On the menu today: The Houthis join the fight on the side of the Iranians, hitting Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. The rise of drone warfare has created a massive new threat to just about all the world’s most critical straits and waterways. There are countermeasures for these kinds of attacks, but they will take time to develop and deploy. Read on.
Strait Flush
The Wall Street Journal, this morning:
Conflict in the Middle East broadened Wednesday after Tehran-backed Houthi militants said they attacked two Saudi tankers heading toward the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The Red Sea maritime chokepoint, which has become the biggest export route for Saudi Arabia’s crude following the Strait of Hormuz closure, accounted for roughly 12 percent of the world’s seaborne oil flows before the war.
You may recall the Trump administration going to war against the Houthis in the early part of last year. That war ended with an Oman-brokered cease-fire agreement; the U.S. effort no doubt inflicted considerable casualties against the Houthis, but it was inconclusive in eliminating them as a threat. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Fatima Abo Alasrar, writing at the Stimson Center on the one-year anniversary of the cease-fire, noted the limited benefits to the cease-fire:
Operation Rough Rider’s ceasefire is a case in point. Because the agreement covered only U.S. naval and government-flagged vessels, much of what else occurred was ignored by Washington. So, when the Houthis sank the Liberian-flagged Magic Seas and Eternity C in July 2025, Washington did not react. By 2026, the Houthis were sorting Red Sea traffic by political identity and deciding what got through. The mission that had begun as freedom of navigation ended as force protection for U.S. hulls, with no movement on underlying Houthi control.
Now, it’s not quite true that the U.S. “did not react” to the Houthis attacking and sinking the Magic Seas and Eternity C last summer. U.S. State Department spokesman Tammy Bruce did issue a firmly worded statement condemning the attacks. (I am reminded of the puppet version of Hans Blix in Team America: World Police. “We will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are.” Language warning at that link.)
Up until very recently, the position of the U.S. Navy was that it upheld freedom of the seas and freedom of navigation for all nations, and “challenges excessive maritime claims around the world, regardless of the identity of the claimant.” Now, under “America First,” we negotiate a deal to ensure our ships don’t get fired upon and leave the rest of the world to figure out how to protect their own ships.
(You can find “analysts” who argue that last spring’s U.S. campaign delivered “complete annihilation” and “broke the Houthis forever”; remember that the media environment has plenty of people who will tell you whatever you want to hear.)
When it comes to international trade and transportation, there are six particularly important straits or other narrow bodies of water.
One of them is the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, mentioned above, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, serving as the southern approach to the Suez Canal. If ships traveling to and from Europe and Asia don’t use this route, they must sail all the way around Africa, adding considerable time and fuel costs.
Another key strait, as you probably noticed, is the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea. About a fifth of global oil consumption passes through here — or at least it did until the end of February – making it the single most important oil chokepoint in the world. Before the war, about 130 ships per day passed through the strait; in the past few weeks, the number of ships passing through has ranged from about ten to about 40; note some ships manipulate their GPS trackers during transit.
The other four key waterways are the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, and the Panama Canal.
For years, international security experts worried about an Islamist terrorist threat to the Strait of Malacca, but that appears to have died down. In September 2025, the Hague-based think tank, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, concluded, “Indonesia’s terrorist groups are currently at their lowest ebb.” Islamist terrorist cells still exist in Malaysia, but they, too, are quieter than in the past.
That’s the good news; the bad news is, “The number of piracy and armed robbery incidents targeting vessels in the Malacca and Singapore Straits in 2025 rose to 108 cases, marking the highest level recorded over the past 19 years (2007–2025).” Still, the fact that this is probably the first you’ve heard of it is a sign that piracy in the Malacca and Singapore Straits is not a major disruption to U.S. international trade.
Islamist terrorists have threatened the Suez Canal for a long time; “On July 29 and August 31, 2013, when militants attacked two ships in the waterway with rocket-propelled grenades (RPG). In both instances, there was only slight damage to the vessels. The Furqan Brigades, a group based out of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, claimed credit for the attacks.” Thankfully, the Egyptian government seems to have that threat largely mitigated . . . at least for now.
More good news is that there is no active, known Islamist terrorist threat to ships passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. Back in 2002, three men with ties to al-Qaeda were arrested in Morocco for planning a plot to blow up U.S. and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar. Back in 2023, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, a senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, threatened the West with “the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, [the Strait of] Gibraltar and other waterways.” He did not elaborate on how Iran, quite some distance from Gibraltar, would close that waterway.
With that said, the countries adjacent to and near the Strait of Gibraltar have persistent Islamist threats on their soil. Earlier this month, Moroccan authorities “arrested 10 members of a cell linked to the ISIL affiliate in Sahel Province (ISSP), foiling a planned attack.” Last week, new figures revealed Spain recorded the highest number of arrests for terrorism offences linked to Islamist extremism in the European Union. And nearby Algeria has had Islamist groups operating within its borders for many years.
You might be thinking, “At least we don’t have to worry about an Islamist terrorist threat to the Panama Canal.” Eh, that’s somewhat true. But as Jose Lev Alvarez recently noted:
Venezuela’s Margarita Island has served as Hezbollah’s primary Western Hemisphere base. Between 2010 and 2019, the regime issued more than 10,400 passports to Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian nationals, many funneled to Hezbollah operatives thanks to figures such as former Venezuelan Vice President Tareck el Aissami.
The terrorist group has established paramilitary training camps on the island, exploited its duty-free status for money laundering, and coordinated cocaine shipments through state-linked networks, including the Cartel of the Suns. Hezbollah’s Latin American cocaine operations generate an estimated $400 million annually, sustaining alliances with FARC dissidents and the NLA through shared trafficking routes and money laundering.
As for the vulnerability of the Panama Canal itself, David Gantz of the Baker Institute at Rice University wrote in January 2025, “While the Panamanian government would not sabotage its own canal, there are concerns that terrorist groups, either from Panama or elsewhere, might target the canal. Some observers worry that a few strategically placed explosives could disable a series of locks for days or weeks, particularly in light of recent tensions.”
Way back in 1999, the Dallas Morning News wrote about the difficulties of securing the entire length of the canal:
Although senior U.S. and Panamanian officials insist that the canal is not regarded as a major attack target for rogue nations or terrorist groups, [retired Gen. Gordon] Sumner contends that the canal remains vulnerable to anyone trying to attract world attention. “I’ve always said, if you want to get at the United States, you don’t go attack the lion in the cage, you go down to Panama and attack Bambi,” he said. A Latin America-based military expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a small commando unit could easily shut down the canal for a matter of months or years.
“It wouldn’t be very hard. I could do it with a few guys,” the expert said. A shoulder-fired, armor-piercing antitank missile could sink a ship at any of several locations and bring traffic to a complete standstill, he said. Each of the massive steel gates in the locks, which hold back the 52 million gallons of water used by each ship during a canal transit, could be disabled or blown open with a few pounds of plastic explosives. An attack on the Gatun Dam, which maintains the huge reservoir of water needed to feed the canal, could flood the canal and disable it for years, the military expert said.
Twenty-seven years later, we’re left wondering . . . what could a drone do to a ship traveling through the Panama Canal?
Islamists plus drones equals a threat to international shipping that is serious and is proving extremely difficult to mitigate. The range of a Shahed drone is 560 miles for the lower-end models and up to 1,550 miles for the higher-end models. Even the high-end consumer drones can fly up to nine miles; an improvised explosive attached to a consumer drone wouldn’t do a lot of damage but would undoubtedly rattle ship crews if they hit ships in transit or in port.
And as I have noted, drones are cheap compared to conventional weapons. One analysis argues the Iranians are building Shahed-136 drones for just $4,000 each; another estimate puts it at $7,000. (Some of this reflects the exchange rate for the nearly worthless Iranian rial currency, but also keep in mind that Iranian labor is cheap.)
Iran has shown every malcontent in the world a relatively easy way to gain enormous leverage and disrupt the economies of countries. Get a bunch of drones, fire them at cargo ships and oil and liquid natural gas tankers in a key strait, watch oil prices and insurance rates soar, and then list your demands.
I have my gripes with how the U.S. effort against Iran has turned out; the threat to international shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was predictable and predicted. But this is not just a Trump administration problem. The ease with which anyone can now threaten international shipping is becoming an everyone problem.
Where there’s a demand, a supply will follow. Dozens of defense contractors and tech companies around the world are inventing new anti-drone technologies, from jammers that will disrupt the signals to an incoming drone, to anti-drone drones that intercept and collide with the attacking drone, to GPS spoofers to get the attacking drone to miss its target. It will take time to fully develop and deploy these technologies, but bit by bit, an anti-drone defense system is taking shape.
One last note: If we’re discussing drones running into international shipping, we can’t ignore the spectacular success the Ukrainians have had with a series of attacks they euphemistically call “long range sanctions” against the Russian shadow fleet. “Since [the Ukrainian] Unmanned Systems Forces launched its campaign targeting the Russian shadow fleet and logistics, Ukrainian drone strikes hit 126 vessels in the Azov Sea and 70 in the Black Sea as of July 22.” To minimize the risk of oil spills, the Ukrainian drones target the oil tanker’s superstructure or screws (propellers). That leaves the ship immobilized and irreparable, but avoids creating an Exxon Valdez-style spill in waterways that have seen enough pollution as it is.
ADDENDUM: Yes, likely Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson can justifiably insist that his views have evolved from 16 years ago, but . . . Jackson was more pro-life back then than Republican incumbent Susan Collins ever was:
Years before emerging as the likely Democratic nominee in Maine’s pivotal US Senate race, Troy Jackson answered on a candidate questionnaire that, “Abortion should never be legal,” and that women seeking an abortion should first be required to view an ultrasound of their pregnancy.
That response in 2010 was one of several sweeping anti-abortion positions Jackson, then running for reelection in the Maine state Senate, staked out in candidate surveys published in a local anti-abortion group’s 2004 and 2010 voter guides, which were reviewed by CNN.
Jackson’s views have since changed dramatically. He now supports establishing a federal right to abortion and, in 2023, co-sponsored a Maine law expanding access to abortion after fetal viability.
But does he have a tattoo of Mother Teresa?