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BEIRUT (Reuters) – Having choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is now signaling it could play its most dangerous card yet: using Yemen’s Houthi allies to shut the Bab el-Mandeb gateway to the Red Sea, opening a new front against Washington and putting two of the world’s most vital energy arteries at risk.
As U.S. strikes deepen inside Iran and Houthi attacks escalate in tandem, analysts say Tehran is widening the conflict and seeking to increase pressure on Washington by extending the threat to global trade and energy supplies beyond the Gulf.
Mohammed al-Farah, a member of the political bureau of Ansarullah, the Houthi resistance movement, said Washington was inciting Saudi Arabia to strike Yemen and that such a provocation would never be in the interest of the United States.
“If the current situation aggravates, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz will be closed in an operational alliance. Oil prices would then skyrocket to $200 a barrel in a dreadful shock,” he warned.
If Hormuz is Tehran’s strongest strategic lever, Bab el-Mandeb may be its last major reserve, analysts said.
“Iran is willing to go all the way,” Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges told Reuters. He said Tehran was showing Washington it could threaten both chokepoints simultaneously, transforming the conflict from a bilateral confrontation into a challenge to the sea lanes underpinning global energy trade.
“Now (Tehran) is escalating both near and wide. The message is that not only Hormuz, but Bab al-Mandab, is at risk.”
The danger, analysts say, is less an immediate return to all-out war than a slow but relentless “mission creep” in which each side raises the stakes without crossing into direct confrontation.
As the conflict spreads from the Gulf to the Red Sea, the growing threat to trade and energy supplies could also increase pressure on Washington and Tehran to return to negotiations before the world’s two most important oil chokepoints become the conflict’s defining battleground.
Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, said from Washington’s point of view, “the issue is, how do you change the Iranian calculus to the point where they’re ready, again, to talk, but not just to talk, but actually to work out an arrangement that is … acceptable.”
