The Siege of Iran Also Trapped Saudi

The siege of Iran was designed to isolate Tehran. It has instead trapped Riyadh.

When US and Israeli aircraft opened the war on 28 February and killed Iran’s supreme leader in the first hours, the best-case working assumption in Washington was that overwhelming force would break Tehran within weeks. Three months on, the Strait of Hormuz that carries 20% of the world’s seaborne oil remains contested, tanker traffic collapsed from around 60 vessels a day to near zero at the worst point, and the US has answered Iran’s closure with its own naval blockade of Iranian ports. The chokepoint did not discriminate between enemy and ally. The same closure that strangles Iran also severed Saudi exports and the longer the siege runs the deeper the wound cuts.

This is no longer a war that Saudi Arabia can watch from the sidelines while quietly banking the advantages. It is a vice closing on the kingdom from two directions at once, financial and strategic, and it is forcing a choice that Riyadh has spent years engineering its entire foreign policy to avoid.

The shared strangulation

Saudi crude exports fell by roughly half in March, to about 3.33 million barrels a day, as the effective closure of the Gulf forced the kingdom to reroute flows westward through the 1,200 kilometre pipeline to Yanbu, whose capacity has been pushed to 7 million barrels a day. Output was cut by around 2 million barrels in March, to near 8 million, and slipped further as the war continued. The largest refinery in the kingdom was halted, propane and butane exports stopped for weeks, and at one point Yanbu stood as the only functioning crude outlet. Aramco’s own leadership concedes that even if the strait reopened immediately, rebalancing would take months and could stretch into 2027.

Iran’s position is far worse, yet the logic is identical. Oil revenue, worth at least 30 billion dollars and around a quarter of state income before the war, has been throttled. The IMF projects a 6.1% contraction this year with no recovery before 2027, 2 million jobs have already gone, and the central bank has privately warned that rebuilding the war-damaged economy could take more than a decade. Reconstruction is impossible while the war continues because it demands finance, foreign exchange, and imported capital goods, and the blockade and sanctions choke all at once.

So both capitals face the same arithmetic. Neither can fund its future from oil while the chokepoint stays contested, and neither can wait the other out without absorbing damage it cannot recover. This is the unintended symmetry of the siege. It has manufactured a shared interest between Tehran and Riyadh, precisely where Washington assumed it was deepening a rivalry. The two are now cornered into one of two outcomes. They fight each other directly, which serves only their enemies, or they reach some form of pact. There is no longer a comfortable third lane.

The end of hedging

For two decades, the Saudi doctrine was to ensure that neither Iran nor Israel achieved regional dominance, to hedge between them and pocket the spread and that posture is now spent. The kingdom declined to enter the military campaign against Iran, issued symbolic condemnations of Tehran, preserved its ceasefire with the Houthis and leaned on Pakistani mediation. Washington has read all of this as betrayal. A leading US senator close to the White House warned in March that Saudi refusal to fight would carry consequences, and in late May widened the threat to severe repercussions for future relations should Riyadh, Doha and Islamabad refuse to join the Abraham Accords. The US president has pressed for simultaneous and mandatory normalisation as the price of the broader settlement.

This is the heart of the trap. Neutrality is no longer a tolerated position for any of the parties that matter. Tehran will not accept a Riyadh that quietly assists the campaign against it. Washington and Tel Aviv will not accept a Riyadh that refuses to convert the moment into normalisation. The kingdom is being pushed to either recognise that Iran has absorbed the worst the US could deliver and emerged standing, which is its own kind of victory, or to sign with Israel and then stand on the confrontation line against a wounded but undefeated neighbour. The official Saudi line, that normalisation requires an irreversible path to Palestinian statehood, is real, but it is also the last evasion available, and the pressure is designed to strip it away.