By Sharon Zhang
This article was originally published by Truthout
A top economist estimated that Trump’s Iran war has already cost the average American household an extra $1,650.
Houthi forces have reportedly seized the entirety of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, further solidifying the group’s control over its key waterway and sending oil prices soaring to even further heights since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, seized control of the key port town of Mocha this week, reports say. They have since rapidly advanced to controlling the entire Red Sea coast, and, on Friday, reached the strategic island of Perim, which sits in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
This gives the Iran-backed rebel group even further control over Bab al-Mandeb, which is one of the world’s most critical shipping routes, with about 12 percent of global seaborne-traded oil typically passing through the strait.
This is the latest escalation in its decade-long fight against the Saudi Arabia-backed Yemeni forces, which has flared up in recent months amid the war on Iran. Over a thousand people have been killed or wounded in the past two weeks of fighting in southwest Yemen, aid agencies have reported, while tens of thousands have been displaced.
Satellite images on Thursday also showed a large amount of black smoke rising from an area of Saudi Arabia’s crucial East-West oil pipeline, which has been critical for the petrostate for diverting oil exports amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
In July, Houthis declared a naval blockade on Saudi Arabian ships passing through Bab al-Mandeb, a response to Saudi strikes on Sanaa International Airport earlier that month and the country’s years-long blockade on Yemen.
But the Houthis have also threatened to close or slow traffic through the strait for years, in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, then, the U.S.’s attacks on Yemen under President Joe Biden. In July, Iranian officials reportedly also asked the Houthis to close Bab al-Mandeb if the U.S. progressed its strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure, as President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to do.
The U.S. is providing Saudi Arabia with intelligence and support as it fights the Houthis. But Trump has reportedly declined Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s request for the U.S. to directly launch strikes against the Houthis, Axios reported on Friday — though war hawks on both sides of the aisle have urged the Trump administration to back the fighting more directly. The U.S. also killed over 150 Yemeni civilians in Trump’s targeting of Houthis last year, a fact that the Pentagon belatedly admitted months later.
Meanwhile, the fighting and threats to the strait, in combination with the pressures caused by the war on Iran, sent oil prices to $110 a barrel on Friday. Diesel prices hit a record high in the U.S., rising above $6 per gallon on average. On Thursday, several gas stations in California maxed out their values for diesel at $9.999 a gallon — the highest number the pumps can display.
This will translate to an even worse affordability crunch in the U.S. in relation to the U.S.’s war on Iran, which has already cost over $100 billion just in additional gas prices. In combination with other factors like rising energy costs and interest rates, Moody’s Analytics’s top economist estimated on Thursday that the war has cost the average American household $1,650 already — with no end in sight to Middle East wars.
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