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View all search resultsThe American shield is cracking
America’s inability to protect bases in the Persian Gulf and Jordan and its regional allies’ territory signals a historic blow to its imperial system.
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A satellite image shows black smoke rising from the Saudi Arabian East-West oil pipeline south of Medina in the Hejaz Region, on Sept. 10, 2026. (-/European Union/Copernicus Sentinel-3/Handout via Reuters)
M
ocha was once known to the world for coffee. Today, the Yemeni port has acquired a harsher significance. Its seizure by the Houthis gives the movement control of the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which ships must pass between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
Taken alone, the fall of Mocha might look like one more reversal in Yemen’s grinding civil war. It is not. It came alongside a drone attack launched from Iraq that forced Saudi Arabia to close its East-West oil pipeline and in the largest context of United States President Donald Trump’s reckless and failing war on Iran. Together, the events expose an uncomfortable truth: The American security order in the Middle East is failing to provide security.
Saudi Arabia built the East-West pipeline to escape precisely this kind of danger. The line carries crude from the kingdom’s eastern oil fields across 1,200 kilometers of desert to Yanbu on the Red Sea. It allows Saudi oil to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has long possessed the ability to disrupt maritime traffic.
Yet the escape route now has its own vulnerabilities, exposed by Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. Saudi Arabia says Iran-backed militias operating from Iraq attacked its pumping stations. At the pipeline’s western end, the Houthi advance threatens shipping around the Bab el-Mandeb. Iran and its allies have, in effect, applied pressure to both exits from the Arabian Peninsula.
This is not the outcome Washington promised.
For decades, Arab governments bought American weapons, hosted American troops and accommodated US strategic priorities. In return, the US presented itself as the guarantor of oil infrastructure, shipping lanes and the political survival of friendly governments.
The problem is larger than Saudi Arabia. Iranian attacks over the past several months have repeatedly reached American bases and diplomatic facilities across the Gulf, Iraq and Jordan. A Pentagon inspector-general report acknowledged that Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed hundreds of structures at US bases in eight countries, along with dozens of aircraft.
