Brent Crude Breaks $100 After Houthi Missile Strike on Two Saudi Tankers in Red Sea

Chokepoint warfare has long shaped oil markets—from Egypt’s closure of the Suez Canal in 1956-1957 that rerouted tankers around the Cape, to the 1984-1988 “Tanker War” in the Iran-Iraq conflict that drove insurance costs and prices higher. The latest Houthi raid reprises that playbook but in a world where global commercial stocks are at multi-year lows and spare capacity—once 5 Mb/d in Saudi hands—has been whittled down by years of under-investment and SPR drawdowns. Structurally, it underscores two century-old constants: the Middle East’s outsized share of seaborne crude and the strategic vulnerability of maritime chokepoints (Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez). Over a 100-year horizon the incident may be a footnote, yet it highlights why energy importers from India to China are accelerating diversification toward LNG, domestic production and renewables—trends that, if successful, could eventually make such brinkmanship at narrow straits less economically explosive than in the oil-dominated 20th century.