Strategic Geography
🇸🇦Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is a critical node in global energy supply, carries political weight in the Islamic world, and is working to convert its defense spending into domestic industrial capability. This section tracks how Riyadh is adding security options beyond the United States, and what those choices mean for energy, supply chains, and the Gulf.
3 analyses
The Houthis Push Toward Bab el-Mandeb as the Middle East's Two Shipping Gateways Come Under Pressure at Once
In September the Houthis took Mocha and reached Perim, the island in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb. The strait is not closed, but with Hormuz traffic down to a handful of ships a day, the Red Sea was the outlet Saudi Arabia was counting on — and its pipeline to Yanbu has just been hit too. Iran has now tied reopening Hormuz to ending the fighting by all its allies, pulling both straits into a single negotiation.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan Align: The Middle East Builds a Second Security Layer Beyond the United States
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement treats an armed attack on any one of the three as an attack on all — language that drew immediate comparison to NATO's Article 5. But reading it as another NATO misses the larger shift: regional powers are no longer only choosing among architectures designed elsewhere. Seventy years after the Baghdad Pact traced nearly the same geographic axis, the architects have changed.
How the New Pipeline Empire Bypassing the Strait of Hormuz Redraws Oil Power
On a map, the Strait of Hormuz is a thin strip of water; in practice, it is the energy chokepoint the world finds hardest to avoid. The fighting of 2026 has changed how oil power is measured. This article examines how Saudi Arabia and the UAE use bypass pipelines to gain a resilience other Gulf producers lack, and how that is reshaping regional alignments.