Two Tankers Full of Saudi Oil Just Turned Around in the Red Sea — and the Houthis Didn't Have to Fire a Single Shot

Summary

The Houthi Crisis? Two tankers loaded with Saudi crude reversed course in the Red Sea on Tuesday. Neither had been fired on. The Xin Long Yang, a very large crude carrier hauling two million barrels toward China, turned north for Suez instead of heading south through Bab el-Mandeb. The Rodos, a smaller tanker carrying Saudi crude for India, made the same turn. The Houthis had warned a day earlier that ships loading at Saudi ports could be targeted anywhere within their reach, and that was enough. Nobody had to shoot at either ship for the threat to already be working. That’s the part the coverage keeps missing. The debate over whether the Houthis can actually seal the strait is the wrong debate. A blockade doesn’t need to physically stop a tanker to change what the tanker does. It just needs to make the direct route look like a bad bet to the people who insure it, crew it, and own it. Riyadh’s Escape Route Leads to Another Chokepoint When the Strait of Hormuz turned into a war zone, Saudi Arabia did the obvious thing and pushed crude west, to the export terminal at Yanbu on the Red Sea coast. The kingdom has shipped more than 4.5 million barrels a day out of Yanbu since April, something like 70 percent of it bound for Asia. For a while this looked like real redundancy, a second route standing in for the one Iran had effectively closed. Under the normal route, those Asia-bound barrels clear Bab el-Mandeb and continue on to their destination directly. The alternative, the one the Xin Long Yang and the Rodos had begun taking, is to sail north through Suez, across the Mediterranean, and then around the whole of Africa to get to Asia anyway. Fully laden VLCCs can’t make that trip through the canal without first discharging part of their cargo into the SUMED pipeline, which has a fixed capacity of its own. Riyadh spent considerable money building a way around one chokepoint threatened by Iran. It just watched two tankers carrying its crude demonstrate how expensive the fallback really is. A Month Is a Lot of Tanker More than 3 million barrels a day of that Yanbu-to-Asia crude could get forced onto the long route around Africa, and some Asian refiners could face roughly another month’s wait for cargo that would otherwise have gone straight through. The arithmetic is rough but worth doing anyway. A VLCC typically carries about two million barrels. Diverting 3 million barrels a day for an extra month works out to something like the equivalent of forty-five fully laden VLCC cargoes tied up in additional transit at any given time, before anyone counts the empty return legs, the refueling stops, or the owners who simply decide Saudi business isn’t worth the exposure anymore. This isn’t a new pattern. The United Nations trade body UNCTAD found that Red Sea rerouting after the Houthis’ first campaign pushed global ton-miles, meaning the distance each ton of cargo actually travels, up nearly 6 percent in 2024, close to three times the growth in cargo volume itself. Ships didn’t stop moving goods. They just started spending a lot more time doing it, which quietly ate into how much capacity was left over for everything else. Apply that same pressure to several million barrels a day of Saudi exports specifically, and spare tanker capacity doesn’t erode gradually. It can go fast. None of this requires the Houthis to touch a single barrel of oil. Make the short route expensive and risky enough, and the fleet does the rest of the damage on its own, one long detour at a time. Warships Cannot Restore a Shipping Schedule Washington’s instinct will be to hand this to the Navy, and American ships can intercept missiles and escort convoys well enough. What they can’t do is compel an owner to accept a charter whose insurance costs and crew risk have become commercially unacceptable, and they can’t conjure a replacement supertanker out of nowhere when the existing ones are weeks out of position on the wrong side of Africa. The earlier Red Sea campaign is the reason to stay skeptical here rather than optimistic. The Trump administration’s 2025 bombing campaign against the Houthis, aimed at restoring free passage through the strait, cost well over a billion dollars. By early 2025, two commercial vessels had already been sunk in the fighting since 2023, and further vessels were sunk later that year even after a ceasefire had briefly taken hold. The Houthis repeatedly demonstrated that they retained the ability to resume missile and drone attacks on shipping. Much of the industry kept avoiding the route anyway. None of that makes naval power irrelevant. It just means a strike package that destroys launchers but leaves tanker schedules in disarray has accomplished less than the battle-damage assessment suggests. What This Actually Tests The real test isn’t whether the blockade survives contact with the Fifth Fleet. It’s whether the global tanker fleet can absorb a second chokepoint fight stacked on top of Hormuz without the slow, unglamorous loss of shipping capacity turning into a shortage that has nothing to do with how much oil sits in the ground. Brent initially moved less than 1 percent on the blockade announcement, trading near $89, before climbing above $91 as the regional fighting intensified. Freight rates, canceled fixtures, and how many owners still call at Yanbu next month will say more than a single day of trading ever could. Saudi Arabia’s pipelines can keep oil moving west. They cannot create the additional ships required when the normal voyage to Asia suddenly becomes several weeks longer. That capacity problem will still be there after the blockade announcement has left the headlines, and Washington has not yet shown that it understands how to solve it. About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.