The Dual-Chokepoint Nightmare Is No Longer Theoretical

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering the largest energy supply disruption in modern history. Within days, the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20% of global oil supply⁴ normally transits — was effectively closed. By March 2, the IRGC had formally confirmed the closure. Tanker traffic collapsed to a trickle of four vessels on March 1, down from 24 per day¹². Brent crude surged past $120 a barrel, and the IEA's head called it the "greatest global energy security challenge in history."¹⁵

That was the first chokepoint. Now we wait for the second.

On March 28, Yemen's Houthis fired ballistic missiles at Israel, officially entering the war². Their deputy information minister told local media that "closing the Bab al-Mandeb strait is among our options." Senior politburo member Mohammed al-Bukhaiti said the group was considering a naval blockade¹ targeting vessels from "aggressor countries." As CNN reported³, "With Tehran blocking most shipping from using the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians and their chief regional ally would control or at least have a massive impact on regional shipping routes — and the flow of oil."

I have spent weeks trying to understand how the analytical community got this risk so wrong. The conventional wisdom, which prevailed across most think tanks and intelligence assessments through 2024 and into 2025, went like this: Iran holds a physical off-switch over the Houthis through weapons supply chains; Iran's own economic dependence on Hormuz (~80-90% of oil export revenue) means Tehran would never tolerate a dual-chokepoint scenario that invites overwhelming Western retaliation; therefore the Houthis are a "managed asset," and the dual-closure scenario is a tail risk, not a central tendency. This framework was coherent. It was also wrong — not in its logic, but in its premises.

The first premise that broke was Iranian control. In November 2025, senior Iranian officials told The Telegraph⁵ that the Houthis had "gone rogue" and "do not listen to Tehran as much as they used to." The IRGC dispatched Quds Force commander Abdolreza Shahlaei to Sanaa in what Yemeni opposition media described as a response to a "leadership crisis." An Iranian official described the Houthis as "the only active group left" in Tehran's fraying proxy network. A Yemeni military affairs outlet, Defense Line, reported that IRGC personnel in Yemen "do not fill this strategic void" and are "essentially an extension and reflection of the confusion that exists in Tehran."

This was not a minor intelligence update. It was a structural shift. The weapons-pipeline constraint — Iran's supposed off-switch over Houthi precision-strike capability — had been degrading for months. As Al Jazeera reported in March 2025⁶, the Houthis had "increasingly tried to showcase their autonomy," diversified their supply lines, and in at least one documented case in 2019 "ignored Iranian advice" by unilaterally declaring a ceasefire with Saudi Arabia when Tehran favored military resistance. A U.N. Panel of Experts finding⁶ confirmed the Houthis "do not have the capacity to develop and produce, without foreign support, complex weapons systems" — but the Houthis had been working to change that, building indigenous manufacturing capacity and reportedly receiving Russian assistance. The off-switch existed, but the plug had been loosening for years.

The second premise that broke was the rational actor model for Iran's Hormuz calculus. The conventional view assumed Iran would never close Hormuz because doing so would destroy its own oil revenue. That logic held when Iran was choosing between escalation and restraint from a position of relative stability. It collapsed when Iran was absorbing existential strikes that killed its Supreme Leader and targeted nuclear facilities across 27 provinces. Under those conditions, Iran closed Hormuz anyway — not because it was rational in the narrow economic sense, but because regime survival trumped revenue calculations⁴. Iran even set up a yuan-based "toll booth" system, allowing select Chinese, Russian, and allied vessels to transit while collecting fees⁴ — a novel arrangement that revealed the closure was not purely self-destructive but could be weaponized as a coercive sorting mechanism.

Now consider where the Bab el-Mandeb fits. With Hormuz effectively closed, Saudi Arabia has been rerouting oil through the East-West Pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu⁴. As the Times of Israel noted¹¹, "Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has been sending millions of barrels of crude oil a day through Bab el-Mandeb." Around 30 tankers near Yanbu are currently within Houthi strike range¹. The Bab el-Mandeb has gone from being an important shipping corridor to being the primary remaining artery for Gulf oil reaching global markets. It has never been more strategically significant — or more vulnerable.

This is the compounding logic that makes the dual-chokepoint scenario qualitatively different from any historical precedent. The 1973 Arab oil embargo, the 1980s tanker wars, the 2019 Abqaiq attack — each was a single-node disruption. Rerouting was painful but possible. When both corridors are threatened simultaneously, there is no adequate alternative¹⁷. The Cape of Good Hope adds 10-14 days of transit time and cannot absorb the combined capacity at scale. The Dallas Federal Reserve estimated¹³ that a three-quarter closure of Hormuz alone could push oil to $132/barrel and reduce global GDP growth by 1.3 percentage points. Add Red Sea disruption on top, and you are in genuinely uncharted economic territory.

I want to be fair about what the restraint optimists got right. For 18 months — from late 2023 through mid-2025 — the Houthis sustained harassment of Red Sea shipping without attempting outright closure. That was real evidence of calibrated behavior. The May 2025 US-Houthi ceasefire⁷, in which the Atlantic Council reported "senior Iranian officials who were involved in the Omani-mediated ceasefire swayed the Houthis to cease attacking US assets," showed Iran still had meaningful influence. And the Houthis' eventual halt of attacks after the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire suggested they could stand down when political conditions aligned.

But here is the critical distinction the optimists missed: the restraint held under conditions of bounded escalation. It held when Iran was not itself under existential military assault. It held when the Houthis' senior leadership was not being killed by Israeli strikes. It held when the broader "axis of resistance" still existed as a coherent structure. Every one of those conditions has now been shattered. Hezbollah's command structure was decimated in 2024¹⁹. Iranian proxies across the region were, by late 2025, acting independently of Tehran⁵. The Houthis lost their prime minister, their chief of staff, and the head of their missile and drone unit to US and Israeli strikes.

The behavioral record that supported the "managed escalation" thesis was a record of how the system performed under moderate stress. We are now seeing how it performs under maximum stress, and the answer is: the constraints break.

The mystery, actually, is not that the Houthis entered the war — The National reported⁹ that analysts were surprised they waited three weeks after the war began. The International Crisis Group's Michael Hanna admitted, "We are not exactly sure, to be honest" why the delay. Some analysts attributed it to possible Iranian coordination. Others pointed to domestic pressures from a southern secessionist movement. A Yemen analyst told The National that they were "waiting for Iran's co-ordination and calculating how to send a powerful message." What everyone agreed on was that the pause was strategic, not structural. The Houthis retained full capability. Their infrastructure survived over 1,000 US strikes that cost $750 million¹. The question was always when, not if.

Now that the Houthis have entered the war, the specific indicators to watch are straightforward. (1) Do Houthi attacks expand from Israeli targets to commercial shipping in the Red Sea? Senior Houthi officials have explicitly stated this is under consideration. (2) Do insurance markets respond by suspending coverage for Bab el-Mandeb transit, as they did for Hormuz? Lloyd's Joint War Committee listed-area designations would be the trigger. (3) Do major carriers — Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM — which had just resumed limited Suez transits in early 2026²³, reverse course and reroute around Africa again? If all three of these happen within the next two weeks, the dual-chokepoint scenario moves from threat to reality, and the IEA's March warning¹⁴ about the "largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market" will need to be revised upward. Dramatically.