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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a former minister of youth and sports in Yemen, and a fellow at Oxford’s Blavatnik School
When Iran moved to block the Strait of Hormuz in March, it exposed the over-dependence of the Gulf countries on a waterway they do not control — and gave fresh urgency to building a new energy architecture that can survive the loss of any one route and contribute to peace in the region. In every conversation about that architecture, though, one country is almost entirely absent: Yemen.
The obvious objection is that Yemen is at war. Houthi rebels still hold the majority of northwestern Yemen, including the capital. The areas controlled by the internationally recognised government, including the interim capital Aden, still face instability. Houthi missile and drone strikes on Red Sea shipping and Israeli targets since 2023 have rerouted global trade and cost billions. With more threats and missile launches in recent days, treating Yemen as a security threat seems, on its face, reasonable.
But that framing is the problem. Yemen’s prolonged economic collapse and exclusion from regional trade and investment are part of what hollowed out the state in the first place — helping bring the Houthis to power. The regional and international response since has been to harden borders and route trade pathways, cables and pipelines around Yemen, making that exclusion permanent. Doing so will only turn the country into a security threat too large to contain.
Yemen sits at the confluence of the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Bab al-Mandab strait and the Arabian Sea, astride almost 15 per cent of all global seaborne trade. The country currently appears on every risk map; it appears on almost none of the opportunity maps. That must change.
With 2,400 kilometres of coast, Yemen is not just a transit point. It offers direct connectivity between Asian shipping lanes and the southern Arabian Peninsula, without a chokepoint. Aden was once among the world’s busiest ports. Decades of mismanagement and war may have obscured that fact, but the geography has not changed.
The lost opportunities in excluding Yemen from future regional plans are already visible across three pieces of Gulf architecture being considered: energy, trade and digital connectivity.
The Hormuz crisis has already shown that existing bypass routes are not enough. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline exits at Yanbu, on a Red Sea already exposed to potential Houthi attacks and the Bab al-Mandab chokepoint for Asia-bound ships. The UAE’s Fujairah pipeline sits within Iranian drone range. A genuinely resilient third route exists, and it runs through Yemen — from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province south to the deep-water port of Al-Dhabba in Hadhramaut, exiting directly into the Arabian Sea. The route was explored up until the early 2000s but negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the previous Yemeni regime collapsed. Two things have changed: Hormuz disruption is now real rather than theoretical, and the current government of Yemen could be more amenable to a pipeline deal.
When it comes to trade, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, Iraq and Turkey’s Development Road, a proposed Saudi-Turkish rail project, and elements of China’s Belt and Road each propose serious regional integration. But none has meaningfully incorporated Yemen. Digital infrastructure makes the cost most concrete. The new Sea-Me-We 6 and 2Africa cables are now being rerouted overland to bypass Yemen, increasing costs significantly due to terrain and complex civil works.
The problem is not Yemen’s instability; it is that the region is adapting by designing Yemen out of its future. Instability produces exclusion; exclusion deepens poverty; poverty sustains conflict. The security concerns driving Yemen’s removal from deals on cables, corridors and pipelines are products of a war that economic integration would help resolve.
A Yemen Connectivity Compact that brings together Gulf states, international financial institutions and Yemeni stakeholders, could commission feasibility work on the Al-Dhabba corridor, set out a cable landing framework for the Arabian Sea coast, rehabilitate Aden, and include Yemen in talks concerning regional infrastructure. Crucially, this would change the calculus for Yemen’s factions. A credible offer of investment, jobs and integration gives them something concrete to negotiate towards — and a stake in the region’s economic future.
The Hormuz crisis will pass. The architecture built in its shadow will not. Routing around Yemen is not a neutral planning choice; it is a wager that a country of this size, this location and this level of exclusion can be ignored indefinitely. It cannot.
