Former United States Institute for Peace Africa Programs director Susan Stigant and University of Maryland public policy professor Michael Woldemariam said the United States must continue to pay attention to the geopolitics of the Red Sea to maintain stability in the region and prevent a humanitarian crisis.
The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding hosted the two Africa and Middle East experts for an April 22 event to discuss the findings of a report they wrote with the USIP Red Sea task force. The report outlines several different paths forward and finds that continued engagement in the region will best serve the interests of the United States and its allies.
The report produced by the Red Sea task force has yet to be released to the public because of mass layoffs at the USIP under the Department of Governmental Efficiency.
Stigant, who was one of the more than 200 employees fired last month, said in an interview after the event that she has doubts about the new model of foreign policy under Trump. For example, she said, her former colleagues working in Nigeria as “community mediators” for violent conflicts and peace agreements no longer have resources or government backing for their work.
During the event, Stigant said the task force began after her conversations about stability in the Red Sea region with a colleague at the African Union, an organization of African states. The task force’s goal was to bridge the gap in foreign policy objectives between the United States and countries in the region.
“[Our African Union colleague] said to us, the thing we are most worried about is the intervention of Middle Eastern states,” Stigant said. “All of you in Washington are talking about China.”
Approximately 40 people attended the event in Haldeman Hall, which was moderated by Dickey Center director Victoria Holt.
Woldemariam agreed that the United States’s focus on Yemen and the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea may miss other, still emerging, issues.
“Part of what our report suggests … is that instability in the Red Sea really extends beyond the Yemen issue,” Woldemariam said. “One vector of instability is that, beyond Yemen, many key countries in the region are in or on the brink of some sort of major conflict-related crisis.”
He pointed to Ethiopia and Sudan as examples, both having descended into civil war and facing major humanitarian crises.
Stigant explained several potential paths forward for the United States in the region that are outlined in the report. The first option continues the “status quo” by resolving crises as they arise through bilateral deals between the United States and individual states while also funding humanitarian causes.
The second option is for the United States to “withdraw entirely” from the region and recognize that most trade through the Red Sea goes to Europe. However, the task force assessed that “eventually those security concerns will closely touch, more closely and immediately, U.S. interests.”
The third option, Stigant said, is to engage with the region more, “but in a smart way.”
“The United States still has really strong convening authority, and could bring together all the countries in that region,” she said. “This is one of the ideas … to encourage the countries in the region to figure out how they could structure themselves to jointly manage and share security risks and threats in a way that wouldn’t have such horrible humanitarian consequences and wouldn’t undermine U.S. national security interest.”
In the past several years, the United States has been leaning towards withdrawal. Stigant mentioned that following a 2023 episode of instability in Sudan, the American embassy in Khartoum closed and has yet to reopen. Pullback has only ramped up under the Trump administration, with cuts to the United States Agency for International Development leaving millions of Sudanese hungry.
In an interview after the event, Woldemariam expressed concern about the potential consequences of disengagement for the region and the world.
“I’m quite worried about the foreign aid cuts, what it means for people in the region, what it means for the effectiveness of U.S. engagement and diplomacy around the world, but ultimately, the proof is going to be in the pudding,” Woldemariam said. “We’ve got to see how this plays out.”
Attendee McKenzi Popper ’26 said she appreciated the questions that the speakers brought up about U.S. foreign policy.
“[The Middle East is] a place that America has had a lot of interventions in the past, has screwed around a lot with in the past and I think that we have a role to play in the region, but it’s figuring out what that role is and how to work with the governments that are there,” Popper said.
