MUSCAT — The call from Riyadh came twice. Twice, Washington did not answer the way Mohammed bin Salman needed it to.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince reached Donald Trump in the days after Houthi fighters completed their seizure of Perim Island on September 12, giving the Yemen-based group full control over both shipping lanes of the Bab al-Mandab Strait. MBS urged American airstrikes against Houthi positions. Trump, by multiple accounts, declined. He offered intelligence support and a contingent of 200 non-kinetic advisers. It was, for a kingdom whose last functioning oil export route had just been severed, close to nothing.
What followed was more alarming than the rebuff itself. On September 15, American officials met Houthi representatives at the United States Embassy in Muscat, a meeting brokered by Oman, according to Yemeni sources cited by The National. The Houthis, the sources said, assured the United States they would not attack American commercial vessels. Only Saudi ships, they specified, were in their sights. Washington, in that formulation, was not a party to the fight. It was a spectator, and apparently a willing one.
Trump said as much himself. Speaking in Dublin on September 12, he framed the Houthi overture in the language of a deal made: “The Houthis called us, and they don’t want to fight us. They don’t want me to attack them.”
The three supply lines that once moved Saudi crude to global markets have now collapsed in sequence. Iran’s campaign sealed the Strait of Hormuz for practical purposes earlier this year. The East-West Pipeline, running from the Eastern Province to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, was destroyed in a strike on September 11. The Bab al-Mandab corridor, which carried Saudi crude exports at eight times their 2025 volume between March and July as tankers rerouted around Hormuz, is now under Houthi interdiction. Saudi Arabia is, in the most literal sense, an oil producer with nowhere to send its oil.
The broader disruption is a number that makes energy traders nervous regardless of their politics. The Bab al-Mandab and the waters on either side of it carry approximately 39 percent of global maritime trade and 31 percent of global oil shipments. Brent crude had pushed above $107 a barrel in the days before the Muscat talks, according to Al Jazeera. The Houthis, for the first time since their campaign began, hold the lever on the single remaining artery that determines where that number goes.
EH reported earlier this month on the destruction of Saudi pipeline infrastructure and Iran’s campaign against Gulf export routes, as well as the Saudi civilian displacement that followed the escalation in Yemen’s border regions. The Perim Island seizure completed a month-long Houthi advance down the Yemeni coast toward the strait. The Oman-brokered GCC diplomacy around Hormuz offered the template for the Muscat channel, and Oman’s capacity to host talks between adversaries is one of the region’s few functioning diplomatic assets. But what the Hormuz closure did to Saudi export economics was already severe; the Bab al-Mandab closure forecloses even the partial workaround tankers were using.
The terms of the September 15 meeting in Muscat have not been made public. American officials have not confirmed whether the Houthi assurances carry any mechanism for enforcement, or whether the arrangement extends beyond a mutual understanding that US-flagged and US-operated vessels will pass unmolested. The Houthis issued no public statement following the talks.
What the meeting produced was a visible asymmetry: a US-Houthi channel, however informal, now exists. A US-Saudi channel, nominally the senior relationship, produced two unanswered requests for military support. Trump’s calculation, that Washington can hold the Houthis to a bilateral accommodation while Saudi Arabia navigates its own crisis, may prove durable, or it may hold only as long as Houthi interests align with it. Neither outcome requires the United States to do anything for the kingdom that called twice.
The oil market is pricing in uncertainty rather than resolution. Analysts have noted that the Bab al-Mandab closure is a different kind of constraint than Hormuz: the strait is narrower, the Houthi position on Perim Island is militarily consolidated, and the political will in Washington to dislodge it appears, for now, absent. Saudi Arabia’s longer-term export infrastructure may require entirely new routes, at costs and timelines the kingdom has not yet publicly discussed.
MBS built much of his foreign policy leverage on the assumption that the United States, regardless of administration, would not allow the kingdom’s export arteries to be permanently severed. That assumption is, at minimum, under review.
