Container lines began testing a return to the Suez route in early 2026, with the first Asia to Europe services shifting back to Red Sea sailings from mid-February on the condition that security conditions held. That condition is generally read as a question about Yemen. It is at least as much a question about the western shore of the same corridor, where a four-year war has left roughly 700 kilometers of Sudanese coastline under a government that depends on foreign weapons suppliers, principally Iran, Turkey, Russia and China, and that has been willing to discuss access to its ports as part of the price.
Port Sudan has been the seat of that government since Khartoum fell out of its hands in 2023, which makes the coast the asset that keeps the authorities supplied, solvent and diplomatically visible. It is therefore the asset most available for trade. Sudan’s frontage sits north of the Bab al-Mandab strait, along the stretch of water vessels enter after they consider themselves clear of the Yemeni threat envelope.
The Iranian supply relationship is documented, not merely inferred. Tehran and Khartoum restored diplomatic relations in October 2023, and in April 2026 the United States Department of Justice charged an Iranian national in Los Angeles with brokering it, describing a contract worth more than seventy million dollars for Mohajer-6 drones from Iran’s defense ministry to Sudan’s military, a letter of intent to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for bomb fuses, and payments routed through an Oman-registered company.
The traffic runs both ways, which is where the monitoring case becomes concrete. The United Nations Panel of Experts on Yemen has documented a smuggling network operating between Yemeni and Sudanese territory since 2023. Its final report of October 2025 describes the Houthis as the principal controllers of regional smuggling as interdiction tightened in the Arabian Sea. Analysts at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, drawing on that reporting, identify a route between Port Sudan and Al Salif in Hodeidah governorate for weapons and personnel, and note Yemeni coast guard interceptions of shipments out of Sudan during 2025. Their own assessment is that indications of cooperation are growing while conclusive evidence lags. That gap is the point.
What Tehran wants in return remains contested. In March 2024 the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had sought a permanent naval facility on the coast and been refused, an account both governments denied. In December 2025 the same newspaper reported that Port Sudan had offered Russia a twenty-five year arrangement covering up to three hundred personnel and four warships, prompting a warning from Washington. The pattern matters more than any single transaction. Coastal access is the currency a besieged government spends when its need for weapons outruns its ability to pay.
None of this requires a view on which belligerent deserves to prevail, and none of it requires Port Sudan to become a firing position. A government living off its own harbor has little incentive to make that harbor unusable, and the near-term risk lies in transfer, resupply and berthing rather than launch. The Yemeni precedent is instructive precisely because it shows how the first category converts into the second. At the latitude of Port Sudan the main shipping lane runs roughly 150 kilometers offshore, inside the reach of systems Iran already exports, and a threat from that shore would sit north of Bab al-Mandab, in the half of the run carriers currently treat as safe. Underwriters price passages rather than individual coastlines. A corridor with two contested shores is one insurers have little reason to reopen.
The exposure is disproportionately Asian. Around twenty-two percent of global seaborne container trade moved through the Suez Canal in 2023, according to UN Trade and Development, most of it on lanes connecting East and South Asia to Europe. By May 2025 transits were running roughly seventy percent below their 2023 average, as recorded in the agency’s Review of Maritime Transport, with the Cape diversion adding ten to fifteen days to those voyages. Chinese, Indian, Japanese and South Korean shippers carried the largest share of the cost. Singapore, Port Klang and Colombo absorbed the network effects.
The monitoring architecture is not built for any of this. The Security Council’s Sudan arms embargo under resolution 1591 applies to Darfur, a mandate written in 2005 for a land war in the west, so the Panel of Experts reports on a theatre that excludes the coastline where the consequential transfers arrive. Twenty-one years on, that geography has never been updated to match the war being fought. Extending the scope of investigation nationally is the clean fix; tasking the Panel to report on maritime and aviation movements into Port Sudan is the minimum. A second gap sits alongside it, since two Panels of Experts examine opposite shores of the same water under separate mandates with no requirement to reconcile findings, which leaves a route from Port Sudan to Al Salif falling between them.
Even the machinery that exists has been allowed to stall. Under resolution 2772 of 2025 the Council extended the Sudan Panel yet could not agree on its composition, so the Panel went unconstituted, missing both its interim report due that August and its mandated quarterly updates. Algeria objected to the expert nominated to cover armed groups. China and Pakistan objected to the expert nominated to cover arms. The renewal that followed in September was a technical rollover, with members divided over whether to reference Sudan’s worsening situation at all. Monitoring capacity is not scarce here. It is being withheld, and the seat covering arms is the one that proved hardest to fill.
The remedies are unglamorous and already available. Satellite radar and automatic identification system gap analysis run commercially along the Sudanese and Eritrean coasts. Port state control inspections and manifest scrutiny at transhipment hubs raise the cost of a route without anyone interdicting at sea. The Los Angeles prosecution worked because financial intelligence connected a shell company, global banking channels and informal value transfer into a single case file.
The UN watches the Yemeni shore because ships were attacked from it, and does not watch the Sudanese shore because nothing has been attacked from it yet, excluding of course untold scores of Sudanese civilians by the arms flowing there. Monitoring built on that logic arrives one crisis late, every time. The states with the most to lose economically are the ones furthest from the conflict, and monitoring is cheap set against a second rerouting of Asia to Europe trade. Whether the Red Sea ends this decade with one contested shore or two is being decided now, in a conflict most of the exposed states have chosen not to engage.
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