Houthi Attack on Saudi Pipeline Backfires, Pushes Riyadh Back Toward Washington

The Houthis may have intended to strike a blow for Iran when they hit Saudi Arabia, but the attack is shaping up to benefit Washington and Jerusalem instead. That’s the argument Howard Richman makes in a recent American Thinker analysis, and it hinges on a single piece of oil infrastructure that Riyadh can no longer use.

The sequence of events matters here. On September 8, Houthi forces attacked Saudi Arabia, seizing several islands along the Red Sea coast and destroying a pumping station the Saudis relied on to move crude from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. That pipeline let Saudi oil bypass the contested waters of the Gulf entirely, flow through the Suez Canal, and reach European buyers quickly. With the pumping station out of commission, that workaround is gone.

The oil market reacted almost immediately. According to Richman, crude futures had been sliding lower—from roughly $102 to $99 a barrel—after the U.S. defeated an Iranian attempt to blockade the Gulf. The Houthi strike reversed that trend, pushing prices back to $102 and then to a high of $106.50 on September 15 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices have since drifted down again, but the spike was a reminder of how tightly the region’s security and the global oil trade are bound together.

The independence play that stalled

What makes the episode strategically interesting, Richman argues, is what Riyadh was trying to do before the attack. The Saudis had been inching toward a more independent foreign policy, less anchored to Washington. On August 7, they signed the Mecca Joint Defense Pact with Turkey and Pakistan—an arrangement that looked, on paper, like a hedge against over-reliance on American security guarantees.

But when the Houthis actually struck, neither Turkey nor Pakistan stepped up to help fight them. Israel, by contrast, is now assisting the Saudis by supplying intelligence used to target Houthi positions. That contrast is difficult to ignore in Riyadh: the new pact partners stayed on the sidelines, while the old American-aligned security architecture delivered something concrete.

Back through the Gulf—and back under U.S. protection

There is also a hard logistical reality squeezing the Saudis. Until the damaged pipeline is repaired—a process Richman says could take weeks—the kingdom cannot pipeline its oil to the Red Sea. It is already shifting exports back through the Persian Gulf, which means it once again depends on the United States to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. That dependency is precisely what the pipeline was built to reduce.

The United States, for its part, wants Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel. Riyadh has been reluctant. But the Houthi attack, in Richman’s telling, has quietly strengthened Washington’s hand: the Saudis need American protection for their rehabilitated export route, and the alternative arrangements they experimented with did not produce results when tested.

Richman also challenges the picture of Hormuz traffic that outlets like Reuters present. Reuters, he writes, continues to suggest that few oil tankers are transiting the strait, relying on AIS tracking data to make that case. But tankers routinely switch off their AIS transponders while passing through the Strait so that Iranian forces cannot easily target them—meaning the data undercounts what is actually moving. In reality, Richman says, the flow has increased so much that tankers can be seen by satellite moving through the strait by day as well as night, with huge vessels traveling back and forth under U.S. protection. Once clear of Hormuz, they often transfer oil and natural gas to tankers unwilling to take the risk themselves.

Europe pays the price

The biggest short-term losers may be the Europeans. With the Red Sea route unavailable for Saudi crude, oil must now travel all the way around Africa to reach European markets. That is a longer, more expensive journey, and Richman warns the price of oil could skyrocket across Europe as a result. The pressure could become severe enough that Western European governments might even soften their stance and acquiesce to a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, purely to get Russian oil flowing quickly again.

That last point gestures at a larger possibility Richman raises: that the Houthi attack might ultimately help President Trump negotiate peace between Ukraine and Russia. It is a speculative thread, but it follows from the energy logic he lays out—if Europe’s supply crunch becomes acute enough, the political calculus in Brussels and other Western European capitals could shift.

Over the longer run, though, Richman expects Saudi exports to continue, just rerouted through the Persian Gulf rather than the Red Sea. Those shipments, he suggests, will probably push oil prices back down. The spike, in other words, may prove temporary—but the strategic realignment it triggered could prove more durable.

Strip away the market mechanics and the analysis points to a familiar irony of proxy conflict. An attack launched with the apparent aim of helping Iran has instead nudged a key Gulf state back toward the American camp, strengthened Israeli-Saudi security cooperation, and handed Washington leverage it had been struggling to gain. Whether that holds depends on how quickly the Saudis repair the pipeline and how much they resent being pulled back into dependence on the United States—but for now, the Houthis appear to have gotten the opposite of what they wanted.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-houthis-inadvertently-helped-the-us-and-israel/