For decades, the security of Gulf countries and the global flow of oil were guaranteed by the "oil for security” doctrine, in which the American defense umbrella in the region protected the sea lanes and kept the Gulf states’ oil flowing to global markets.

However, this American-led security order has been disrupted, and its limits have been exposed. Developments in Bab el-Mandeb, where Houthi forces have seized the ports of Mocha and Dhubab, as well as Perim Island (a small landmass that divides the strait into two navigable channels), suggest that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has further weakened American security guarantees in the Gulf and the Red Sea region. These guarantees appear increasingly limited and ineffective in the absence of "home-grown” regional security and strategic mechanisms.

The recent developments in southwestern Yemen and their implications will reverberate far beyond the region, ushering in tectonic shifts in regional security and strategic thinking. Bab el-Mandeb is a crucial maritime chokepoint through which a significant volume of the world’s oil passes. This is precisely why Houthi control over its shores could affect global energy security and influence market prices in distant parts of the world.

America’s changing priorities

When U.S. President Donald Trump remarked in Dublin that the Houthis had "called us,” "don’t want to fight us,” and that the situation would "work out very well,” he was not merely making an offhand comment. Rather, he was revealing a hierarchy of priorities in which Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf oil reaches markets linked to the United States, take precedence over Bab el-Mandeb, whose traffic serves China and Asia far more than it does the U.S.

However understandable this asymmetry in American priorities and interests may be from the perspective of Washington’s narrowly defined strategic objectives, it is precisely this asymmetry that could expose the strategic vulnerabilities of Riyadh, Cairo and the Gulf states.

It is worth pausing on what this means in practical terms. Saudi oil exports to Asia, which stood at roughly 3.4 million barrels a day in June, collapsed to a mere 128,000 barrels by August before recovering only partially to around 700,000 in September 2026. Prices have climbed past $107 a barrel, and the cost of that increase is already visible at petrol pumps in the U.S., where prices have risen by more than a third.

The Red Sea matters to Riyadh in ways that extend beyond its commercial value. For years, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to Yanbu, with a capacity of around 5 million barrels a day, was regarded as the kingdom’s insurance policy against any closure of the Strait of Hormuz. By transporting crude to the Red Sea coast, the pipeline offered an alternative to the Gulf’s most exposed chokepoint. However, a bypass is only as secure as the waters into which it opens. With Bab el-Mandeb contested and a hostile Houthi force threatening the southern approaches, the route designed to provide resilience has become another potential point of vulnerability, leaving Saudi Arabia squeezed at both ends of its maritime geography.

The global energy crisis, moreover, is not confined to one strait alone. With Hormuz already strained by the war between the U.S. and Iran, and Bab el-Mandeb now under a hostile Houthi militia’s watch, the world is looking at the possibility that a quarter of its oil and gas supply could be disrupted, with the possibility of long-term negative economic consequences.

Lacking strategic depth

What makes the Bab el-Mandeb vulnerable and occasioned this crisis is not simply how the Houthis blitzkrieged and took strategic locations, but Washington’s evident reluctance to intervene, Riyadh’s not anticipating such a scenario in the context of numerous Houthi verbal threats to close the strait, and the Yemeni government’s ineffective military and security strategizing.

American reluctance to intervene and Saudi security vulnerability is not new so much as the Houthi attacks are the latest instance of a pattern stretching back to the 2019 attack on Saudi Aramco facilities, through the decision earlier this year to strike Iran without consulting Gulf allies, and now to a public unwillingness to open a new front in Yemen ahead of midterm elections that have already been complicated by an unpopular war in American politics.

Whatever the merits of restraint and non-intervention from a purely American perspective, the cumulative security and strategic implication, as seen from Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Cairo and Doha, is that the security umbrella these states once relied upon has become conditional, selective, and increasingly hostage to domestic political calculations that have nothing to do with Gulf and regional interests. The crisis in the Hormuz Strait and Bab el-Mandeb is a wake-up call to institute domestic security and military capabilities that the region can depend on as America retreats.

Red Sea alliance

Saudi Arabia’s previous response to a possible security destabilization of the Red Sea region, which was in the form of a 14-member multinational maritime alliance that included Türkiye, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and Djibouti, ought to be analyzed as regional domestic strategy and "ownership” of regional security instead of depending on American or foreign strategic calculations.

Egypt’s stake in all this is equally significant and should not be overlooked. Suez Canal revenues are among Cairo’s main sources of hard currency, and every vessel diverted around the Cape of Good Hope is income lost at a time when the Egyptian economy is already under severe strain, with longer transit times and higher insurance premiums adding to the damage well beyond Egypt itself. For Cairo, the alliance is therefore less an exercise in strategic autonomy than an economic necessity, which also explains why Egyptian participation lends the coalition a seriousness that declaratory statements alone could not provide.

The Red Sea alliance is, in effect, a declaration that the regional countries will no longer serve as the sole guarantors of a global public good, the free flow of oil, for which the industrialized world has grown accustomed to paying nothing beyond the market price.

The Saudi Defense Ministry’s language, describing maritime security as "a collective responsibility that requires effective and sustainable international partnership,” is a polite way of saying that the old arrangement, in which Gulf states bore the risk while consuming nations enjoyed the benefit, is no longer acceptable on its previous terms.

Türkiye factor

For Türkiye, whose defense partnerships with Riyadh have deepened through the Mecca alliance and related agreements, this shift carries real opportunity, but also responsibility, since a regional order built on distributed rather than singular guarantees will require exactly the kind of sustained, capable partnership that Ankara has been positioning itself to provide.

Türkiye’s comparative advantage lies in the breadth of what it can offer, from naval capabilities and unmanned systems to air defense development and a growing record of training and basing arrangements in the wider Red Sea and Horn of Africa space. Unlike external powers, Ankara brings political familiarity with the region and no appetite for the kind of conditionality that has shaped Washington’s commitments in recent years. Even so, its credibility will be tested less by procurement announcements than by sustained operational presence and interoperability with Saudi, Egyptian and other partner forces, both on the ground and at sea. Türkiye, with its burgeoning military industry and strategic capabilities, can offer a "regionally owned” security partnership that can stabilize a region prone to proxies and non-state actors.

The broader lesson from the Bab el-Mandeb crisis is therefore clear: Regional actors need their own security strategies and the capabilities to back them up. Security borrowed from others can be withdrawn at any time, while security that is built, shared and owned is the only kind that endures. Finally, given how quickly the conflict is evolving, the question for the Gulf and its partners is no longer whether to build it but how fast they can do so.