Philip Pilkington laid out the map.
Saudi Arabia reroutes roughly 5 million barrels a day through its east-west pipeline, the UAE runs its own line to Fujairah, and nearly all of Riyadh's bypassed oil still has to sail out through the Bab el-Mandeb.
His math: if that strait closes, something like 60 PERCENT of the Middle East's remaining exports go dark.
The Houthis closed it during the Gaza war with weaker arsenals than they hold today, and this week they traded strikes with Saudi Arabia for the first time in four years.
His darker question: with every red line already crossed, what stops the IRGC from skipping the proxy layer and running the closure directly?
He was equally unsparing on the strike strategy.
Pipelines self-seal and repair in days, refineries and fields are genuinely hard to kill, and reaching for energy infrastructure looks to him less like a plan than a fashion, borrowed from Ukraine coverage, by a side running low on cards.
Mid-conversation, the IRGC broadcast on channel 16 to every vessel in range: do not approach the strait, you will be fired upon. Two more ships were hit before we finished.
@philippilk
