The fall of Mokha was a lesson for Riyadh about alliances: the Mecca pact produced a courier, America’s older allies produced restrictions on American access, and the only partnership that has actually fought Iran’s network this year has an American hand on it. This is the lesson for Washington, and it has a date on it.
Consider the geometry the Houthis left behind. Hormuz is running at a fraction of pre-war volume — Tehran calls it closed, Washington insists it is open, and IMF PortWatch counted six transits on Sept. 6 against a pre-crisis norm of near 85 a day. The Houthis now hold the ground overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, and are threatening to close it altogether if Washington intervenes.
Al Jazeera’s arithmetic: with Hormuz already shut, closing Bab el Mandeb too would put about a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply behind one of two Iranian-held doors. And the route Saudi Arabia built between them to escape the first — the East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea — was itself struck on the day Mokha fell, by drones that Riyadh and Baghdad both say were launched from Iraq, and shut down as a precaution. Every tanker leaving Yanbu for Asia has to clear the strait the Houthis just took. The bypass did not remove the chokepoint. It moved it, and then the chokepoint followed.
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Here is the part the Houthis will not have intended. In closing that circle, they handed Washington leverage weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit — and the address that leverage points to is Beijing.
Trace the lines. Iranian oil is the regime’s revenue, and China is very nearly its only customer; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the blockade has left Tehran with roughly 30 million barrels Beijing has not bought. Iranian money pays for Hezbollah and Hamas — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz described the complex Israel demolished in southern Lebanon this month as two decades of construction financed by Tehran. Iranian weapons and Revolutionary Guard officers, Reuters reports, moved the Houthis down Yemen’s coast. Russian oil carries its own dependency: the sanctions bill named for the late Lindsey Graham would impose tariffs of up to 100% on the largest continuing buyers of Russian energy, and Graham himself put China and India at roughly 70% of those purchases. Rep. Joe Wilson spent Sept. 10 urging Speaker Mike Johnson to bring it to a House vote.
Europe is the lever nobody names, because its dependence is already denominated in barrels. The Gulf normally supplies about three-quarters of Europe’s jet fuel imports, and Hormuz alone carries around 40% of them. With that gone, the largest replacement has been American: European purchases of U.S. jet fuel ran between 30,000 and 60,000 barrels a day before the war and surged to roughly 200,000, while U.S. exports hit a record 442,000 barrels a day in early April and American jet fuel output topped 2 million barrels a day for the first time on record. Argus’s European product editor put the market in four words: Europe must fight for every cargo. The continent avoided the shortage the International Energy Agency had warned of, but it did so by buying American at historic prices — and it depends, in practice, on the U.S. Navy to keep the water open for the rest.
Beijing has already answered in public. At the BRICS summit in New Delhi on Saturday, Xi told the room that the Middle East war “does not serve the common interests of the international community.” The declaration the bloc adopted that day passed unanimously; Iran’s president was in the room, and so was Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, and neither objected. It went further than sentiment: it criticized unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures as inconsistent with WTO rules, and denounced unilateral economic and secondary sanctions. Secondary sanctions are precisely the mechanism the Graham bill would use. On Sept. 12, twelve days before he was due in Washington, Xi helped put the objection on paper with eleven governments behind it.
There is also a record on the narrower question of weapons, and it is not reassuring. Days after their May summit in Beijing, President Donald Trump said Xi had promised that China was not sending arms to Iran: “That’s a beautiful promise. I take him at his word.” On July 24, he went further, writing that Xi had told him he would not “under any circumstances” give or sell weapons to Iran — “And that statement included Chinese Companies.” Five days later, Reuters reported a signed deal worth $60 million to $70 million for up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired missile systems bound for Iran, arranged through a Hong Kong intermediary. Beijing called the report groundless; no delivery has been publicly confirmed, and Reuters’ own sources cautioned that schedules could change. Asked about it, Trump did not dispute the substance. That would be surprising, he said; Xi had told him very strongly he wouldn’t take part, “but he knows I’d be quite disappointed.”
Tehran, for its part, is arguing about Beijing in public. After Xi gave Iran’s president a few minutes on the sidelines in Bishkek on Sept. 1, Hossein Marashi, who heads a reformist party, claimed Beijing had set Tehran four conditions: Reopen Hormuz, stop charging ships, settle with Saudi Arabia, and settle with Washington. The office of parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Tehran’s special envoy for China, denied it. The same week, according to the Iranian sources Reuters quoted, Tehran told the Houthis to strike Saudi Arabia — the opposite of Marashi’s third condition. Whatever Beijing is asking for, it is not obviously getting it.
Strip the map back, and one buyer sits underneath nearly all of it. Cut Beijing out — or price its participation high enough — and Tehran’s revenue thins, the proxies it funds thin with it, and Moscow’s largest customer acquires a reason to hesitate. That is the argument for treating Sept. 24 as the hinge rather than a trade meeting with an Iran file attached.
My own view, and I flag it as a judgment rather than a fact: If Washington succeeds in sidelining China on this one question, the network America and Israel have been fighting since Feb. 28 loses the financing that sustains it, and the Islamic Republic becomes the load-bearing wall that fails first.
The case against is real and should be stated. Beijing arrives holding leverage of its own — it refines roughly nine-tenths of the world’s rare earths and has twice throttled that supply to move Washington, most recently ahead of the Busan meeting in 2025. Trump’s May state visit to Beijing produced soybean purchases and an American claim of progress on minerals; the Chinese readout mentioned rare earths not at all. The Council on Foreign Relations argued before that summit that China would hold the upper hand. A president who needs magnets for weapons production may find Iranian oil a costly thing to make an ultimatum about.
Xi arrives on Sept. 24. He was last on American soil in November 2023, for the APEC summit in San Francisco, where he met Joe Biden at a country estate on the peninsula. This is different in kind: the last formal state visit by a Chinese leader was in 2015. Volodymyr Zelensky expects to meet Trump in New York in the days around it, putting Ukraine’s war on the table beside Iran’s oil. Israel votes Oct. 27. America votes Nov. 3.
Trump has said the war will end “immediately after the election,” and that only then will prices fall; asked in Dublin about Monday’s Iran–Gulf meeting in Oman, he said he did not care, and repeated the forecast. Bessent has put a number on it: $40 to $50 a barrel once it does. Markets have moved on Trump’s words before — Brent fell as much as 10% in March when he called the war nearly complete. So the arithmetic is simple enough to state. If Washington’s leverage outweighs Beijing’s on Sept. 24, the price can turn before the war formally ends, with six weeks still left before Americans vote. If it does not, triple-digit oil and record diesel are what the electorate carries to the polls.
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Readers of my earlier work will recognize the pattern. I have called it controlled chaos — Trump thinks one thing, says and writes a second, does a third, and a fourth result arrives — and the operational pause, the stop-start rhythm of pressure on Iran that looks like drift and functions like sequencing. Both are running here. The strait closes, and Washington declines to bomb, holding its forces on Hormuz. The Saudi crown prince asks twice and gets intelligence instead of aircraft. The campaign against Tehran arrives, as CNN put it this month, in drips. Read week by week, it looks like hesitation. Read against a calendar with Sept. 24, Oct. 27, and Nov. 3 on it, it looks like a man declining to spend an instrument before the week he needs it.
I am not claiming a script; nobody can prove one, and the Houthis did not consult Washington before taking Mokha. The effect points one way regardless. What remains open is whether the administration spends the instrument it was handed on the day Xi sits down, or holds it for the six weeks after.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.