian diplomacy a stage it currently lacks. A doctrine that locks out U.S. naval power, however, would do the opposite of what Egypt needs. The Suez Canal is the country’s largest single source of foreign currency, and that revenue collapsed by 66% in 2024 because the waterway was unsafe for shipping. Egypt’s interests are aligned with American naval power in the Red Sea, and its diplomatic campaign is aligned against it. That contradiction will have to be resolved, and the sooner Washington treats it as the strategic question it is, the less it will cost. The Red Sea Council was designed to coordinate eight coastal states. The doctrine Egypt is loading into it is built to do something else, and the United States should not wait for the first crisis to discover which.