Power projection of Middle East states in the Horn of Africa: linking security burdens with capabilities

ABSTRACT

The reported militarization of the Horn of Africa by Middle Eastern states has generated great interest among scholars and analysts alike. Their analyses and articles about the projections of power from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa are exaggerated, however, because they underappreciate the extant and enduring security burdens of the states in question and overestimate their national power capabilities. This is largely due to common misperceptions and faulty measures of military power. The question that this article answers is therefore not whether states such as Turkey or the United Arab Emirates (UAE) could redeploy limited military resources extra-regionally, but why would they and for how long? Using empirical data from interviews, defence statistics and data from recent deployments of the UAE and Turkey, we show how these key players are inhibited from prospective, long-term, and sustained deployments extra-territorially. This is supported by our analysis of the two states’ power capabilities (latent and actual) and their security burdens that constrain and limit options for the use of military tools abroad in the pursuit of foreign policy aims. This has led both Turkey and the UAE to engage in various forms of remote warfare involving local partners, allied militias, and mercenaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Military power projection
• Middle East
• remote warfare
• security burdens
• Horn of Africa
• extra-regional military deployment

Introduction

Recently, various states of the Middle East have taken unprecedented military and quasi-military actions in their near abroad. The spree of base building, ports development and influence seeking in the Horn of Africa by states such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) offer prime examples. Indeed, these countries may be said to be increasingly enmeshed in the politics and security of states such as Somalia and Sudan. This has aroused great interest among area specialists and the policy community of interested nations. In a short time, a wide literature has grown that attempts to objectively analyze the increasing interactions between the two sides of the Red Sea and, correspondingly, the rise in tensions between ideological and political rivals in the Middle East.¹ The actions of these Middle Eastern states across the Horn of Africa have reportedly ‘[…]facilitated geopolitical tensions and regional rivalries that risk militarizing the region and impacting human security by reinforcing more state-centric conceptions of security concentrated on territorial and border disputes’.² Echoing the increased likelihood of troop deployments and a clash of arms, Todman argued that the increasing growth of security and economic interests in the Horn of Africa on the part of Middle East states has led ‘[…] their interventions [to] become more assertive, the impact of their rivalries in Africa is becoming increasingly damaging. Their zero-sum rivalry has provoked retaliations, which have dangerously destabilized vulnerable parts of Africa. New tensions are also arising’.³

These scenarios are all predicated, without fail, on the assumption that Middle East states and their leaders possess the capabilities to effectively project power extra-regionally. There are two primary causes for this. First, overestimations of national power and hard power resources available to the state to prosecute military operations extra-regionally generally prevail over soberer analyses.⁴ Second, most measures of power fail to contextualize or underappreciate the enduring and extant security burdens faced by these states.

Narratives and misreading of power such as those described above, however, have important implications. This is because our (always imperfect) measurements of power – and therefore our analyses – can inform much of the way states interact with one another and, in turn, our perceptions of threats. Misperceptions of power can generate and exacerbate highly unstable security environments and contribute to security dilemmas and/or an intensification of status competition between emerging powers.⁵ Misunderstandings or miscalculations on the parts of state leaders can lead to dangerous outcomes, including arms races, the failure of deterrence or, in extremis, war. In addition, underestimating an adversarial state’s capabilities may lead to gratuitous adventurism by states that may correspondingly overestimate their own capabilities.⁶

All measurements of power offer only an incomplete sum of the parts.⁷ Yet, we posit these measurements are doubly flawed if they fail to contextualize the geographic and security environment of states, i.e. identifying and analyzing the impact of security burdens of the states in question. The purpose of this article, accordingly, will demonstrate not only the prevalence of misleading overestimations of state power by scholars as well as pundits, but also how the extra-regional projections of military power by states may be misconstrued as something they are not. To do so we have selected Turkey and the UAE and their respective power projections in the Horn of Africa as our case studies. The rationale for these Middle East states over others such as Iran or Saudi Arabia is because they are the most active in the Horn of Africa and therefore have been the subjects of frequent (mis)characterization.

The article begins with a brief overview of the genesis and development of power projections to the Horn of Africa by various Middle East states, paying particular attention to our case studies. We focus on state use of hard power, e.g. using coercion through threats or inducements to get ‘others to act in ways that are contrary to their initial preferences and strategies’.⁸ These could include military deployments, or leverage gaining actions such as security-related infrastructure building like bases and dual-use ports,⁹ as opposed to other political or economic interactions. This is because they link the rationale of states to take actions – as informed by their primary security burdens – with their hard power resources, i.e. the products or outcomes of translating those resources into military capabilities. The military capabilities of states are particularly important because ‘military power expresses and implements the power of the state in a variety of ways within and beyond the state borders, and is also one of the instruments with which political power is originally created and made permanent’.¹⁰ We assess this combination – security burdens with hard power resources – best illustrates the latent and total power of the state to project hard power as well as the ability of state leaders to project said power.¹¹

The second section measures Turkey and the UAE’s national power resources and the extent to which these are translated into military capabilities. Subsequently, it explores the degree to which this military power has been utilized (or not) to affect outcomes on the ground in the Horn of Africa. In the final section, we define and analyze the security burdens and hard power resources of Turkey and the UAE, demonstrating that both states may possess some intent but currently lack the capability to effectively project hard power in the Horn of Africa for the length of time suitable to demonstrably alter current distributions of power. This contributes to the literature by offering an important corrective to measurements of power. In short, our focus on the hard power capabilities of states, on the one hand, and their relative security burdens, on the other, that constrain and limit options for the use of military tools abroad in the pursuit of foreign policy aims.

Power projection into the Horn of Africa

The millennia-old interactions between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East have increasingly become associated with security. While patterns of the current interaction are uneven, what links the actions of all Middle East states involved in the Horn of Africa¹² is that they have demonstrated at least some intent and a limited capacity to engage significantly with most states in the region. Some such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been involved quite substantially since the 1960s and the era of decolonization.¹³ Substantive, sustained engagement by Turkey, the UAE and Qatar, on the other hand, dates to a little over a decade. Their entry to the region has already influenced major political changes such as the 2018 peace accord between Eritrea and Ethiopia.¹⁴

The impetus and timing for Middle East states may have differed, but the intensity of their recent interactions in the Horn of Africa has its roots in the 2011 Arab uprisings.¹⁵ These resulted in turmoil across the region and certainly paved the way, in part, for attempts by regional and extra-regional states to redistribute power and change regime types. Indeed, beyond the sectarian-political competition of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the rise to power of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood has resulted in an intra-Sunni cleavage over the mobilization of political Islam. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (JDP)-led government under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, has overtly supported Hamas as well as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, putting it on a collision course with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. In addition, Qatar, a conservative Gulf monarchy, has used its vast hydrocarbon wealth in the service of various and often controversial political agendas across the region, at times dovetailing with Ankara’s agenda.¹⁶ The UAE, on the other hand, has progressively drawn closer to Saudi Arabia, particularly post-2011, in an attempt not only to maintain but grow the power and influence of the region’s conservative monarchies.¹⁷

The reshuffling of regional power distributions had led to increased polarization,¹⁸ and has given new impetus to the search for strategic partners and spheres of influence beyond the traditional boundaries of the Middle East, particularly in the Horn of Africa. The polarization inherently present in the Middle East, one that is engendered as much by the lack of a clear hegemon as by the presence of shifting would-be hegemons, is instructive in explaining the current pattern of Middle East states’ power projections in the Horn of Africa.¹⁹ In essence, the current polarity constitutes a greater impetus for certain states to engage with Horn of Africa states to pursue strategies that further their own security interests at the expense of rival states. The power rivalries have spilled beyond the Middle East’s boundaries into the Horn of Africa, a regional security complex that also lacks a clear hegemon. Given delicate structural and systemic variables in both regional security complexes, such rivalries are of concern to regional and extra-regional states.

The growing intervention of Middle East players has been matched by a gradual shift in their repertoire of involvement: from transactional and humanitarian to political and strategic. For example, over a decade ago, the UAE, via Dubai ports operator DP World, began to invest in the development and management of Djibouti’s ports. That same year, Turkey launched a political agenda of openness towards the African continent that was largely driven by humanitarian and business organizations, but that quickly led to Turkey becoming a political actor in Somalia.²⁰ Qatar and Saud Arabia, states with interests that increasingly seem to align with Turkey and the UAE, respectively, have also been active but less visibly so. For example, the Saudi approach to the Horn of Africa has been based on economic and financial aid, and on religious proselytism often referred to as ‘quiet diplomacy’ for several years.²¹ It has also strengthened its bonds with Ethiopia, reportedly being one of the main promoters of normalization of ties between Addis Ababa and Asmara.²² On the other side, Qatar was able to increase its footprint in the region through its ‘carrot diplomacy’ and the establishment and funding of a wide network of institutions, schools and charities.²³

Two post-Arab Spring events were particularly important for the transformation of the Horn of Africa into a zone of contestation and militarization post-2011: the military intervention in Yemen in 2015 and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) rupture in 2017. The armed conflict in Yemen increased the geostrategic importance of the Horn of Africa for certain Middle East states, particularly the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Saudi-led coalition, spearheaded by the UAE, attempted to limit Iranian influence by breaking Eritrea and Sudan away from Tehran to stem the supply of weaponry from points across the Red Sea and the Gulf of Yemen in the Horn.²⁴ Importantly, in what would become one port/basing deal amongst many, Eritrea agreed to lease its Hanish Islands and facilities at the port city of Assab to the UAE for 30 years in 2015. The next year, DP World signed a tripartite agreement with Ethiopia and the de-facto independent but internationally unrecognized Republic of Somaliland to refurbish and expand the port of Berbera on the southern coast of the Gulf of Yemen.²⁵ In 2017, a DP World subsidiary, won a concession for the management and development the port at Bosaso in Somalia’s autonomous region of Puntland. But the UAE and its companies were not acting alone nor were they the first to cut deals in the region.

In 2013 and 2014, Turkish companies took over operations at Mogadishu’s international airport and port, respectively.²⁶ By 2017, Turkey not only controlled Somalia’s most lucrative infrastructure assets, but had built a prominent embassy and opened a military facility to train the Somali National Army .²⁷ To Somalia’s north, Turkish president, Erdoğan, made his first visit to Sudan in December 2017, signing multi-million dollar agreements and giving Turkey the green light to restore a ruined Ottoman port city at Suakin, a strategically located island on Sudan’s coast.

In June 2017, the split in the GCC pitting Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain against Qatar exacerbated what had been an already tense situation one decade in the making. The rift brought Turkey and Qatar closer together symbolically and materially. Turkey airlifted food and medical supplies and established the Qatar-Turkey Combined Joint Force Command in Doha. The rift then spilled over to the Horn of Africa, as regional states aligned either for or against Qatar. Tensions increased and led to even more involvement of Middle East states in the Horn of Africa. What has followed since have been frequent overestimations of power projection capabilities of Middle Eastern states by punditry and in scholarly treatments.²⁸ In turn, it engendered a narrative based on faulty premises about the nature of power and its measurements, a subject of critical import that is addressed in the next section.

Power: measurement and projection

Power is intrinsically important, but notoriously difficult to measure.²⁹ Joseph Nye famously noted that power, like love, is ‘easier to experience than to define or measure’.³⁰ Power is quantifiable only in the sum of its parts. And our measurements of those parts – whether this is GDP, gold reserves or scientific prowess – form, at best, a fuzzy representation. Perceptions of influence and power, therefore, often lead to poorly informed assumptions. Relatedly, conceptualizations of power, for valid reasons, remain central to and inform our most critical theories about the international relations of states.

Numerous measures have been developed to estimate a given state’s power. These include information-dominant, power-as-outcomes approaches as well as measurements identifying the numbers of soldiers, defense spending and measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) that, in combination, form the building blocks of state power. The most common approach to measuring power is by calculating the military kit and wealth of a given state or states.³¹ Material wealth – currency reserves, hydrocarbons, human capital, technology – enable a state to buy influence, provide humanitarian and other sorts of aid, offer cash to support leaders with congruent interests and invest in businesses, industry, and critical infrastructure in another state. This article uses a largely qualitative methodology and employs methods of measuring material power. This methodological decision is not due to a lack of consideration for ideational power and soft resources, but by the difficulty of measuring them effectively.³²

Military strength, on the other hand, gives states the ability to commit violence and coerce other states, issue threats, defend themselves from threats and defeat enemies. We pay particular attention to measurements of military might because ‘The ultimate yardstick of national power is military capability’.³³ Thus, scholars, intelligence analysts and think tanks compile exhaustive lists of the most visible symbols of state power: tanks, ships, drones and fighter jets (see Table 1). Although the assessments of military power by analysts and scholars are mostly based on variables such as the amount of money that states spend each year on defense, the number of personnel in their armed forces and how many advanced weapon systems they have, power, military effectiveness and a willingness to use them cannot be reduced to simple numbers.³⁴ In addition, even the most accurate measures of power are often outdated or contain erroneous information, further contributing to mistaken analyses.³⁵ Scholars and analysts frequently tend to divine the intent of states and their leaders to project force overseas on the basis of these analyses. However, these almost always fail to consider the difficulties of deploying assets extra-territorially. This is true for almost all states. Possession of an army, for example, does not necessarily lend itself to amphibious operations. This capability continues to allude the militaries of some of the most developed states. To put it another way, ‘knowing the horsepower and mileage of the vehicle does not tell us whether it will get to the preferred destination’.³⁶

Table 1. A comparison of the commonly used military strength indicators/equipment: UAE and Turkey.

Country	UAE		Turkey
Army
Main Battle Tanks (MBT)	383		2,379
Air Force
Fighter (FTR) and Fighter/Ground Attack (FGA) aircraft	137		310
Navy
Total Naval Vessels	67		158
Principal Surface Combatants (PSC)	1		20
Submarines – Tactical	0		12
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)
	- Wing Loong I	15	- Bayraktar Mini	200+
	- Wing Loong II	25	- Bayraktar TB2	86
	- MQ-9B	15–18	- Serçe-1.	500+
	- RQ-1E Predator XP	10+	- Anka S	16–22
			- Heron 1	7

By ‘commonly used’ we mean figures for tanks, fighter aircraft etc. that give a snapshot or form indicators of a state’s military strength. Numbers sourced and aggregated from. IISS, Military Balance 2020, 153–156; 381–383. For UAV numbers sourced and aggregated from Gettinger, The Drone Databook 2019.

Measurement of national resources and their translation into hard power resources

Comparing military power based on numbers and types of equipment offers the tantalizing possibility of depicting – even measuring – the comparative military might of states. Even reputable and much-cited statistics nevertheless fail to reflect the real power capabilities of these states because they are either incorrect and/or outdated. In addition, simply counting the number of soldiers or equipment is generally as poor an indicator of a state’s power as population size is. As one scholar observed, ‘most attempts to explicitly measure military power are mere tabulations of forces’ that offer little insight into ‘the actual capabilities of the forces of one country to deal with another’.³⁷ Egypt, for example, can reportedly field close to half a million soldiers, but it is weighed down with massive internal security and welfare burdens.³⁸ Doctrines and training remain rigid and state-of-the-art US weaponry remains underutilized.³⁹ In other words, Egypt’s ability to project power to its near abroad is not only severely hampered by internal threats coupled with supporting an underemployed, poor population, but by issues of training, interoperability, command and finances. Fittingly, as well as by necessity, Egypt’s various military services are regularly deployed within the country and act primarily in defense of the state against internal security threats. They also act as tools of force denial against outside armies, i.e. they are a defensive force.

Turning to our case studies, Turkey and the UAE were selected because they are the states most often referenced in the literature in relation to the scramble for power in the Horn of Africa. We focus primarily on naval assets because navies offer states the ability to project power and potentially take territory and hold it via amphibious operations, for example⁴⁰. Air power, on the hand, while powerful in terms of a state’s power projection capabilities, is most often geared towards territorial air defense. In addition, air power alone cannot result in the acquisition of territory; boots on the ground are needed.

In terms of hard power projection capabilities, the UAE currently counts 67 vessels as comprising its naval force (see Table 1). This substantial number, however, includes vessels under 30 m which many navies do not count when reporting their fleet size. Fleet size, in any case, tells us little about a state’s onshore power projection from sea or, more broadly, its ability to operate effectively in non-territorial waters and achieve littoral effects. Rather, an exploration of the history of deployments, mission and doctrine, and primary role is required. In the case of the UAE, the navy’s priority has been and remains the protection of territorial waters and offshore hydrocarbon facilities⁴¹. Hydrocarbons are the lifeblood of the UAE, and their protection continues to comprise the core economic and security interests of the country and its navy. This means the navy’s ability to blockade ports and the coast to stem the importation of arms to enemy forces was severely limited when UAE forces were redeployed to Yemen in 2015. This occurred for four main reasons: sustainability at sea issues, demands for vessels for other missions, a shortage of vessels with required capabilities such as high-speed transports, and a dearth of ships with qualified crews which could be tasked. The UAE did send Baynunah class corvettes to patrol the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Yemen, attempting to undertake blockading and force protection operations in the process. However, the navy had to hire additional support vessels to assist it with moving equipment and personnel to Yemen and within the region.⁴²

In the case of Turkey, with its much larger navy, naval strategy has been designed around its prospective maritime jurisdiction areas that equal more than half of the country’s land territory. Across this huge area bordering four seas (Black, Marmara, Aegean and Mediterranean) only the boundaries in the Black Sea have been determined by international treaties. Turkey’s power projection on the sea relies on the new pre-emptive security approach known as the Erdoğan doctrine.⁴³ According to this, Turkish security rests on the presence of boots on the ground beyond national borders, such as in northern Iraq or Syria.⁴⁴ The Blue Homeland (Turkish: Mavi Vatan) doctrine has extended that security concept to the seas. Turkey’s navy, therefore, is trained to ‘eliminate the threats to [Turkish] homeland […]; shape the behaviors of other [state] actors by playing an active role during crisis management; and protect [Turkey’s] maritime rights and interests.’⁴⁵ It is in this role that Turkey’s relatively dated guided missile frigates operate and act as a deterrent to competitor states in the region, as witnessed in the ongoing Eastern Mediterranean gas dispute.⁴⁶ The desire to reduce the gap with its most powerful neighbors has convinced Ankara to assign greater importance to its navy, but it is still the smallest of its armed forces and remains focused on its near abroad as befits its training, doctrine, mission and its extant and enduring security burdens. It, like the UAE’s navy, is therefore ill-suited to redeploy to the Red Sea or further afield.

Power as outcomes: the UAE and Turkey in the Horn of Africa

Taking a defensive force focused on mitigating extant and enduring security burdens (with commensurate doctrine, training, history of deployments and primary roles) and attempting to utilize it for power projection extra-territorially or extra-regionally is no simple task. ‘Even when we focus on agents or actors [such as states], we cannot say an actor “has power” without specifying “power to do what”’.⁴⁷ Yet, the analyses and measurements of Turkey’s and the UAE’s power projection capabilities – their ability to affect outcomes militarily – has ignore this ‘black box’. For example, one report noted ‘a race is underway between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey to build naval and military bases right across the Horn of Africa. This threatens to change the naval balance in the north-west Indian Ocean’.⁴⁸ Another suggested ‘The Iranians can now use the new Turkish base [at Suakin] in Sudan to send more arms and equipment to [the] Houthis [in Yemen], while Turkey can use its newfound military presence to send more troops to Qatar or meddle further in the affairs of Egypt […]’.⁴⁹

These analyses make for exciting reading but are nevertheless flawed for a number of reasons. First, many ports in the region are positively second tier. Berbera, Bosaso and Suakin, for example, have either fallen into disrepair and require substantial infrastructural improvements or never have been able to offer berthing to ships much larger than dhows. This means that the stationing of naval vessels much larger than small gunships is impossible or downright foolhardy. Even with larger naval vessels like corvettes which have a relatively shallow draft, ports may lack the facilities that would routinely be found in naval ports.⁵⁰ The result is that even if a state such as the UAE possessed the capability and rationale to redeploy, let alone dock, a corvette away from it territorial waters, it would have been unable to berth at the moribund port of Berbera during the duration of the conflict in Yemen..

Second, both the UAE and Turkey have found it necessary to deploy military force to their near abroad since 2015. None of these deployments were to the Horn of Africa except the UAE’s usage of the port and airport facilities at Assab to move equipment and personnel to and from Yemen. This is not to say that Turkey’s and the UAE’s military deployments in their near abroad were not successful in affecting outcomes. The UAE’s limited intervention in Yemen demonstrated its armed forces were an effective small force with bounded capabilities; ‘they can punch above their weight’, as Yates put it.⁵¹ Similarly, Turkey’s significant deployment of military forces to Syria as well as its supporting role in Libya and the Caucasus demonstrated Turkey’s military can be formidable close to home and against certain military forces.

Third, the deployments of both Emirati and Turkish forces were in line with their respective security doctrines of keeping security threats at arm’s length.⁵² They also occurred in what the leaders of both states consider their near abroad. Yet, Ankara and Abu Dhabi largely turned to remote warfare to attempt to affect favorable outcomes without becoming embroiled in potentially costly – in blood and treasure – conflicts. Remote warfare is characterized by a shift away from ‘boots on the ground’ deployments toward light-footprint military interventions. This may involve using drone and air strikes, special forces, intelligence operatives, private contractors, buying the loyalty of tribes and their fighters and training teams assisting local forces to do the fighting, killing, and dying on the ground.⁵³ In Libya, for instance, the UAE and Turkey supported opposing sides in the Libyan civil war. They did so by providing drones and other military hardware such as armored vehicles, training and the funding of mercenary forces. It was in Libya that Turkish-made drones were used to good effect against the UAE-backed militias using Chinese-made drones and Russian-made weaponry. In the Caucasus, in late 2020, when Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed over Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey and the UAE both utilized remote warfare to affect outcomes. Turkey supplied Azerbaijan with Turkish-made drones such as the Bayraktar TB-2 armed with munitions. The UAE, for its part, reportedly supplied Armenia with Russian-made tanks.

While they both prosecuted forms of remote warfare in Libya, they took actions for very different reasons. The UAE, for example, provided support for the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) against the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which was aligned with various Islamist militias. The UAE’s leadership views the threat of ‘political Islam’ as a primary security threat, as described below, and has acted to counteract it in Libya, Yemen and Egypt since 2011. For Turkey, the decision to support the GNA came out of the worsening security situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and attempts by Greece, Egypt and other states to limit Turkey’s access to offshore gas reserves – not its Muslim Brotherhood leanings. The fact that Turkey ended up supporting a Libyan faction with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, nevertheless, convinced the UAE’s leadership that its support of the eastern faction was in line with its national interests.

The Horn of Africa, despite the rhetorical scramble by Middle East states for influence and power, has remained relatively free from more overt forms of remote warfare such as drones and mercenaries. But it certainly has not escaped unscathed, with instances of other forms of remote warfare on the rise since 2017. Turkey, for example, has trained elements of the Somali National Army (SNA) since 2017 in Turkey and at its military facility in Mogadishu. Turkey reportedly donated 12 Kirpi armored vehicles and over one thousand assault rifles to the Cheetah Unit (Somali: Ciidanka Haramcad), a Turkish-trained special operations force in 2020. The UAE has also assisted the SNA by training troops at a camp near Mogadishu and reportedly paying the salaries of some SNA units, though these efforts ended in 2018. Beyond this, the UAE reportedly supported a mission to train a maritime force in the autonomous Somali region of Puntland circa 2010–2014. These efforts have led to allegations and genuine concerns that the forces trained by the UAE and Turkey, respectively, may be used as proxy forces in yet another remote warfare scenario similar to what was seen in Libya. The prosecution of forms of remote warfare by both protagonists in the Horn of Africa therefore looks set to continue. What has not occurred, and is distinctly unlikely to ever occur, is the projection of hard power by either state actor in the Horn of Africa. Their primary security burdens, as defined and analyzed in the next section, mean limited hard power capabilities are kept closer to home.

Evaluating security burdens

Any measures of power should consider states’ primary and often enduring security burdens. This is true of small states like the UAE, medium powers like Turkey, and great powers such as the US that possess the capabilities and, at times, the rationale to deploy force overseas on a truly global scale. By failing to take security burdens into account, scholars and pundits fail to understand some of the most basic additives of foreign policymaking by state leaders, almost regardless of regime type. In addition, even the most referenced qualitative or quantitative measurements of national power when separated from the context of primary and secondary security burdens – particularly over the longue durée, with its concentration on long-term conditions and gradual change rather than relatively brief political and military events – are handicapped in their explanatory power.

The first and second tier security burdens for Turkey and UAE are shown in Table 2. We define first tier security burdens as those coming from states possessing the extant and enduring capability and intent to cause catastrophic harm to the national security of the state in question. We define second tier security burdens as those emanating from states and non-states actors possessing the possible capability and intent to cause enduring, extant and serious harm to the national security of a country. Admittedly, Table 2 will be the subject of some dispute given its qualitative nature. Nevertheless, a listing of the UAE’s and Turkey’s respective security burdens helps illustrate why they place such great demands on their military resources, thus inhibiting them from effectively projecting force abroad. Turkey’s mistrust of Russia, for example, dates back centuries and has resulted in multiple wars.⁵⁴ Russia’s upgrades to its Black Sea fleet, the presence of Russian troops in neighbouring Syria, Armenia and Russian-occupied parts of Georgia, and its omnipresent interest in controlling the Straits represent existential threats and form the basis for Turkey’s primary security burden. Having a state harbouring age-old territorial designs and possessing the world’s fourth largest military at its doorstep means Turkey’s military remains largely designed (as it was during the Cold War) for defensive action close to home.

Table 2. First and second tier security burdens: Turkey and the UAE.

State	First tier security burdens (external states)	Second tier security burdens (external states)
Turkey	Russia	European states (in combination) and/or the USA, particularly when allied – in theory or in practice – with ‘internal agents’ such as Kurdish separatist groups
UAE	Iran	Groups or states associated with political Islam, e.g. Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey, Qatar

Reinforcing the threat from Russia, Turkish policymakers since the foundation of the Republic suffer from what has been termed ‘Sèvres syndrome’, or the belief that the country is permanently under the threat of dissolution from internal and external enemies. Named after the never-implemented 1919 Treaty of Sèvres, which aimed to dismember Ottoman Turkey, this ‘trauma’ continues to inform Turkey’s perception that Europe and the West, in general, pose an existential threat.⁵⁵ This has been spearheaded, in recent years, by Turkey’s secular nationalists (Turkish: ulusalcı),⁵⁶ who perceive both domestic and external insecurity as intrinsically linked.⁵⁷ Consequently, Turkey’s NATO allies offer the only credible bulwark against Russian aggression but are also the source of extant and enduring security threats. This has become even more pronounced following the 2016 failed coup and the US decision to support Kurdish militias in Syria as a proxy in the fight against the Islamic State, or Daesh.

In terms of military threats, Iran will remain the greatest concern for the foreseeable future for the UAE. Accordingly, the UAE’s armed forces remain almost exclusively in-country, offering a deterrent and allowing for sustained defensive and limited offensive operations.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, post-2011, the growing influence of groups associated with political Islam and its main backers, Turkey and Qatar, have come to be perceived as an additional extant security burden for the UAE. More specifically, Abu Dhabi’s royal rulers perceive political Islam – Sunni or Shia – as a primary security threat when it becomes part of a hostile state’s agenda against the UAE.⁵⁹ For the UAE’s leadership, countering political Islam in all forms, but particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, has therefore become a primary foreign policy driver, leading Abu Dhabi to support the ousting of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, send troops to Yemen in 2015, and prosecute remote warfare in Libya. Nevertheless, the UAE’s rulers continue to give understandable precedence to the omnipresent threat of a geographically proximate and hostile Iran while balancing that with the threat of political Islam. The cases of Assab and Perim Island are instructive here because they illustrate the rationale of the UAE to project limited hard power resources away from the homeland, but also the limits of said projection. As noted, Assab was leased and developed for the war in Yemen. Its importance was downgraded after the UAE discontinued military operations in mid-2019. Beyond the maintenance of a small presence at the base and related facilities for surveillance and logistics, most of the UAE’s hard power assets, to include personnel, have returned to the UAE.⁶⁰ In February 2021, the Emirates reportedly dismantled the Assab base.⁶¹ In contrast, an airbase being built by the UAE on Perim Island (also known as Mayun), strategically straddling the entrance to and from the Red Sea, was reportedly canceled in 2017, only for reports to surface in mid-2021 of its completion.⁶² A small airbase with an equally small commitment of troops in such a strategic location does not represent power projection in the traditional sense, but it packs a serious symbolic punch and signals the UAE’s commitment to countering perceived threats in the region even with only a miniscule contingent of soldiers and materiel.

When Turkey’s interests in the Horn of Africa are contextualized, they, like those of the UAE, pale in comparison to its next-door security burdens. The fact remains that Turkey’s FDI into the region is a fraction of its overall budgetary expenses.⁶³ Private businesses, despite many with strong ties to Erdoğan and his JDP, operate in places like Mogadishu and Addis Ababa and do much to further Turkey’s influence across the Horn of Africa that has nothing to do with ‘strategy’ or ‘power projection’. Turkey’s much-ballyhooed ‘base’ in Mogadishu, as currently used and operated, is certainly not a base in the traditional military sense of projecting hard power overseas.⁶⁴ And its intention to restore the old Ottoman port of Suakin is not driven by grand strategy but by a domestic political base hungry for a return to past Ottoman glories.⁶⁵ Prosecuting remote warfare in places like Libya has been a necessity for both the UAE and Turkey, rather than an option. Their enduring security burdens mean that their limited capabilities are kept close to the homeland to combat an array of external threats that are, in turn, perceived to trigger internal instability. In this way, both Ankara and Abu Dhabi attempt to affect outcomes on the ground by proxy. Both countries intervene remotely within the contexts of their second-tier security burdens such as Turkey in Syria against US-backed Kurdish militias and to counter growing Russian influence, and the UAE in Libya to counter a government allied with various Islamist militias.

These extant and enduring security burdens have had significant implications in terms of Turkey’s and the UAE’s respective foreign policy conduct in the Horn of Africa. Both states have developed ambitious foreign policies that involve actions and locations outside their traditional remit. Their limited capabilities to project traditional forms of military power, however, have led both Ankara and Abu Dhabi to turn to remote warfare to influence outcomes and undercut the influence of the other. Working through local partners, using allied militias and mercenaries, and transferring arms have allowed both the UAE and Turkey remote, but nonetheless substantial influence in the Horn of Africa. Security assistance, in general, has long been looked at as a backdoor vector for influence. No matter how originally altruistic the efforts of Turkey or the UAE to train police and army units, their indelible mark has been made. Turkish-trained SNA troops, for example, may be perceived as one more Trojan horse for Turkish power along with Turkey’s control of Mogadishu’s airport and port. That the SNA is utilized by Mogadishu’s government for local purposes that remain divorced from Middle East rivalries, does not necessarily dispel Abu Dhabi’s view that ‘Turkish’ troops are operating in Somalia. The stakes continue to rise as both states double down on remote warfare. In this zero-sum framework, and with a plethora of proxy-trained, equipped and salaried forces already operating in Mogadishu, violence seems increasingly likely at either the local level, the regional level or as an arena for international proxy conflict.

Conclusion

Despite the burgeoning narrative about a scramble for bases and nodes of power projection in the Horn of Africa, our findings demonstrate that observers have overestimated and miscalculated the capabilities of the UAE and Turkey to project sustained military power beyond their immediate neighborhoods. Neither state is capable of prosecuting grand ambitions because they do not currently possess those hard power capabilities. Because of security burdens, those hard power assets remain deployed closer to the homeland. This offers a needed correction to recent analysis that talks of a mad rush for military basing in the area.

By encapsulating and contextualizing the actions of the UAE and Turkey in the Horn of Africa, we demonstrate how they both currently lack the capabilities and rationale to effectively project military power extra-regionally for any sustained period. This conclusion is determined essentially by two factors. Firstly, as evidenced by extant and enduring security burdens, defense of their homelands for Middle East states from geographically proximate states is tantamount to any peripheral interests in the geographically distant Horn of Africa. Secondly, all states – to include the Middle East states in question – possess finite hard power capabilities, which inevitably affect any medium to long-term commitments by inhibiting their sustained deployment. The result entails an inability for significant power projection – consisting of the means for direct intervention or a sustained forward presence – away from their own borders. It is for these reasons that the UAE and Turkey have, by necessity, turned to remote warfare – using drones, security assistance and paying allied militias – to project power remotely.

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Notes on contributors

Federico Donelli

Federico Donelli is a postdoctoral research fellow in International Relations at the University of Genoa, Department of Political Sciences. His research fields have covered international politics and security studies of the MENA region, focusing on the foreign policy of the different players. Currently he is working on the process of militarization in the Horn of Africa and the growing engagement of the Middle Eastern states in the region. His latest works include ‘The Ankara Consensus: the significance of Turkey’s engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa’ in Global Change, Peace & Security, ‘Fluctuating Saudi and Emirati Alignment Behaviours in the Horn of Africa’ in The International Spectator, and Turkey in Africa. Turkey’s strategic involvement in sub-Saharan Africa’(I.B. Tauris, 2021).

Brendon J. Cannon

Brendon J. Cannon is Assistant Professor of International Security at the Institute of International & Civil Security (IICS), Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science with an emphasis on International Relations at the University of Utah, USA (2009), and held previous academic positions in Nairobi, Kenya and Hargeisa, Somaliland. His research focuses on the nexus of international relations, security studies, geopolitics and the strategic interplay between external states and the Horn of Africa. He is the author of multiple articles appearing in African Security, Terrorism and Political Violence, Defence Studies, and Third World Quarterly.

Notes

1. Demmelhuber, “Playing the Diversity Card”; Mabon, “Desectarianization”; and Beck and Richter, “Fluctuating Regional (Dis-)Order.”

2. Kabandula and Shaw, “Rising powers,” 2328.

3. Todman, “The Gulf Scramble for Africa,” 8.

4. Such fears led, in part, to massive overestimations of Soviet power by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War. Long, “Rubles, Dollars, and Power.”

5. Jervis, Perception and misperception.

6. Johnson, Overconfidence and war.

7. On the issue see Dahl, “The Concept of Power”; Tellis, Measuring National Power; Baldwin, Power and International Relations.

8. Nye Jr, The Future of Power, 11.

9. For more on these hard power interactions between the Middle East and the Horn of Africa regional security complexes see, for example, Cannon and Donelli, “Asymmetric alliances.”

10. Paret, “Military power,” 240.

11. There is a qualitative difference here. When national security concerns are less pronounced, state leaders may demonstrate a greater propensity to project hard power further from home. The case of the US is perhaps the most cited. According to Mearsheimer, once the US established hegemony in the nineteenth century in the Western Hemisphere, it formed the ‘basis of American exceptionalism in the foreign policy realm.’ Given the lack of geographically proximate threats, the US can and does deploy its power globally as an offshore balancer. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power, 234–244.

12. We consider Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Iran as comprising the most active Middle East states in the Horn of Africa.

13. Verhoeven, “The Gulf and the Horn.”

14. Ylönen, “Is the Horn of Africa’s.”

15. The roots, however, date back earlier and have much to do with Iranian actions in the Horn of Africa beginning in the mid-2000s. See Lefebvre, “Iran in the Horn.”

16. Roberts, “Reflecting on Qatar’s.”

17. Yates, The Evolution, 109–110.

18. By polarisation we mean the level of divergence in political outlooks and agendas of the regional units; i.e. the states and their leaders. The category of political polarisation, often with sectarian roots, is commonly used in the analysis of Middle East politics. See, for example, Valbjørn and Hinnebusch, “Exploring the Nexus.”

19. Hinnebusch, “The Middle East Regional System.”

20. Donelli, “The Ankara Consensus”; Özkan and Orakçı, “Viewpoint: Turkey.”

21. Richter, “Saudi Arabia: A Conservative P(l)ayer.”

22. Donelli and Dentice, “Fluctuating Saudi and Emirati.”

23. For more on Qatar’s role in the Horn see Cannon, “Foreign State Influence.”

24. In 2015, when the coalition launched operations in Yemen, it was supported by both Eritrea and Sudan. Sudan sent troops to Yemen and Eritrea allowed the UAE to use its airspace, territorial waters and the base and port at Assab.

25. Cannon and Rossiter, “Ethiopia, Berbera Port.”

26. Cannon, “Deconstructing Turkey’s Efforts,” 113–114.

27. Rossiter and Cannon, “Re-examining the ‘Base’.”

28. See, for example, Kleinfeld, “Maritime agreements”; Mishra, Gulf’s involvement in Horn; Abu-Sirriya, How the Gulf.

29. Tellis, Measuring National Power; Kadera and Sorokin, “Measuring National Power.”

30. Nye Jr, Bound to Lead, 177.

31. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power, 57–60. See also Nye Jr, The Future of Power.

32. Carstensen and Schmidt, “Power through, over and in ideas.”

33. Tellis, Measuring National Power, 133.

34. Montgomery, “Signals of strength,” 315–316. See also Tellis, Measuring National Power, 19–23.

35. The 2014 edition of Jane’s World Armies, for example, does not include any mention of the UAE’s division-sized Presidential Guard formed in 2011. It also incorrectly states that the UAE is divided into three commands – Northern, Central and Western Military Commands – a structure which effectively ended in 1978. SIPRI’s data related to the military expenditures of the UAE, for example, only dates to 2014.

36. Nye Jr, The Future of Power, 9.

37. Marshall, Problems of Estimating, 2.

38. Welfare costs are “subsistence costs; they are the expenses a nation pays to keep its people from dying in the streets and include outlays on basic items such as food, health care, social security, and education. Beckley, “The Power of Nations,” 15.

39. Springbord and Williams, “The Egyptian Military,” 2–3.

40. We pay close attention to navies because power projection relies on mobility. Naval forces, by their very nature, are mobile in a way that land-based forces are not given limitation of terrain. Jervis, “Cooperation under.”

41. Yates, The Evolution, 187–188.

42. Ibid., 179.

43. Haugom, “Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan.”

44. Merz, “Security and Stability.”

45. Turkish Naval Forces, Turkish Naval Forces Strategy, 24.

46. Turkey’s G class (Turkish: Gabya sınıfı fırkateyn) frigates, of which it reportedly has eight, are significantly modernized versions of the Oliver Hazard Perry class of guided missile frigates. They have been reportedly retrofitted with a Turkish digital combat management system named GENESIS (Turkish: Gemi Entegre Savaş İdare Sistemi).

47. Nye Jr, The Future of Power, 6.

48. Brewster, “Base race.”

49. Moubayed, “Turkish base.”

50. These include a security perimeter, accommodation facilities, munitions bunkers and medical facilities.

51. Yates, The Evolution, 302.

52. Haugom, “Turkish foreign policy.”

53. Demmers and Gould, “An Assemblage Approach,” 365; Watts and Biegon, “Defining Remote Warfare,” 1.

54. Aktürk, “Relations between Russia”; Aydin, “Determinants of Turkish.”

55. Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey, 45.

56. Donelli, “Explaining the Role.”

57. The Kurdish threat to Turkey, for instance, is a cross-cutting or transnational issue. Consequently, the perception of external threat overlaps with that of domestic thereby making it almost impossible to disaggregate. For example, the internal, existential threat posed by the PKK terrorist group is widely believed to be supported and funded by outsiders, particularly northern European states. See Cornell, “The Kurdish question.”

58. Yates, The Evolution, 39–40.

59. Ibid., 60–66.

60. Further proving our arguments, when tensions with Iran soared over the course of 2019 and early 2020, the Emiratis not only withdrew troops as well as naval and ground force equipment from Yemen and Assab but have also brought Patriot batteries and other defense systems back to the UAE. Batrawy and Magdi, “Explains: How Emirates.”

61. Gambrell, “UAE dismantles Eritrea.”

62. Associated Press in Dubai, “Mysterious airbase being built.”

63. Aman and Kaplan, “The distribution”; Parlar Dal and Dipama, “Assessing the Turkish.”

64. See note 27 above.

65. Danforth, “Turkey’s New Maps”; Colborne and Edwards, “Erdogan Is Making.”