ISTANBUL — The Gulf monarchies that supply much of the world’s oil spent the summer building ways around Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. This week, the backup routes came under fire, too, and Washington opened its own line to the militia threatening them.
Saudi air defenses shot down a Houthi drone south of Mecca on Tuesday night, the Yemeni rebels’ first attempt on Islam’s holiest city since 2017. The city lends its name to the defense pact Saudi Arabia signed with Turkey and Pakistan last month. Hours earlier, Qatar warned that losing the Bab al-Mandab, the strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, on top of Hormuz would be “catastrophic for the entire world.”
The attempt came two days after U.S. officials met representatives of the Iran-backed Houthis at the American Embassy in Oman, Reuters reported Wednesday. The group had just seized a stretch of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and Perim island at the mouth of Bab al-Mandab. The Houthis told the Americans they would not attack U.S. ships, according to the report, and a Yemeni source told the news agency they also promised to spare Israeli and other commercial vessels, except Saudi ones. Saudi Arabia’s pipeline to the Red Sea has been shut since drone strikes last week.
The six Gulf states, all American security partners, have come under attack together, and each is answering in its own way. Oman is mediating. Bahrain refuses to talk to Iran. The United Arab Emirates keeps a channel to Tehran open. Saudi Arabia asked Washington for military help and was told the U.S. would stay out of the fighting, Reuters reported.
Mohammed Baharoon, director general of the Dubai think tank B’huth, described Iran to The Washington Times as “a goldmine littered with land mines.”
“If they want to fulfill their potential, they need to start clearing those mines starting with Hormuz,” he said.
The stakes reach American gas stations. Oil has climbed above $100 a barrel, and the Gulf’s workarounds are running thin.
In Washington, the House voted 220-204 late Tuesday to end the war, with seven Republicans joining Democrats, a symbolic rebuke President Trump is expected to veto. The Congressional Budget Office put the war’s cost at more than $38 billion. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the conflict is entering a “new phase” as allies step up to stabilize the region.
“The world is suffering enough with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, so we cannot also afford to add the Bab al-Mandab into that equation,” Ibrahim Al Hashmi, a Qatari Foreign Ministry official, told reporters in Doha.
Riyadh called the Mecca attempt a “cowardly terrorist attack.” Maj. Gen. Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen, said the security of the holy sites “is a red line.” The Houthis denied targeting the city and claimed to have downed a Saudi F-15. Neither claim could be verified. Qatar said any threat to Mecca crosses “all religious, moral and humanitarian red lines,” and the UAE and Kuwait also condemned the attempt.
On Wednesday, the Houthis claimed a barrage of missiles and drones on Aramco facilities in Yanbu and on a Saudi air base in Khamis Mushait. Saudi Arabia did not confirm the attacks. The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh urged Americans to reconsider travel to the kingdom.
The fighting inside Yemen continued Thursday. Yemeni government aircraft struck Houthi positions around Mocha and on front lines north of Taiz, and Houthi-run media said Saudi airstrikes hit communications towers in Taiz province. In Jawf province, on the Saudi border, government troops and Houthi fighters were dug in on opposite halves of a military camp, according to Yemeni government military sources.
Common problem, divergent solutions
The Gulf Cooperation Council’s six members — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman — have argued over Iran for decades.
“They’re unified in their outrage at the damage done to their countries by Iran,” said Geoffrey Miller, editor of the Gulf States Insights newsletter. “They are not unified as yet on what the strategy should be in dealing with Iran at this point.”
Cauvery Ganapathy, a fellow at ORF Middle East in Dubai and a former research associate with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, said the war has sharpened old differences. All six want open sea lanes, she told The Times, but each weighs differently how badly it needs a deal, how far it will bend toward Tehran and how well it can defend itself.
“I expect the states to pursue their own bilateral tracks, customized to their own circumstances,” she said. That could add up to “a ’managed peace’ kind of situation,” she said, but “I don’t see them being coordinated pathways just now.”
Oman was to host Iran and the Gulf foreign ministers in Salalah on Monday to discuss Hormuz shipping. Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi postponed the meeting at the last minute to build consensus, he said. Tehran said Riyadh asked for the delay. Bahrain had already said it would attend no meeting that includes Iran until relations are normalized.
Mr. Baharoon rejected Tehran’s account, saying the Gulf states had been asked to “rubber stamp” an arrangement they had no hand in shaping.
The UAE, which has absorbed more Iranian fire than any of its neighbors, sent Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed to meet Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Saturday at the BRICS summit in New Delhi.
Mr. Miller said the Gulf states share one demand. “They don’t want a U.S.-Iran deal done over the top of their heads,” he said. He expects Gulf diplomats at next week’s U.N. General Assembly to press for language treating “a free and open Strait of Hormuz as a right, not something to be negotiated away with tolls, fees, etc.”
That puts them at odds with Oman. Oman’s July proposal to manage the strait jointly with Iran would have had both governments collect voluntary fees from passing ships, according to ORF Middle East. Iran reportedly demanded more control.
The Emirates have spent heavily to get around Hormuz, moving cargo through Omani ports on the Arabian Sea and building a new oil pipeline to their own eastern coast.
“The answer to Hormuz is connectivity,” Mr. Baharoon said. Closing Bab al-Mandab, he said, will only speed the Gulf’s push for new ports, pipelines and rail links, including proposed corridors to Europe.
More weapons
Gulf militaries are changing too, Mr. Baharoon said, pointing to Emirati interest in the BrahMos cruise missile, built by India and Russia, and a stealth combat drone the UAE is developing.
Some of the new hardware comes from China. In July, photos surfaced of Chinese-made FK-2000 air-defense vehicles on the coast of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Washington has raised no public objection.
Mr. Baharoon said the silence likely reflects the strain on Gulf air defenses and cooperation in an area where both countries have an interest. He called it “a welcome sign of strength.”
The UAE withdrew from Yemen in 2025, and Mr. Baharoon said a return to the coalition would be difficult since the Emiratis were recently asked to leave. Abu Dhabi could still join a response if the Gulf states invoked their joint defense pact, he said.
Qatar has no such escape routes. The emirate ships its liquefied natural gas to Asia and Europe through Hormuz, and Iranian missiles struck its main export hub in March. Mr. Miller said the war’s economic toll has fallen hardest on “the likes of Qatar which lack alternative shipping routes.”
Doha’s answer has been diplomacy. Mr. Al Hashmi said Qatar is “pushing for diplomacy, dialogue.” Majed Al Ansari, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, brushed aside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s prediction that new pipelines would turn Hormuz into “a worthless piece of water.”
Squeezing the Saudis
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is fast running out of detours.
When the Houthis banned Saudi ships from the southern Red Sea in July, the kingdom sent Asia-bound crude north through the Suez Canal and around Africa. A tanker from the Red Sea port of Yanbu to South Korea takes about 54 days that way, against 24 through Bab al-Mandab, according to shipping data firm Kpler.
With the pipeline down, Riyadh is turning back to Hormuz. Saudi Aramco is offering Asian buyers crude moved between tankers off Oman, Reuters reported, and some tankers are crossing the strait with their tracking signals switched off.
“I don’t think the Saudis have any good options left,” Ms. Ganapathy said. The Suez Canal cannot take the largest tankers fully loaded, she said, so cargoes must be split, adding cost and delay.
By her estimate, the kingdom had 30 million to 35 million barrels stored around the region when the pipeline shut Friday, Sept. 11. With the line carrying 3 million to 4 million barrels a day, “the pinch then can be severe within 10 days, if not earlier,” she said. Production cuts could follow, “which in turn could have a longer cascading effect.”
Estimates for repairing the pipeline range from days to weeks.
The Houthi delegation in Muscat included Mohammad Abdulsalam, a senior official under U.S. sanctions, Reuters reported. The State Department declined to confirm the meeting but said freedom of navigation in the Red Sea is a core U.S. interest. Mr. Trump said Saturday the Houthis had asked Washington to stay out of the Yemen war, and Vice President JD Vance said Monday the U.S. was in direct contact with the group.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman received Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, in Jeddah this week, the Saudi Press Agency said. Days earlier, Adm. Cooper met military chiefs from Israel and five of the six Gulf states in Germany, Axios reported. Oman was absent. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Oman’s foreign minister Tuesday to discuss Hormuz.
The Saudi press has signaled restraint. Jameel Altheyabi, editor-in-chief of the daily Okaz, wrote this week that the kingdom has one of the best-armed militaries in the region and could deliver decisive strikes if it chose. For now, he wrote, Riyadh is keeping its “strategic patience until the horizons for solutions widen,” betting that Iran will see escalation turn the world against it and rein in its proxies.
The Houthis will be harder to bargain with than Iran, Ms. Ganapathy said. Tehran’s demands over Hormuz were fairly specific, while the rebels’ motives are “more opaque, more volatile and more likely to morph into differing asks.”
“I doubt the Saudis just now have a good hand to play in terms of a conduit who could bring the Houthis to the negotiating table,” she said.
Mohamed Qubaty, a former Yemeni information minister and ambassador, said the rebels’ selective promises tempt each government to seek its own exemption. “Assurances from an armed group are conditional access, not durable maritime security,” he told The Times. Yemeni, regional and international efforts to deter the Houthis, he said, were insufficiently integrated.
Saudi Arabia’s partners in the Mecca pact have so far confined themselves to statements. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif condemned the attempt on Mecca “in the strongest possible terms,” and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called for an end to tit-for-tat attacks in the Gulf.
World leaders open the General Assembly’s main debate in New York on Tuesday, with Turkey and Qatar scheduled to speak back-to-back that morning.
In 2012, Mr. Qubaty said, he warned Yemen’s then-president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, that in addition to Hormuz, Iran wanted a hand on Bab al-Mandab — a prize he called worth more to Tehran than a nuclear bomb.
“Iran does not need to own both straits to gain from insecurity at both,” Mr. Qubaty said.
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