Responsible Statecraft:

There’s no place on Earth like Socotra. With its dragon’s blood trees and white sandy beaches, the Yemeni island looks like it was pulled straight from a sequel to James Cameron’s Avatar. But the island’s unique ecology is threatened by another of its quirks: it is situated squarely at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden, through which ships bound for the West must pass on their way to the Suez Canal.

As Yemen’s civil war raged, the United Arab Emirates arrived on Socotra in 2015 and, despite protests from nearly all warring factions, have slowly expanded their influence since. Today, calls to the island are made using the UAE’s country code, and tourists fly from Abu Dhabi without a Yemeni visa — a situation that some argue amounts to annexation…

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