The world’s most valuable energy corridors are pinching shut.
On Friday, Houthi militants backed by Iran expanded their control of the Red Sea, threatening a critical route for Persian Gulf crude. That left the region with few alternatives, since shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — once the world’s primary oil transit point — remains significantly constrained and far below what it was before the war.
And oil exports from Saudi Arabia, long the most important producer in the Middle East, plunged last month to their lowest point in at least 13 years.
The U.S. Navy has been able to keep oil flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz on sea paths close to the coast of Oman, the opposite side from Iran. But that has required an extensive and dangerous operation.
For shipping companies, the once routine operation of navigating the strait has become a high-risk endeavor. At least 23 ships were hit in the waterway near Oman in July and August. Since the war began at the end of February, at least 22 sailors have been killed in the Middle East.
“These waters aren’t safe,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, a maritime intelligence company.
As the war in Iran nears its seventh month, it appears to be spinning out of control, analysts said. With no diplomatic end in sight, the Middle East, the epicenter of energy production, is facing its most severe supply crisis in decades.
The Trump administration “has been using a variety of tools very effectively to keep the oil price and the gasoline price at bay,” said Amos Hochstein, who served as a foreign affairs and energy adviser in the Biden administration. But now, he said, President Trump and his team are “stuck.”
The economic consequences are piling up.
Oil prices on Friday briefly topped $108 per barrel after escalating attacks from the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. That is roughly 50 percent above prewar levels. Average U.S. gasoline prices have climbed above $4 a gallon — over $1 more than they were a year ago. Also on Friday, the average cost of diesel, a staple fuel for trucking, farming and industry, topped $6 a gallon in the United States.
Mr. Trump said this week that he believed the war in Iran would not end until after the U.S. midterm election in November, but claimed gas prices would come “tumbling down” after the voting. In truth, analysts said, the Trump administration has few options left for ending the war or lowering energy prices. Last month, administration officials imposed tight new economic sanctions on Tehran in the hope the move would topple the regime, but it has not.
“They could bomb, or they could talk,” said Gregory Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a research firm.
Iran has demanded, among other things, the end of a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and the release of frozen assets overseas. Iran has also continually claimed it will maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz.
“There may be a clear way out, which would be surrender to Iran,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a special representative for Iran and Venezuela during the first Trump administration. But, he added, “the question to the president would be: Are you willing to grant that to get past the election?”
On Friday, Houthi rebel groups gained control of the strategic Red Sea port city of Mokha in Yemen, pushing out forces allied with the Yemeni government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia. Just days earlier, the Houthis injured 73 civilians and hit energy facilities in the southern part of Saudi Arabia.
Fawaz A. Gerges, a London School of Economics professor focusing on the Middle East, called the Houthi control of Mokha “a game changer” for the militant group as well as for Iran.
The Saudi Energy Ministry said on Friday that its East-West Pipeline, the conduit it had been using instead of the Strait of Hormuz, had been “targeted multiple times” by attacks the day before and had been shut down as a “precautionary measure.”
After the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran restricted access though the Strait of Hormuz. That turned the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the south entry to the Red Sea, into a backup route for Middle East oil, particularly for Saudi Arabia. Now the Houthis have a stranglehold there.
“This new development gives the Houthis important leverage with Saudi Arabia, their staunch enemy, and also the global trade system,” Mr. Gerges said. He added, “As a result, Iran is in a stronger position now to increase the pain to the U.S. economy and the world.”
In the past week, only two Saudi Arabian cargoes passed through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, according to Kpler, a maritime data firm.
Saudi Arabia has another Red Sea option to export oil — sending it north though a pipeline near the Suez Canal. But that route through the Mediterranean is costlier and adds weeks to the voyage to Asia, where most of the kingdom’s customers are.
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is a small fraction of the 130 or so vessels a day before the war, according to ship-tracking companies. An average of 19 ships per day have transited the strait in September, down from 20 in August and a high of 34 in June, when a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was briefly in place.
Kpler recorded just nine ships as having passed through the strait on Thursday.
Ms. Wiese Bockmann, the analyst at Windward, calculated that crude oil exports from Gulf countries, aside from Iran, in August was about two-thirds of what it was before the war.
Just in the past week, U.S. forces have disabled or destroyed at least eight Iranian tankers, she said, and Iran has retaliated with deadly attacks against vessels passing through the strait near Oman. The intensifying attacks are causing shipowners, even ones with a high appetite for risk, to hold of on braving the region.
Shirin Hakim contributed reporting from New York.
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