strikeJul 21, 2026

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.

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Andrew LathamBy Andrew Latham
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-Mande…

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Key Oil Chokepoints in Mideast Face Disruption as Threats Mount

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Key Oil Chokepoints in Mideast Face Disruption as Threats Mount Shipping disruptions in key Middle East chokepoints intensified as the US-Iran war grinds on, with vessels in the Red Sea making unusual maneuvers, while visible traffic through the Strait of Hormuz sank.

(Bloomberg) — Shipping disruptions in key Middle East chokepoints intensified as the US-Iran war grinds on, with vessels in the Red Sea making unusual maneuvers, while visible traffic through the Strait of Hormuz sank. In the Red Sea, at least one vessel u-turned to head north toward the Suez Canal, while others paused their journeys, maritime-tracking data showed.

The voyage shifts follow threats from the Tehran-backed Houthi militant group in Yemen to fully blockade all ships calling at Saudi Arabia’s ports. tap here to see other videos from our team. Back to video In the Strait of Hormuz — which links the Persian Gulf to global markets — only three commodity vessels were observed transiting on Tuesday, Kpler tracking data showed.

That’s the lowest daily count since early May. Early Wednesday, the waterway remained deserted, with no observable traffic. Global energy markets are on edge as the conflict between the US and Iran reignites, with both sides trading tit-for-tat strikes for more than a week.

At the heart of concerns are signs that exports via the Red Sea — a crucial conduit for Saudi flows rerouted from the Persian Gulf — are now at risk given the Houthi threat. Brent futures have spiked more than quarter this month. The Houthi militant group in Yemen is ready to attack shipping from positions near the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, according to a global monitoring body for naval security.

“The Houthis have completed preparations to attack shipping, including the deployment of missiles and drones,” the Joint Maritime Information Center said in an alert late Tuesday, citing sources it did not identify. In the Red Sea, liquefied petroleum gas tanker Gas King switched to sailing out of the region via the Suez Canal, after picking up a cargo from the Saudi port of Yanbu.

Initially, the very large gas carrier — which appears to be heading for Japan — had been sailing south, only to u-turn. It’s unusual for Asia-bound vessels within the Red Sea to head north given that route entails far higher costs because of the longer voyage around the African continent, plus additional fees to transit the Suez Canal.

Separately, supertanker New Explorer, carrying Saudi oil and bound for Singapore, appears to be idling in the Red Sea after picking up a cargo from Yanbu, the data show. It’s unclear why the 2025-built vessel has come to a near-stop, with its current status showing “not under command”.

In addition, an Aframax vessel, Lahore, also came to a halt after receiving a Saudi cargo. Earlier this week, a handful of oil tankers were seen pausing and u-turning from their planned routes, after several shipowners received an email from the Houthi rebels warning against calling at Saudi ports.

Still, one of those vessels, Xin Long Yang, has since reverted to its original route, and is now sailing toward Bab el-Mandeb. News Taxes - Advertisement 1Story continues below FP Comment Innovation Financial Times In the Red Sea, loadings at the Saudi port of Yanbu — which receives crude flows from Persian Gulf fields via the kingdom’s East-West pipeline — appeared to continue Wednesday, with some tankers signaling that they’re berthed at the facility.

On Tuesday, some Asian buyers of Saudi oil were still sending tankers into the Red Sea in the hopes of picking up their cargoes. In the days ahead of the Houthi threat, the kingdom had exported record volumes of crude from its terminals on the Red Sea, shipping out 5.

9 million barrels a day from the two terminals at Yanbu in the week up to July 17, according to tanker tracking compiled by Bloomberg.

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- The US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, estimated the war's financial toll at $37.5bn and is seeking an additional $67bn from Congress, while at least 18 US troops have died and over 400 have been injured, according to US officials. - Iran claimed to have struck US military targets in Kuwait and Amazon’s central data infrastructure in Bahrain, in response to the US’s alleged attack on the "civilian facilities of Darkhovey".

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Another Hormuz: How Iran's Houthi Card In Red Sea May Torch Oil Markets

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The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen announced on Monday that they would block maritime trade with Saudi Arabia, a move that could further strain global energy markets already affected by Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. It remains unclear whether the Houthis would resume attacks on shipping as part of their proposed naval embargo on Saudi Arabia.

ALSO READ: Iran Targets Amazon Data Infrastructure In Bahrain, Attacks US Military Base In Jordan The Red Sea has emerged as a vital substitute route for Gulf oil and other goods, with Hormuz already hampered. A significant disruption would result in the simultaneous closure of both of the Middle East's main oil export routes.

The majority of Gulf oil and other exports were halted by Iran's partial blockage of the Strait of Hormuz following an attack by Israel and the United States on February 28, which increased prices and caused a global energy shock. In response, Saudi Arabia shifted over 70% of its regular daily petroleum exports to Yanbu, a port on the Red Sea.

Ships from Yanbu travel north via the Suez Canal on their way to Europe. Bab el-Mandeb is the southern route taken by those travelling to Asia. Shipments from Yanbu have surged from about 973,000 barrels per day a year ago to around 4 million bpd in recent weeks, according to Kpler and Signal Ocean.

Kpler data also showed oil volumes passing through Bab el-Mandeb rose from 4.2 million bpd to 7.4 million bpd in June, helping keep global oil prices in check. According to a report from Reuters last week, Saudi Arabia is thinking about extending its pipeline for crude oil to the Red Sea shore.

Gulf oil shipments remained unaffected even after the Houthis began attacking vessels in the Red Sea in November 2023. ARE THE HOUTHIS CLOSING RED SEA ENERGY ROUTES ON IRAN'S BEHALF? In the 1990s, the Houthis became a military, political, and religious force in northern Yemen, waging guerrilla warfare against the Sanaa government.

They have been engaged in a civil war with the internationally recognised government supported by Saudi Arabia for almost ten years, and they have used drones and missiles to attack Gulf neighbours. But until last week, when Yemen's internationally recognised government claimed to have attacked Sanaa airport to prevent an Iranian plane from arriving, a 2022 truce between the nation's warring factions remained largely intact.

Houthis blamed Saudi Arabia, who retaliated by firing missiles at Abha airport in the mountainous southwest of the kingdom. Then, in an appearance on Iran's Press TV website, Mohammad al-Farah, a prominent Houthi leader and member of the politburo, threatened to seal Bab el-Mandeb if the situation continued to worsen.

Iran supports the Houthis as part of its "Axis of Resistance" in the region, which also includes Iraqi Shi'ite militias and Hezbollah in Lebanon; however, its connections to the Yemeni movement are less obvious than those of those other groups. ALSO READ: Ceasefire And Hormuz Reopening Or Wider Conflict?

Trump Faces Crucial Decision On Iran War, Says Report Unlike Hezbollah and the Iraqi parties, the Houthis do not see Iran's supreme leader as their supreme religious authority. Despite the group's ideological alignment with Iran, their aims are mostly domestic.

The United States claims that Iran, with assistance from Hezbollah, has provided the Houthis with weapons, money, and training. The Houthis claim to create their own weaponry and deny being an Iranian proxy. The extent to which the group is acting on Iran's behalf or in accordance with its own geopolitical interests regarding Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea is unclear.

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated on Wednesday that Washington remains open to negotiations to resolve the Iran crisis while questioning Iran's seriousness about talks, citing disruptions to energy shipping routes. The comments followed reports that three oil tankers carrying Saudi crude reversed course in the Red Sea after threats from Yemen's Houthis, who announced a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia on Monday.

Iranian officials have separately discussed a proposed 10-day ceasefire with mediators and engaged Pakistan on continued diplomatic efforts.

Location: Jerusalem

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