Iran does not need to beat the Americans militarily. It just needs to outlast them - Middle East Eye

The usual suspects might have declared Iran’s “axis of resistance” defeated too early.

Two separate theatres of the Middle East’s widening conflict produced results in a few days that, taken together, say more about Tehran’s long-term attrition strategy than either does alone. 

Pro-Iran Houthi forces completed a week-long offensive that gave them effective control over all of Yemen’s Red Sea shore, along with the Bab el-Mandeb Strait through the seizure of Perim Island and the Hanish archipelago. They now control one of the world’s principal maritime chokepoints, just as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. 

At the same time, drones apparently launched from Iraqi territory - an attack for which pro-Iran militia forces in the country denied responsibility - struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, forcing a shutdown of the artery that carries crude to the Red Sea terminal at Yanbu.

For the record, a few weeks ago, joint US-Saudi air strikes killed 20 members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces, and the latter had vowed retaliation.

The Saudi pipeline is precisely the route that Riyadh built to avoid dependence on Hormuz, which has been mostly closed since March.

This is likely the latest instalment in Iran’s long-war campaign, whose logic has less to do with (an unlikely) battlefield victory than it does with the political calendar in Washington.

Six months of blockade, counter-blockade and a failed ceasefire later, Hormuz remains a source of chronic disruption to seaborne oil and gas flows, along with other critical commodities for global supply chains.

What changed in the last few days is that the southern exit from the Gulf region - the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which a significant share of traffic between Europe and Asia transits towards the Suez Canal - is now under the practical control of a force aligned with Tehran. 

Houthi officials were quick to insist that commercial shipping in general would not be threatened, carving out an exception for Saudi-flagged vessels. The message was aimed less at the global shipping industry than at Riyadh: the cost of alignment with Washington has just risen. It is a message that might also extend to other Gulf Cooperation Council members.

The Iraqi government publicly asked the Saudi kingdom not to retaliate, and the royal court - notably restrained, given the scale of the provocation - has for now agreed to hold fire. Clearly, Riyadh is not yet certain as to whether it wants this fight to escalate on Iraqi or Yemeni soil, with a risk of becoming engaged on two fronts simultaneously - not to mention the direct attacks from Iran that it has already experienced. 

Iran cannot win this war in any conventional sense. It is betting that it does not need to; that it needs only to outlast the patience of its adversary's domestic politics

The scale of what is being contested is worth setting out plainly. Bab el-Mandeb is not a marginal route: it carries roughly 10 percent of global trade and around a third of container traffic, including a substantial flow of Gulf crude, refined products and liquefied natural gas. 

Oil transiting the strait had already fallen sharply amid earlier bouts of Houthi attacks on shipping - from an average of roughly 8.7 million barrels a day (bpd) in 2023 to around four million in 2024 - as tankers rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, a diversion that adds 10 to 14 days of transit time and pushes up freight rates, insurance premiums and, ultimately, consumer prices in importing economies. 

Effective Houthi control of the strait raises the credible prospect of pushing that residual traffic towards zero, particularly for Saudi-linked cargo.

The pipeline side of the ledger is even more consequential for Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, the East-West line was pushed to a record seven million bpd precisely to compensate for the closure of Hormuz, with roughly five million bpd of that flow reaching Yanbu before the strike, and the remainder consumed by domestic refineries. Yanbu’s loading capacity is itself capped at around four million bpd. 

Tanker-tracking firms had clocked Yanbu loadings climbing to nearly that level in the months before the attack. A sustained outage of even a fraction of that volume, at oil prices that have traded above $100 a barrel for much of the war, could plausibly put hundreds of millions of dollars a day of export revenues at risk, on top of the direct damage to pumping infrastructure.

Saudi authorities shut down the pipeline after the attack, with the state oil company Aramco calling it a precautionary and temporary measure. The extent of physical damage to the pumping stations has not been independently confirmed. 

None of this reflects an Iranian state capable of matching American or Israeli conventional power; the assassination of its senior leadership, and months of strikes on its territory, have made that asymmetry brutally clear. 

What Tehran retains is the capacity to raise the costs of the war incrementally, through proxies on multiple fronts simultaneously, without committing its own forces or crossing thresholds that would trigger a decisive American response. 

It is the well-known death by a thousand cuts.

Closing Hormuz, contesting Bab el-Mandeb, and severing Saudi Arabia’s overland alternative are not three separate campaigns; they are part of the same strategy, applied wherever a low-cost proxy or partner is available. 

The strategic objective is not to defeat the US militarily - an outcome unreachable for Tehran - but to make the war’s costs, measured in energy prices, insurance premiums and diverted shipping, politically unsustainable for an American administration that has to answer to angry voters in a matter of weeks.

That the calculation is explicitly tied to the electoral calendar is no longer a matter of speculation; it has become part of the public discourse in Washington itself. The administration wants to avoid a full resumption of hostilities before the midterm elections in November, while simultaneously insisting that the conflict barely qualifies as a war at all. 

That rhetorical posture - downplaying an active war involving a naval blockade, an aerial campaign and now two contested chokepoints - is itself evidence of the pressure Iran’s strategy is generating. 

With the price of oil recently hitting $108 a barrel, a White House that needs to reassure domestic audiences ahead of a vote in which its congressional majorities are at stake is a White House with an incentive to manage the war rather than to win it outright. Tehran’s proxies appear to be timing their moves to keep that incentive under constant strain.

The more consequential question, beyond the immediate electoral calendar, is what this attrition is doing to the assumptions that have underpinned Gulf security policy for the past two decades. 

Saudi Arabia’s decision to absorb a direct strike on critical energy infrastructure without immediate retaliation (as occurred in 2019), at Iraq’s request, is a small but telling departure from the reflexive alignment with a maximalist American-Israeli posture that Riyadh maintained through most of this conflict’s earlier phases. 

It does not amount to a rapprochement with Tehran, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reported appeals to Washington for direct military action against the Houthis point the other way. But the coexistence of both signals - private pressure on Washington to intervene, and public restraint towards Baghdad and, by extension, Iran - captures a Gulf state hedging between two futures, rather than committed to one. 

The longer the war grinds on without a decisive American or Israeli victory, the more plausible it becomes that regional actors will quietly begin exploring an accommodation among themselves - one that treats US-Israeli preferences as a constraint to be managed, rather than an anchor to be followed.

The recently signed Mecca agreement should, in principle, play this role.

Whether that undertow becomes a current depends on variables still in motion: whether Saudi Arabia’s restraint survives a second or third strike on its infrastructure, whether the Houthi position at Bab el-Mandeb hardens into interdiction of actual traffic, and above all whether the political costs Iran is manufacturing in the Gulf translate into the outcome Tehran is wagering on. 

The latter would include an American electorate, and by extension a US Congress, less willing to fund an open-ended Middle Eastern war after the ballots are counted. Even inside the Trump administration, there is more than a little doubt over the feasibility of continuing the Iran war. 

As noted, Iran cannot win this war in any conventional sense. It is betting that it does not need to; that it needs only to outlast the patience of its adversary’s domestic politics.

In reference to foreign invaders, the following phrase was attributed to a Taliban commander during the ill-fated US war on Afghanistan: “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

It might apply to this conflict as well.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.