The Unfaithful Triangle

A very different picture emerges when the political map of West Asia is removed. Once the familiar colored polygons of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula are gone — the transplanted state of Israel is irrelevant to this discussion for now — it becomes clear that a large geographical hinge exists between the Mediterranean to the west and the Indian Ocean to the southeast, between Central Asia to the northeast and Africa across the Red Sea. The Taurus and Zagros mountains, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Syrian and Arabian deserts are surrounded by a network of seas. The Caspian and Black Seas, extending to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and around to the Red and Arabian Seas, border the land masses of the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus, along with the extensive river basins and the massive deserts in between. History has embedded itself in layers conforming to the topographic specificity of space. Mesopotamia arose from the alluvial ecosystem of the Tigris and Euphrates. Empires grew and shrank along the caravan routes established by negotiations with rivers, deserts, and mountains. Commerce radiated from and returned to ports that developed where land met navigable water. That is how West Asia would fit on an untampered geographical map, aligned with a supporting world order. When it does not, the focus shifts to how the dominant world system fits into the region's configuration, exposing its own agenda and vulnerability. Geopolitical abstraction tends to conceal that the physical world can constrain power, but containers cannot obey financial charts alone, and oil cannot teleport from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam. The flows of Capital carried by the geographical waterways harden at chokepoints with three apertures that pin the region to the colonial map of the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz is a bottleneck that accounts for nearly a quarter of global petroleum trade and consumption. The location of hydrocarbon deposits and the enclosed form of the Gulf tapering into a narrow outlet trigger successive attempts to stabilize a geographical relation upon which an external economic system makes itself dependent. At the opposite corner of the Arabian Peninsula lies Bab el-Mandeb, which separates Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea. The “Gate of Lamentation” is the southern aperture of the Red Sea and, with its northern counterpart, the Suez Canal, constitutes the two-valve system of a complementary maritime organ. When it is hard to cross, Africa becomes large again, Europe farther away, fuel heavy, and time expensive. Suez is the most contested member of the triangle, because unlike Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb, its geographical isthmus has always presented a tantalizing possibility of joining the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to what stretches beyond. Egyptian, Persian, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Islamic rulers maintained canal systems in an effort that culminated in the 19th century’s enormous European intervention to tap the area’s geographical resources. The canal has been an infrastructural tool of empire since its opening in 1869, converting access to property and geopolitical power. Save for the hiatus of Nasser’s intolerable 1956 nationalization of the canal, European powers have latched on to a passage indispensable to their international system. Britain, France, and their above-mentioned Zionist progeny have made sure to pass the baton to the United States and its war apparatus. These chokepoints are usually described as strategic assets of the Middle East, but the three waterways do not reveal West Asia’s dependence on the world economy as much as the other way around, a system guaranteeing Europe’s access to Asian production, Asian access to Gulf energy, Mediterranean access to the Indian Ocean, and certainly US hegemony over global trade. The latter has to squeeze through three apertures of the world economy’s abstract map to come in contact with land, water, distance, and what it abhors the most, material constraint.

The Yemeni highlands descend toward Aden and Bab el-Mandeb, saturated with a history much older than the states through which it is now partitioned. Zaydi highlands, Sabaean kingdoms, caravan routes, and Aden's Indian Ocean commerce accumulate along this descent until the land reaches the Gate of Lamentation. Here, Yemen does not so much possess the strait as run into it where Africa approaches from the opposite shore, while the Red Sea arrives from the north, and the Indian Ocean opens to the south. Unlike Suez, which was constructed, Bab el-Mandeb was encountered. More than alluding to the danger of navigating a strait, the Gate of Lamentation is at the tip of the Red Sea, which is the aquatic rift produced by the divergence of the tectonic plates of Africa and Arabia. It is a geological separation that harks back to the breaking apart and flooding of ancient land, swallowing its perished populations. There is an islet of mourning at the tip of the finger where land retreats, emanating the memory of danger, departure, and loss through the narrow strait where two continents almost touch. Old Greek and Roman authors called the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula “Arabia Felix,” because the highlands with their terraced agriculture contrasted with its vast and arid northern interior. Prosperous kingdoms flourished, and numerous cultures thrived. The Marib dam was a wonder of hydraulic technology that fertilized the land, making ancient Yemen a major center of economic and political gravity. From the 9th century on, Zaydi Islam spread a political-religious tradition that survived intermittently for a millennium, and from which the Houthis emerged in the northern highlands immediately adjacent to Saudi Arabia. The latter sought to expand its territory and fought Yemen repeatedly in the hope of annexing it. The Saudi forces prevailed in 1934 with the Taif treaty, but the frontier remained a source of disagreement for decades, as again, borders were laid over organic human ties and physical landscape. In 1962, Yemeni republicans loyal to Nasser’s revolutionary nationalism overthrew the religious order, while the Saudis perceived this potentially far-reaching political transformation as an imminent threat to their security environment. In a striking parallel to the present, Faisal Al Saud chose to support the Yemeni royalists opposed to the republican uprising, while Egypt’s Nasserite revolution, like Iran’s solidarity with the Houthis today, stood and fought for indigenous autonomy and self-determination. Adding to the ethno-political imbroglio, Southern Yemen had followed a different historical trajectory, seized by Britain in 1839 due to its particularly strategic location. When the British Empire withdrew in 1967, after 128 years of rule, South Yemen transformed into an explicitly Marxist democratic republic, while North Yemen remained republican but relatively conservative and increasingly aligned with Saudi Arabia. The unification of the two states in 1990 created today’s Republic of Yemen, which, in contrast to the enormous petroleum wealth of its foe, has been mired in poverty due to sanctions, but with steadfast principles and resilience refuses to bend the knee. Ansar Allah emerges as a Zaydi religious and cultural revival, fighting many wars against its government, spilling across Saudi Arabia and involving the Gulf states. The Saudi military intervention of 2015 exploded into a devastating and protracted war, but its military superiority did not, to this day, translate into control of the Yemenis, who have demonstrated that geography, social structures, and internal history cannot be conveniently subordinated. Saudi Arabia has since repeatedly attempted to secure its southern border by influencing the political order of what it considers its backyard. Designated as a terrorist organization by the US and suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises, Ansar Allah remains in control of northwestern Yemen. Since August 2026, the valiant movement has been engaged in an escalation that may unravel the truce held since 2022 and restore the aperture through which proper relations and safe passage have to be negotiated.

The excavation process differs from Suez’s removal of the obstructing substance. Here, the desired resource is buried deep in large subterranean pockets, drilled to the surface, and concentrated in wells and gathering systems, before it is loaded in terminals and tankers that converge on the Persian Gulf. Thus, the reservoir is effectively an extractive enclosure, yet the condition of the commodity’s release into circulation rests upon a geographical position that has the capacity to contest passage. Iran has the upper hand since Saudi Arabia’s petroleum reserves, the Emirates’ crude oil, Qatar’s liquid gas, international contracts, insurance, and all sorts of financial relations remain subordinate to the brutal material fact that the ship has to leave the Gulf. And all the failed American military presence can do is parade its deterrence with empty threats and intimidation.

Geography opens a passage at Bab el-Mandeb, circulation cuts through geography with the Suez Canal, but geography reasserts itself at the Strait of Hormuz, the single maritime outlet of an extractive enclosure indispensable to world economy. On one side is a corridor, open at Bab el-Mandeb and artificially completed at Suez; on the other, a funnel with a narrow spout holding back reserves. Therefore, the three apertures describe the different relations between geography and the circulation of goods, and how two maritime channels serve the flow of Capital and the hegemony of the US empire. But rather than being arranged in a triangle, they form an arc that boomerangs upon the imperial powers dependent on it, with the poetic justice and sober fact that the Strait of Hormuz does not have its Suez.

If the sedimentation of Yemeni civilization descends from the highlands toward a naturally given channel, another path can be followed along the Red Sea to reach its northern end, where the nature of the passage changes. The Isthmus of Suez is the narrow land connection between Africa and Asia, separating the Mediterranean from the Red Sea. The landscape itself suggests the idea of connection, and several attempts were made before the 19th century’s bold excavation of the canal. The possibility for Europe to reach the Indian Ocean without circumnavigating Africa became a reality between 1859 and 1869 under the Suez Canal Company, associated with Ferdinand de Lesseps. Large numbers of Egyptian laborers, including peasants conscripted through the corvée system, carried out harsh physical work before mechanization began to replace manual labor. The British, initially suspicious of the French-backed canal project, could not ignore its importance and, in 1875, bought Egypt’s share when the country was in financial distress. Egypt was occupied by Britain in 1882 and gained independence in 1922. However, it was not until a remarkable moment in 1956 that President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company. An entirely different course for the region could have developed, but the imperial system had transformed Egypt's geography into an infrastructure for its own movement. This imperial tool was quickly reclaimed and left embedded in a naturalized colony, a mere line on a global trade map, an abstraction from the millions of cubic meters of displaced earth, human labor, machinery, finance, disease, and coercion. In 2021, the Ever Given, a mega cargo vessel, ran aground in the Suez Canal, blocking it for six days and causing an economic disaster, with hundreds of vessels accumulating on both ends. Global circulation ground to a halt due to an object turned sideways, revealing how the vocabulary of flows, markets, and logistics eventually breaks down to expose the physical foundation of a returning geography.

Unlike the valve system of the Suez Canal and Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz is the mouth of a reservoir. The defining strategic flow is outwards, as crude oil and petroleum products produced around the Gulf enter the global market through a narrow maritime outlet. Whereas topography and excavation define the other two, the aperture of Hormuz is steeped in geology. Some 20 million barrels of petroleum per day pass through the strait, compared to about 5 million that the pipelines can circumvent. With no second maritime aperture, the Persian Gulf is an elongated, shallow sea, almost enclosed by the southeastern Iranian coast skirting the protruding Musandam Peninsula of Oman, colorfully conveyed in Arabic by Ras Al Khaimah (head of the tent), the nearby port city. A vast basin of petrochemical resources extends behind the tight sea gorge that opens into the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Petroleum, however, does not originate at the surface to move horizontally towards the outlet but is the product of hundreds of millions of years of deposition, burial, transformation, and migration through porous rock.

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