Iranian leaders have encouraged the Yemen-based Houthis to be ready to shut down shipping in the Red Sea if the United States strikes Tehran’s power infrastructure.
The Iranians have discussed the plan and informed their Houthi allies, Reuters reported on Thursday. New attacks like those the Iranians have carried out near the Strait of Hormuz in the Red Sea and the Bab el Mandeb Strait would exacerbate the already increasing energy crisis triggered by the U.S.-Iran war.
Should the Houthis start such attacks, it would take the region’s two main oil export routes out simultaneously. While this threat has always been a possibility, the Houthis did not carry out attacks on commercial vessels off their coast during the most intense weeks of the U.S.-Iran war in March.
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The threat comes as the U.S. military has intensified its strikes on Iran this week amid continued Iranian attacks and the collapse of the memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed last month.
In a sign that the Houthis are inching toward getting involved, the Houthis fired missiles at Saudi Arabia after accusing the kingdom of bombing an airport in Sanaa, Yemen, which broke a yearslong truce in their conflict.
The Houthis shut down shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023 and 2024, coinciding with Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel. They targeted more than 100 commercial vessels in the ensuing months, killing multiple mariners.
The Trump administration carried out a roughly five-week bombing campaign against the Houthis last year as well.
Iran views the Houthis as one of its proxy forces in the region, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and Iraqi Shiite militias. The Houthis appear to be best positioned of the group to impose economic costs on the West.
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The Iranians and Houthis’ actions in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea represent the concern of supply chain chokepoints and the impacts they can have on the global economy.
“What it has underscored is the vulnerability of these choke points to threats and attacks,” Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst with Windward, told the Washington Examiner in May. “So in the case of the Houthis, it was like very low, low-technology drones, the threat of attacks that more effectively closed off the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, that that waterway to Western-affiliated vessels, and it’s the same with the Strait of Hormuz.”