(Dobbs) “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war.”“The Houthis don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car.”
It didn’t take long for it to happen. In just 36 hours, the global economy and the price of diesel and gas changed. Again. After a drone attack Thursday on a Saudi pipeline that ran from its oilfields to the Red Sea to divert up to five million barrels of oil a day that can’t transit the war-torn Strait of Hormuz— that’s about 5% of daily oil consumption worldwide— the Saudis had to shut it down. Then Friday the Houthis, the ragtag Yemeni rebels backed by Iran, ran roughshod over their nation’s ragtag army and took a key city called Mokha, close to another chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandeb strait on the Red Sea itself. It gave them the power to threaten any Saudi oil that might be moving that way in ships. And then in a lightning-fast advance with what one Yemeni general called “waves upon waves of fighters,” they moved on to take an island right at the mouth of the Red Sea called Perim. Basically, as this CNN map shows, with the Strait of Hormuz off one tip of the Arabian Peninsula and the Bab el-Mandeb off the other. both of the main shipping routes for Gulf oil are now under the finger of the Iranians. It costs them almost nothing. One official from Yemen’s struggling American-allied government told reporters, “(The Houthis) don’t need to use advanced weapons to close Bab al-Mandeb. They can just use a cannon on a car.” Another said ominously, “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war.” It’s not the kind of takeover you see every day. I saw something like it covering the revolution in Iran when rebels swept away the forces of the Shah’s government in a matter of days and the nation was forever transformed, which on the worst day of fighting I called a “brushfire revolution.” We saw it two years ago in Syria when rebels moved on Damascus so fast, they forced longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad to hightail it from the country. Now, Yemen. This time, to threaten global energy. And where was Donald Trump when the world was changing? Headed for his golf course in western Ireland. Reportedly he did engage a little bit. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke twice with Trump as all this was happening and told him what was at stake and how to stop it with airstrikes, and Trump said no. Control of a second vital waterway was about to fall to Iran and its proxy, the Houthis, and Donald Trump said no. U.S. Central Command assured the Yemeni government that Saudi airstrikes were coming, but as a Yemeni official told CNN, “the air support never came, and Mokha has now fallen.” A disingenuous statement from the White House said, “The United States is focused on protecting our core national security interests— such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea— while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges. We are in continuous dialogue with Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Yemen Government regarding regional stability.” Except something’s wrong here. By letting the Houthis take the territory they just took with hardly a fight, the U.S. has done anything but ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, it has put it in immediate jeopardy, and what the President of the United States is focused on now is the Irish Open at his golf game in Ireland. It’s not as if it had to happen this way. Yemen’s government says it told Central Command over the past few days that its conflicts with the Houthis were getting critical, and that it needed help. The help didn’t come. What’s more, Yemen is one of the poorer countries on earth. I only got there once, covering a massive mortal earthquake, and at the time Yemen had less than half a dozen doctors in the whole country and no paved roads outside the capital. It was about as backward as it gets. I’ve followed it since and it never got far beyond that. Its forces and the rebel forces are backward by modern measures. And yet the Houthis took their targets because there was no American response. It’s a disaster. The Red Sea might be a new chokepoint in the war with Iran. Would any of this would be happening if the president hadn’t plunged stupidly and sloppily into his war with the Islamic Republic? Naturally, like everything he touches that turns to muck, he kisses it all off. He told reporters yesterday that “everything will work out fine.” Everything works out fine in the fantasy land Donald Trump inhabits, doesn’t it? Share But it’s not working out so fine so far. After the Houthis had their victories, the price of oil went up to $104 a barrel. That’s almost half-again higher than before this war began. It pushed average gas prices in the United States back above $4 a gallon, a dollar higher than a year ago. Diesel, on which most commercial transport depends, rose past $6. Trump will try, but he can’t spin this one away. Leave a comment As historian Heather Cox Richardson explained yesterday on Substack, “Trump and his advisors have said they plan to strangle Iran economically through their blockade of Iranian ports. Now it appears Iran is retaliating with a plan to strangle the U.S. economy by slowing the transport of oil even further.” And where has the president been? At his golf course in Ireland. © 2026 Greg Dobbs |