Juan Cole Informed Comment
My interview with Ian Masters is at his Background Briefing
Background Briefing with Ian Masters · July 30, 2026 – Juan Cole | Larry Tye | Clay Risen
Transcript (produced by VoiceMe app and cleaned up with Anthropic’s Claude as well as my own eye):
# Background Briefing — Interview with Juan Cole
**IAN MASTERS:** And joining us now is Professor Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His latest articles in Informed Comment include “New War on Saudi Refineries by Iran Allies” and “Houthis Aim for Red Sea Tolls, May Have Hit Ship in Egypt.” Welcome to Background Briefing, Juan Cole.
**JUAN COLE:** Thank you, Ian.
**IAN MASTERS:** So, Juan, it looks as if the Houthis have really angered Muhammad bin Salman, and we know that he has a temper. After all, he ordered the beheading and dismemberment of a critic in Turkey. And now he has bombed the main Houthi port of Hodeidah. Apparently he’s sending the military in on a ground offensive. He’s furious at Iran, which, through its proxies in Iraq, struck Abqaiq, which is the main big Saudi oil refinery. So it looks as though — and then, of course, this American ship has been struck in a Mediterranean port in Egypt, an LNG ship. So it’s pretty clear that this Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran is poised to break out into a wider catastrophe, because once both sides go after each other’s oil facilities, then it’s a catastrophe for the world and the global economy. So how much on the brink are we, Juan?
**JUAN COLE:** The situation with regard to diesel and gasoline is dire. The way we’ve gotten through this crisis so far is that the United States, China, and Europe have drawn down their strategic reserves, both state reserves and reserves held by private companies. But you can only do that for so long, and we are now at historic lows in those reserves. And because of the resumption of hostilities, the Strait of Hormuz is still basically closed. And now the Houthis — the Helpers of God militia, which controls 80% of the Yemeni population — I think have decided to take advantage of the straits, so to speak, in which the Saudis find themselves, to put more pressure on the Saudi government by closing the Red Sea routes for Saudi petroleum, which can’t go out of the Strait of Hormuz anymore but can go through the Bab-el-Mandeb from the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean.
**IAN MASTERS:** Right. Otherwise known as the Gates of Grief. But, as you pointed out in your article “Houthis’ Aim for Red Sea Tolls May Have Hit Ship in Egypt,” last time around, when the Houthis tried to close the straits and went after various ships, shipping companies paid about $180 million a month in protection money. My understanding is that the Saudis were paying protection money to the Houthis. And they broke that deal, and I assume they broke that deal because the Iranians more or less told them to. I’ve talked to a lot of analysts on Yemen over the years, and many have said, “Oh, the Houthis aren’t really that connected to Iran. They don’t take orders from Tehran.” But it sure looks like they do.
**JUAN COLE:** I think “taking orders” is too strong. They’re allies, and they see common interests. But, as I said, I think the Saudis are in a difficult position right now, because most of their exports of petroleum, on which their economy completely depends — I mean, like 70, 80% of the Saudi economy is its oil exports and petrochemicals and so forth — those are not going out through the Strait of Hormuz. They have a pipeline to the west that ends up in Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast. So they had a capacity of about 3.5 million barrels a day through that pipeline before the war. It can do 7 million barrels a day, and so they’ve started sending extra petroleum through that pipeline to make up a little bit of the losses that they have had in the Persian Gulf. But if the Houthis make it difficult or impossible to export petroleum through the Red Sea, then the Saudis are completely cut off, and their economy will collapse. So the reason the Houthis are doing this is not because Iran told them to, I don’t think — it is because they think they can extract concessions from the Saudis, and they can hurt the United States, which has bombed them quite a lot and would like to see them overthrown as well.
**IAN MASTERS:** On Wednesday, Saudi’s defense minister, Prince Salman, had an urgent meeting with Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office, and apparently the Saudis are trying to get a coalition together of European navy ships to police the Red Sea chokepoint that they’d put under control. They’ve already got Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, and Djibouti to sign on to this deal. So when you say the Saudis are vulnerable, how much can they form an international coalition to make the Houthis vulnerable?
**JUAN COLE:** The Houthis are difficult to dislodge. The Saudis launched a campaign against them in 2015. That war went on for seven years. The Houthis still control 80% of the Yemeni population, and they’re hard-scrabble — you know, they’re good old boys from the rural north — and they have their own base in the Zaydi community in Yemen, but they’ve also made advantageous deals with other tribes. So the Saudis have not been able to get rid of the Houthis, or even to substantially weaken them. And the Houthis, when the Israeli genocide against Gaza began in 2023, closed the Red Sea at that time by targeting shipping on the open seas. And at that time also, in 2023-2024, the Saudis and the United States attempted to create a naval alliance that would keep the Red Sea open. Not very many countries signed on to that naval alliance, and it was completely ineffectual.
The problem, Ian, is we’ve entered a stage now of drone warfare, and I think the great naval powers are confused about what to do about it. I’ve heard admirals talking about how they’re capable of protecting their ships with anti-missile missiles, with interceptors, and to some extent that may be true. But they’re not able to protect a big body of water like the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. They can’t protect all the ships that are on it. They can’t protect the littoral countries. So this idea of a naval force to take on the Houthis doesn’t make any sense. The Houthis are not a naval force — they’re not doing this with the Navy, they are doing it with drones.
And so you’d need interceptors, and there’s an inequity in the military configuration here, because the Houthis and the Iranians can fire these little drones — they’re like Volkswagens, they cost $30,000, they’re cheap but they’re effective, they’re long-distance, they’re fairly accurate — and the interceptors for them, are a million and a half dollars apiece. And the United States seems to have used up at least half of all the interceptors it has, and you can’t dedicate all of them to protecting the Red Sea. You have to protect US allies in East Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, and so forth. So the US is, at the moment, losing an asymmetrical war. And the idea that the Saudis can win this asymmetrical war, when they couldn’t for the seven years that they fought it before, that suddenly now they have the capacity to do it, doesn’t make any sense — except that the Saudis are desperate. And I think they could make an attempt to hurt the Houthis in Yemen militarily, but the likelihood of victory seems to be low.
**IAN MASTERS:** It didn’t work last time, that’s for sure. And it didn’t work for the Egyptians back in the 1960s. But the last time around, when the Houthis were going after ships in that chokepoint and there was an international coalition of warships trying to protect ships, the Iranians had intelligence vessels — they were telling their Houthis which ships to target. This time around, they’ve targeted Saudi tankers, which started this whole tit-for-tat striking, back and forth between the Houthis and Saudis, which is obviously going to escalate. So where do they get their intelligence from, the Houthis? How do they know which ships to strike?
**JUAN COLE:** Ian, I am not a signals intelligence guy, so I can’t tell you the technicalities of exactly how the Houthis and the Iranians are doing this. All I can say is it just seems to be radar, and it doesn’t seem to be very complicated, and the US hasn’t managed to knock it out. The big shipping companies — there are about six who handle these enormous container ships, and there are also, of course, the oil and gas tankers. Most of them, the last time the Houthis did this, just went around the coast of West Africa, between Asia and Europe, and avoided the Red Sea. And I think we’ll see more of that, just because you have this big investment of billions of dollars in these ships, and a little drone could set them on fire, sink them. You don’t want to take that chance. So in some ways, just the Houthis announcing that they’re going to behave this way is enough to seriously disrupt Red Sea trade, and that’s what the Saudis and the others have to be afraid of.
**Ian Masters:** You can take the biggest tankers, which carry two million barrels down the Red Sea to Asian markets, but you can’t take them through the Suez Canal. You can only take the million-barrel tankers, which are super-tankers — but there’s a super-tanker, and there’s a super-super-tanker. So now these tankers have to go — not the biggest ones, but the smaller ones, the million-barrel ones — through the Suez, through the Mediterranean, down the west coast of Africa, around Cape Town, and then back up the Indian Ocean to the Asian market. So it’s a much longer haul.
I noted that after Netanyahu had his meeting in the White House with Trump on Tuesday, he was asked about the extent to which this war has had a terrible impact on the energy market, and how you’d have a deal with the Iranians over the Strait of Hormuz because they have all the cards. And Netanyahu said that’s not going to last very long — they’re going to change all the oil pipelines now out of the Gulf, and they’re all going to come through — he actually said they’re going to come through Israel. So, one of the workarounds — are they practical?
**JUAN COLE:** Yeah, you can export oil and gas through pipelines, and that’s been done for a very long time. In fact, the US invaded Lebanon in 1958 over the possibility that the radical government that had come to power in Iraq might disrupt plans for a pipeline to the Mediterranean. So that’s not a new idea. But, Ian, drones can hit pipelines too. I don’t understand this thinking that if you don’t go through the Gulf, you can have pipelines instead, and those are safe. The Iraqi insurgents during the Iraq War very frequently took out the pipeline that went from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in Turkey, and so it wasn’t flowing a lot of the time because of sabotage. So I don’t understand that way of thinking.
I think Netanyahu has gotten the whole world into a big problem. This is an energy crisis. It’s felt in the United States to some extent, but for a lot of countries it’s a big energy crisis, because they were heavily dependent on the kind of petroleum that was refined in the Gulf. And Israel has to have talking points to reply to the question, “Why did you do this to us?” The Koreans and others have scolded Netanyahu for all this, and it’s made Israel even more of a black sheep in the world community than it was to begin with. So, of course, he’s going to say things like “it’ll work out.”
The other thing about the pipelines is it would take five years to build them, and then they’re just as vulnerable as the sea routes, and they’re more expensive. So that whole line of thinking doesn’t solve the problem.
Photo by Sandro Gautier on Unsplash
The problem is that the world is dependent on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are highly vulnerable to disruption by war and by tactics, which Iran is demonstrating. And the actual way to get out of this crisis is to move very quickly toward the electrification of transport. I drive an electric car — I don’t care what the price of gasoline is. And I’ve got solar panels on my roof, and I fuel it from those. China understands this and is moving very rapidly to electrify its economy, and therefore has not suffered as badly from this crisis as a lot of countries have. So that’s the solution — pipelines are just as vulnerable as sea routes.
**IAN MASTERS:** But just in closing, in the last minute, Juan — the people who are not suffering from this crisis, the people who are making out like bandits, are the big oil companies.
**JUAN COLE:** They are, of course, because of the high prices. But if you think about the long-term future of this industry — this is not good news, because what it means is that fossil fuels are very volatile, very vulnerable. And who wants to plan out their economy on that basis? If you’re Kenya, or you’re India, are you really going to look out 50 years and say, “Oh, ExxonMobil will take care of me”? That’s just not the case anymore. It’s very obvious that this industry is in deep trouble, and the world is going to move to green energy really quickly.
**IAN MASTERS:** Yeah — you’ve got to get Trump out of the way before that happens. So I thank you for joining us, Juan. I appreciate it.
**JUAN COLE:** Thank you, Ian.
**IAN MASTERS:** And again, I’ve been speaking with Juan Cole, who’s a professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. He’s the author of the blog Informed Comment at juancole.com, and the author of *Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires*, and most recently *Gaza Yet Stands*. His latest articles in Informed Comment include “New War on Saudi Refineries by Iran Allies” and “Houthis’ Aim for Red Sea Tolls May Have Hit Ship in Egypt.”
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