Beyond the growing competition between the United States and China, a range of overlapping tensions is emerging across the region, underscoring how contested and complex the future of the Indian Ocean is likely to be.
Yemen’s Houthis, an Iran-aligned group, have repeatedly threatened to disrupt shipping through the Bab al Mandeb Strait in response to Israel’s war on Gaza and the US-Israeli confrontation with Iran. The waterway, which links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, carries 10 to 14 percent of global maritime trade.
Elsewhere, tensions have surfaced between Somalia and Israel over the latter’s support for closer ties with Somaliland, the self-declared breakaway region that Somalia considers part of its sovereign territory.
Somaliland occupies a strategic stretch of coastline in the Horn of Africa near the Red Sea, making it geopolitically significant.
Türkiye, a close ally of Somalia, has strongly backed Mogadishu’s territorial integrity and opposed what it views as policies that could further fragment the region.
In February, Ankara and Mogadishu signed a major defence and economic agreement aimed at deepening cooperation in areas ranging from security and military affairs to trade and investment.
“There are so many players now – not just the US and China, but also India, regional Arab powers, and even Türkiye are expanding their footprint,” Abdinor Dahir, a Somali political analyst, tells TRT World.
“All these are happening at the backdrop of a shifting global order characterised by multipolar fragmentation and a shift from free-trade globalisation to strategic nationalism. The complex competition in the Indian Ocean basically means it’s a fragmented and fragile security landscape where no single power dominates,” says Dahir.
Dahir also notes that this changing environment is prompting smaller Indian Ocean states, including Seychelles, the Maldives and Mauritius, to diversify their security partnerships and diplomatic relationships.
These countries are members of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), a regional organisation that promotes economic cooperation among littoral states.
Its membership spans countries with widely differing geopolitical interests, including Iran, the UAE, Australia, Kenya, France and India, reflecting both the diversity and strategic importance of the region.
Historical context
Five centuries ago, the Indian Ocean was the scene of an intense geopolitical rivalry between the Ottoman Empire, a major Muslim naval power, and Portugal, the leading European maritime force of the era.
Their struggle for influence produced a series of battles, shifting alliances and campaigns aimed at controlling key straits and maritime trade routes—what modern strategic thinkers refer to as Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC).
“Throughout centuries, many confrontations between European and Muslim states have taken place from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf that form the historical foundations of the modern strategic concept known today as SLOC,” says Gulizar Manav Uludag, a researcher on the 16th-century Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry in the Indian Ocean.
According to Uludag, the geopolitical importance of the Indian Ocean has not diminished over nearly 500 years.
Rather, globalisation has amplified its significance, turning the region into one of the world’s most important maritime spaces for international trade and energy security.
Andrew Peacock, a historian at the University of St Andrews who has studied pre-modern Indian Ocean politics, from the Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry to other regional power struggles, agrees that the region has long occupied a central place in global affairs.
“Much of the famous ‘silk roads’ of history were actually maritime routes that went across the Indian Ocean, linking China to the Middle East and ultimately Europe. This has made the Indian Ocean a zone of intense competition between outside forces, but also a place where local states and actors have been able to challenge the great powers of history,” Peacock says.
“We can see these dynamics continuing today in various forms, not least in the current competition both between China and America, and Iran and America. The global significance of these routes remains as crucial as ever, even if the goods transported have changed,” the professor tells TRT World.
Strategists in the region note that small littoral states like Djibouti or island-nations like Mauritius might play a bigger role than their size or power, as great powers like China and the US have recently tried to exert their influence over them.
Peacock says this also has a historical precedent in the Indian Ocean’s centuries-old conflicts, noting that, because of the region’s vast expanse, outside powers have sought to dominate it by occupying a few strategically important locations, such as Hormuz, which Iran’s Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I seized from the Portuguese in 1622.
“In the 16th century, the Portuguese tried to seize key ports from Mombasa in what is now Kenya to Melaka on the Malay peninsula. So the current competition over the Chagos Islands is a continuation of this strategy in many ways,” Peacock says.
“Even the idea of closing down the ocean to all but favoured shipping, as attempted by both the Houthis and Iran, is something with plenty of historical precedents—the Portuguese similarly tried to monopolise trade across the Indian Ocean back in the days, he adds.
Obviously, in the current context, modern weapons make it much easier and more effective for countries to conduct blockades across critical choke points like Hormuz than old-fashioned blockades of the past.
In the contemporary international system, different actors have replaced the 16th-century Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry, according to Uludag.
“Chinese projects across the Horn of Africa under the Belt and Road Initiative—alongside India’s maritime strategy centered on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and its security partnerships with the US, Japan, and Australia, demonstrate that a new power rivalry is unfolding in the Indian Ocean,” she tells TRT World.
“The region has evolved into a theater of multidimensional geopolitical struggle shaped not merely by military supremacy, but by port investments, energy corridors, maritime transport routes, logistics hubs, and supply chains.”
