Iran’s threat to shut down the Bab al-Mandeb strait through its Houthi allies would, if carried out alongside the existing Strait of Hormuz blockade, cut off a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply and send shockwaves through global trade routes that have no ready substitutes.

Iranian officials warned on Sunday that coordinated disruptions to the Bab al-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz could be used as leverage points, signaling that Tehran views these two waterways as a unified pressure system against the U.S. and its allies.

The statement comes as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has already ground to a near halt. Reports indicate that Iran closed navigation through that waterway after retaliating to U.S. and Israeli strikes, and several tanker owners, oil majors, and trading houses have suspended shipments through the strait. Opening a second front at Bab al-Mandeb would amount to a stranglehold on the two most important maritime energy corridors on Earth.

The Geometry of Two Chokepoints

To understand why this threat carries so much weight, consider the physical constraints. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman, carries more than 20 million barrels of crude, condensate, and fuels per day on average. That represents roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas in peacetime. OPEC members Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iraq export most of their crude through it, primarily to Asia. Qatar sends almost all of its liquefied natural gas through the same bottleneck.

The Bab al-Mandeb, at its narrowest point roughly 29 kilometers wide, sits at the southern end of the Red Sea between Yemen and Djibouti. About 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products passed through it in 2024, representing 5 percent of the global total. But crude tells only part of the story. An estimated ten percent of all global trade sails through the Bab al-Mandeb, including container traffic moving between Asia and Europe.

Blocking either strait alone causes serious disruption. Blocking both simultaneously would trap energy exports between two closed gates. Saudi Arabia, which has increasingly shifted oil exports through its Red Sea port of Yanbu via the East West Pipeline to avoid the Hormuz chokepoint, would find that alternative route also under threat if Bab al-Mandeb were closed.

Saudi Arabia’s Pipeline Gambit

The East West Pipeline has become Saudi Arabia’s insurance policy against the Hormuz blockade. According to data from energy intelligence firm Kpler cited by Al Jazeera, the pipeline transferred an average of 770,000 barrels per day to the Red Sea coast in January and February of this year. By the end of March, that figure reportedly surged to its capacity of 7 million barrels per day.

That is a staggering ramp-up. Going from 770,000 bpd to 7 million bpd in roughly six weeks reflects both the urgency of the Hormuz disruption and the scale of Saudi infrastructure investment in this contingency route. But all of that oil still needs to transit the Red Sea. If Houthi forces close the Bab al-Mandeb, the pipeline becomes a pipe to nowhere, at least for European and some Asian markets.

The engineering logic here is straightforward. A system with a single bypass route has a single point of failure. Saudi Arabia solved its Hormuz problem by routing around it, but the alternative route passes through another chokepoint that the same adversary network can threaten. Redundancy only works if the backup path is truly independent of the primary failure mode.

The Houthi Track Record

The Houthis are not making idle threats. The Iran-backed group has previously launched missile attacks on commercial shipping that effectively halted major container lines from transiting the Red Sea. That campaign demonstrated both the willingness and the operational capability to disrupt one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

Nabeel Khoury, a former U.S. diplomat with experience in Yemen, has described the mechanics plainly: a few targeted attacks on ships would be sufficient to halt all commercial shipping through the Red Sea, likely triggering retaliatory strikes against Yemen.

Analysts have also noted that the Houthis’ previous missile attacks against Israel represented limited rather than full engagement, suggesting the group has significant unused capacity. A full commitment to closing the Bab al-Mandeb would represent a substantial escalation beyond what the world has already seen.

The asymmetry of the threat is what makes it so effective. Closing a strait doesn’t require sinking a fleet. It requires making the insurance and operational risk of transit unacceptable to commercial operators. A few missiles, or even the credible threat of mines, can accomplish what a naval blockade historically required.

The Cascade: From Energy to Food to Medicine

Maritime experts have warned that simultaneous restrictions on both the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb could severely disrupt or cripple trade routes to Europe, as reported by Al Jazeera. Elisabeth Kendall, a Middle East specialist at Cambridge University, has described the dual closure as the scenario that keeps trade analysts awake at night.

A simultaneous closure could block as much as 25 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply. But the cascade effects extend far beyond energy. Container shipping between Asia and Europe that normally transits the Suez Canal must first pass through the Bab al-Mandeb. Alternative routing around the Cape of Good Hope adds approximately two weeks to transit times and substantially increases fuel costs, which were already elevated due to the Hormuz crisis.

The effects on downstream supply chains are already visible even with only the Hormuz strait disrupted. UK food supply chain experts have warned of significant impacts from major shocks to the world energy system. Industry analyses project that food price inflation in England could double. Dairy farmers face fertilizer cost spikes during the critical spring growing season. Horticulture businesses confront surging costs of heating glasshouses. Industry groups have warned that within weeks, shoppers could see price increases for tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers.

The medicine supply chain faces its own pressures. The vast majority of medicines prescribed in the UK are generics sourced from India and China, relying on transit routes through the Middle East. Supply chain analysts have reported that shortages are being driven by delays in the transit of petrochemical precursors used to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients, with some production halted entirely.

The vulnerability gap between nations is stark. Supply chain researchers note that most manufacturers hold about eight weeks of buffer stocks, while European countries hold pharmaceutical stockpiles intended to last up to six months. But the British government holds no food stockpile. Supermarket shelves contain roughly three days’ worth of supply. The Swiss government, by contrast, maintains a three-month food reserve. China has been aggressively building reserves for years. Experts have warned that people on low incomes are the worst-hit already and that a significant portion of UK households were already food insecure before this crisis began.

If Bab al-Mandeb closes, the alternative route from Asia to Europe around Africa would stretch already strained supply chains further. Price spikes that are currently driven by one chokepoint would compound. The system has no slack left to absorb a second shock.

Mines, Missiles, and the Military Calculus

The Hormuz crisis has already demonstrated what maritime disruption looks like in practice. The U.S.-flagged products tanker Stena Imperative was reportedly damaged by aerial strikes while berthed in the Gulf, killing a shipyard worker. A projectile hit the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker MKD VYOM off the coast of Oman, killing a crew member. The Gibraltar-flagged bunkering tanker Hercules Star was struck off the UAE coast.

Beyond direct strikes, Iran reportedly possesses a substantial stockpile of mines, including drifting, limpet, bottom, and moored varieties. Maritime security analysts have noted that floating and naval mines pose a severe asymmetric threat in these confined waters, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz’s narrow transit lanes, where shallow depths and Iran’s coastal positioning enable swift, potentially deniable deployment.

The same logic applies to the Bab al-Mandeb. Its narrow width makes it vulnerable to the same categories of anti-shipping weapons. The Houthis have access to Iranian-supplied missiles and drones, and the geography of the Yemeni coastline provides ample positions for concealed launch sites.

But military retaliation would almost certainly follow any Bab al-Mandeb closure. Experts have suggested that attacks against Yemen would come quickly in response. The question is whether military strikes against Houthi positions would actually reopen the strait or simply escalate the conflict further. The U.S. and allies conducted extensive strikes against Houthi infrastructure during the Gaza war era, and the group continued operating.

The Architecture of Leverage

Iran’s threat was deliberately calibrated. Tehran’s messaging has emphasized that strategic disruptions to key chokepoints could be achieved through coordinated action with its regional partners. This reflects Iran’s understanding that it doesn’t need to match U.S. or Israeli military power to inflict strategic-level damage. It needs only to make two narrow waterways impassable to commercial traffic. The cost of a few dozen anti-ship missiles is trivial compared to the trillions of dollars in trade those missiles can hold hostage.

The world’s energy and trade infrastructure was built on the assumption that these chokepoints would remain open. Decades of international commerce have been optimized around the shortest, cheapest routes, with just-in-time logistics replacing warehoused inventory. That optimization created efficiency. It also created fragility.

The simultaneous closure of both straits would test global supply chains in ways that no modern crisis has. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted production. The Suez Canal blockage in 2021 disrupted a single transit point for six days. This would be the closure of two transit points handling a quarter of global energy, with no clear timeline for reopening.

Whether Iran actually orders the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandeb depends on how the broader conflict evolves. But the strategic calculus has already shifted. Iran has demonstrated something that defense planners have long theorized but rarely seen executed: the capacity of a mid-tier military power to hold the global economy at risk through the coordinated control of geographic bottlenecks. This is not a naval strategy. It is an economic strategy executed through naval geography.

The threat alone has already achieved part of its purpose: it has reminded every government that relies on these sea lanes how exposed they are. The deeper lesson is structural. For decades, globalization optimized for cost and speed, concentrating trade flows through a handful of narrow passages and assuming that the political conditions guaranteeing their openness were permanent. That assumption has now been tested at one chokepoint and credibly threatened at a second. The question is no longer whether the architecture of global trade is fragile. It is whether the world’s major powers will treat this crisis as an aberration to be managed or as a signal that the entire system of maritime-dependent, just-in-time global commerce needs to be redesigned for a world where chokepoints can close.

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