Mokha's Strategic Prize: How a Historic Coffee Port Became a Battleground

On the Red Sea coast of Yemen, a port town once synonymous with the world's coffee trade now finds itself at the center of a different kind of commerce — the exchange of military power. Mokha's centuries-old geography, which once drew merchants and their fortunes, now draws armed factions who understand that controlling a maritime chokepoint is controlling the future. In the long arc of human history, the same places tend to matter, again and again, for reasons that outlast the civilizations that first recognized them.