RIYADH: On 30 July 2026, the declaration establishing the Multinational Maritime Defence Alliance was signed in Riyadh. The signatories were Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Türkiye, Pakistan, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Djibouti and Somalia. Representatives of 43 countries attended the meeting, out of 51 invited parties.
The founding states agreed to entrust the leadership of the alliance to Saudi Arabia, itself a founding member, and to establish on its territory the permanent headquarters, joint command, command-and-control centre, combined maritime operations centre and secretariat-general. The declaration is significant because, for the first time in the region’s approach to Red Sea security, it identifies the institutions that must be first built to achieve their objectives. Earlier initiatives had failed to do so.
The declaration is a belated yet serious attempt to answer a question that has hung over the region for more than half a century: who has the authority to decide the fate of a maritime passage that carries nearly a tenth of global seaborne trade and is crossed by tens of thousands of vessels each year?
There has never been discord over the lawfulness of such an approach, but the difficulty lay in political will and the capacity to enforce it. The concept of collective security in the Red Sea is not new; it has long been discussed in strategic regional planning. However, the idea failed to be translated into a workable form capable of translating principle into action.
During the 1970s, there was collective agreement that the Red Sea should be a commercial and economic artery that allowed passage to all without discrimination. The littoral states, with Sudan at the forefront, moved towards understandings founded on that principle, but these never matured into a practical arrangement. They foundered amid the divisions of the Cold War, the wars of the Horn of Africa and the collapse of Somalia on the passage’s south-western shore.
