Iran Turns to Bab el-Mandeb as New Pressure Point After Hormuz

Having disrupted global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is now signaling it may activate its most dangerous reserve card — using Yemen’s Houthi allies to shut the Bab el-Mandeb gateway to the Red Sea, potentially threatening two of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints simultaneously.

A Second Front Opens in the Global Energy War

The Iran Bab el-Mandeb Hormuz Red Sea pressure point threat emerged Monday when a senior Yemeni official warned that Yemen’s armed forces were prepared to close the strait — a move he said could send oil prices surging to $200 per barrel — if Saudi Arabia continued to strike Yemen.

Mohammed al-Farah, a member of the political bureau of Ansarullah, the Houthi resistance movement, said Washington was inciting Saudi Arabia to escalate against Yemen and warned of dire consequences. “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 said.

Bab el-Mandeb is the narrow waterway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, through which Saudi oil exports and a significant share of global maritime trade pass daily. If Hormuz is Tehran’s most powerful strategic lever, analysts say Bab el-Mandeb may be its final major reserve.

Analysts Warn of “Mission Creep”

Middle East scholar Fawaz Gerges told Reuters that Iran is demonstrating its capacity to threaten both chokepoints simultaneously, transforming the bilateral US-Iran confrontation into a broader 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 el-Mandeb, is at risk,” Gerges said.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, described the latest Houthi threat as “another nuclear option” for Iran — one it would deploy only if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps concluded that a return to full-scale war had become unavoidable. He warned that if Washington continued intensifying strikes on Iran’s critical infrastructure, Tehran could direct its Houthi allies to close Bab el-Mandeb, compounding the economic shock already caused by the Hormuz disruption.

The deeper danger, analysts say, is not an immediate collapse into all-out war but a gradual “mission creep” — each side incrementally raising the stakes without crossing directly into open confrontation, until one of the world’s most vital trade corridors becomes the conflict’s defining battleground.

Houthis Have Done It Before

The Houthi threat is not hypothetical. After the Gaza war erupted in October 2023, the Houthi movement launched an extensive campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea, targeting vessels it claimed were linked to Israel. The campaign forced major shipping companies to reroute vessels around southern Africa, significantly raising transport costs and prompting US and British airstrikes alongside a multinational naval protection mission.

Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, said the Houthis retain the capability to disrupt Bab el-Mandeb navigation but are unlikely to act without clear direction from Tehran. Any such move, he added, would likely trigger a broad military response from the United States and its allies aimed at severely degrading Houthi capabilities.

Pressure Mounts on Both Sides to Return to Talks

The widening threat to global trade and energy supplies could paradoxically create pressure on both Washington and Tehran to return to negotiations before the conflict fully consumes both waterways. Dennis Ross, a former US Middle East peace negotiator, said the key question from Washington’s perspective 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.”

Gulf states are increasingly skeptical that diplomacy with Iran can succeed at this point, despite the enormous costs a wider confrontation would impose on the region. “Both a victorious Iran and a defeated Iran carry consequences for the region,” said Sager. Many Gulf governments, he noted, may find the costs of a defeated Iran more acceptable if it leads to a more stable long-term security environment.

The war, launched in late February by the United States and Israel, has already killed thousands of people — primarily in Iran and Lebanon — and spread across the region through a series of Iranian attacks on US military bases in multiple countries.