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The global energy system had a backup plan for the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia could move more crude west across the kingdom and load it onto tankers in the Red Sea. That route would not eliminate the damage from a disrupted Hormuz, but it could keep more oil moving and take some pressure off prices.
Now that backup route is under pressure too.
The Houthis are threatening shipping through Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Saudi-backed Yemeni forces are fighting them on land.
Suddenly, two of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints are part of the same energy-security problem. That was the focus of my latest conversation with foreign-policy analyst Jack Cunningham.
His central point is simple: Iran and the Houthis do not need to control these waterways in the conventional military sense. They do not even need to stop every tanker. They only need to make passage dangerous enough that shipowners, insurers, and governments have to treat every transit as a risk calculation.
That is already happening around Hormuz.
Cunningham notes that commercial traffic continues, but much of it depends on a heavy American naval presence. Ships are moving under escort, sometimes with transponders turned off, while tankers continue to face the threat of attack. Keeping that commerce moving is expensive, and it ties down major U.S. military assets that cannot be used elsewhere.
Bab el-Mandeb presents the same basic problem with much cheaper weapons. Shore-based drones and missiles can threaten a narrow shipping lane without the Houthis maintaining permanent control of the waterway. The economics favour the disruptor.
Cunningham thinks that matters well beyond today’s war. Cheap precision weapons are spreading. Maritime commerce still depends on a small number of narrow passages.
The lesson being demonstrated in the Middle East is that relatively weak actors can impose very high costs on the global economy.
And the most immediate economic danger may not be crude oil. Cunningham is increasingly concerned about diesel and other refined products as refinery capacity is damaged and emergency inventories are drawn down.
Short-term releases from strategic reserves can buy time. They cannot solve a prolonged disruption.
His conclusion is uncomfortable: the present crisis may not end quickly, and even when it does, the vulnerability of the world’s energy chokepoints will remain.
