Why So Many Foreign Militaries Have Bases in Tiny Djibouti

Djibouti covers more land than the state of New Jersey and has a population under 1.2 million, yet it hosts a denser concentration of foreign military installations than any other country on Earth. The United States, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and China all operate bases there, with Saudi Arabia having pursued plans for one as well. What draws so many militaries to so small a country comes down to geography and money in roughly equal measure.

Djibouti sits directly on the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the narrow chokepoint where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, a route that carries a substantial share of the world’s shipping traffic, including oil tankers moving between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. That position, just across the water from Yemen and within reach of Somalia’s coastline, made the country a natural staging ground for counter-piracy patrols, counterterrorism operations and humanitarian missions throughout the 2000s and 2010s, as piracy off the Somali coast and instability across the Horn of Africa pushed multiple governments to want a permanent regional foothold. France retained a base left over from Djibouti’s colonial history as French Somaliland, while the United States established Camp Lemonnier, its main installation in Africa, in the early 2000s. Djibouti’s government leaned into the arrangement, charging rent for each installation and turning basing rights into one of the country’s largest sources of foreign revenue.

China’s arrival marked the most significant shift. On August 1, 2017, coinciding with the People’s Liberation Army’s 90th anniversary, China formally opened what it called a logistics support base in Djibouti, its first military installation anywhere outside its own territory. Writing in the Journal of Contemporary China, scholar Jean-Pierre Cabestan describes the base as a signal moment in China’s emergence as a global military actor, one that let Beijing frame the facility publicly as support for anti-piracy and peacekeeping work in the region while also giving it a permanent naval presence near one of the world’s most strategically sensitive waterways. The base sits only a few miles from Camp Lemonnier, putting American and Chinese forces in closer daily proximity than almost anywhere else in the world.

That crowding has made Djibouti something of a live laboratory for great-power competition, with the country’s leadership generally avoiding exclusive alignment with any single foreign power and instead extracting basing revenue from several at once. Djibouti’s government has continued fielding interest from additional states since, underscoring that the same chokepoint geography that made the country valuable to 19th-century colonial powers still shapes who wants a foothold there today.