Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb: The two-front bind facing US naval power
Tehran - BORNA - The clearest measure of a shift in the regional balance is not just what Tehran says about it, but what Israeli military analysts have begun conceding. Writing in the Hebrew-language outlet Israel Defense, military technology editor Ami Rohkes Dombe has argued that the American attempt to keep the region's maritime corridors open on Washington's terms has run into a wall — that the routes designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz have reached a dead end, and that the US, having declined Riyadh's requests to open a direct military front in Yemen, has confined itself to intelligence and targeting support. When that assessment comes from Tel Aviv rather than Tehran, it is worth taking seriously.
What Dombe describes is not a single adversary executing a single plan. It is something harder for a naval power to counter: two separate situations, at opposite ends of the Arabian Peninsula, driven by different actors with their own reasons — arriving at the same time.
Two ends, one fleet
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb lie roughly 3,000 kilometers apart. Policing either against a capable adversary is demanding; policing both at once, while also shielding the overland and pipeline routes meant to bypass them, exceeds the force posture the US currently maintains in the region. Every additional mission draws escorts, minesweepers and air cover away from somewhere else.
At the eastern end, Iran has responded to the American naval blockade and to direct military attack on its territory — a response conducted in its own coastal waters, on the basis of the sovereign rights of a state bordering the strait. At the western end, Yemeni forces have consolidated positions along the Red Sea coastline and the approaches to Bab el-Mandeb, acting on a conflict of their own that long predates the current standoff and that has its own causes: more than a decade of war and blockade, and Sanaa's declared position on Gaza.
These are distinct theaters with distinct actors. But a fleet does not get to choose its problems one at a time. Whatever the origins of each situation, the effect on American planning is cumulative — and that is the difficulty Washington has not solved.
The bypass routes were the answer — until both halves came under pressure
For a decade, the strategic logic in Washington and the Persian Gulf capitals was that Hormuz could be worked around. Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline to the Red Sea, the UAE's Fujairah terminal and expanded Red Sea export capacity were all developed on the premise that Gulf producers could keep oil flowing even if the strait became contested.
That calculation assumed the Red Sea would remain the safe half of the equation. It no longer does. With the Bab el-Mandeb approaches contested and the pipeline infrastructure itself having come under drone attack, both halves of the bypass strategy are under pressure simultaneously. A workaround only works if it is unlikely to be disrupted in the same period as the route it replaces. That assumption has not held — not because anyone coordinated its failure, but because the strategy was never designed for the possibility that both corridors could become difficult at once.
Logistics, not firepower, is the binding constraint
Warships are only as sustainable as the ports behind them. The US Fifth Fleet's support infrastructure in Bahrain is the node that makes sustained American naval operations in the Persian Gulf possible at all — refueling, repair, crew rotation, ordnance resupply. According to Dombe's account, that infrastructure has sustained serious damage, with American naval officials acknowledging that a rapid return to normal operations is not feasible.
Without a secure logistics hub inside the Gulf, every option degrades. Ships must operate farther from station, transit more often, and spend more time moving than deployed. A navy that cannot reliably resupply within a theater is not a permanent presence there; it is a visitor.
Here the asymmetry runs against the US. Iran's coastline, its dispersed infrastructure and its domestic production base all sit inside the theater. American assets do not. This is the advantage Iranian officials have pointed to in arguing that the country's defensive capability rests on indigenous production rather than external supply — an advantage measured not in headline capability but in the ability to sustain a posture over time. Distance is a cost that compounds.
Who made these waters unsafe
It should be stated plainly where the current insecurity originated. Iran did not create this situation; it entered it. Iranian officials have consistently held that the disruption to regional shipping traces directly to the American naval blockade and to the military aggression launched against Iran — and have noted the contradiction in a power that deploys thousands of kilometers from its own borders while claiming to safeguard the security of waterways, then strikes vessels in Iran's own coastal waters.
Tehran has been equally clear about the other end of the peninsula. Iran's Foreign Ministry has stated that it has no involvement in Yemen's affairs, describing Ansarullah as an independent Yemeni party that makes its own decisions according to its own interests, and has urged regional states to look at the facts rather than engage in deflection by assigning blame to the wrong address. The Yemeni file, in Tehran's account, is a Yemeni matter with Yemeni causes — and attributing it elsewhere does not bring anyone closer to resolving it.
The wider legal point Tehran advances regarding Hormuz is difficult to dismiss on its own terms: the strait is bounded by coastal states, and the management of its navigation is a matter for those states under international law and their sovereign rights. Iran and Oman have finalized an understanding on designated safe navigation routes on precisely this basis. The presence of extra-regional forces is not the solution to insecurity in these waters; by Tehran's account, it is the source of it.
It is worth being precise about which assumption has failed. The US military remains capable of striking almost anywhere in the region. What it appears unable to do is hold open two chokepoints, protect its partners' alternative export corridors, and guarantee its own basing security — all at once, indefinitely, at acceptable cost. Those are different kinds of capability, and the second kind is what determines who sets the terms in a maritime standoff.
The proposition that has collapsed is narrower but more consequential: that a demonstration of military force could restore the freedom of maneuver the US enjoyed in these waters in earlier decades. That belief no longer survives contact with the facts, and — as Dombe's analysis indicates — it is no longer treated as settled even by those with the strongest interest in believing it.
The regional recalculation
The consequence extends beyond the naval balance. Gulf states that built their security assumptions around American protection are watching a scenario in which that protection does not extend to the thing they most need protected — their ability to sell oil. When Washington declines to open a direct front in Yemen while being unable to guarantee the safety of the routes that bypass Hormuz, regional capitals draw the obvious conclusion about what the security relationship actually delivers, and at what price.
This points toward the argument Tehran has been making for years, which the current impasse has made harder to wave away: if an external power cannot secure these waterways, the logic of the situation favors arrangements built by the states that actually live on them. Regional security produced by regional states is not merely an Iranian preference; it is increasingly the only proposition on the table that has not already been tested and found wanting.
Whether this moment produces a durable change in the region's security architecture depends on questions that cannot yet be answered — how quickly American logistics capacity in the Gulf can be restored, whether current maritime pressure is sustained, and whether regional states convert their recalculation into new arrangements or simply wait. What can be said now is narrower but not trivial: the assumption that American naval power could unilaterally guarantee freedom of navigation in these waters is no longer one that anyone in the region, including in Tel Aviv, treats as settled.
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