$100 Oil, Red Sea Siege, and Trump’s Nuclear Pivot

The Price of Passage

Every conduit in the region now carries a price tag. The Houthis put theirs on a Saudi tanker’s bow. The market put its at $100.69 a barrel, the first triple-digit close since May. The President put his on Truth Social twice, once as a massive-attack warning to Tehran and once as a normalization clause on Riyadh’s signed nuclear deal. And in Paris, a court put Turkey’s at $1.47 billion, the judgment the Forum’s new analysis reads tonight. Passage, everywhere, is no longer free.

Good evening. The blockade of Saudi Arabia stopped being rhetoric last night. A projectile struck the Saudi tanker Encelia off Al Shuqaiq, setting a fire at her bow, the first actual attack under the Houthi embargo declared Monday; Riyadh confirmed the hit, the crew is safe, and a second claimed strike on the tanker Layla remains unconfirmed. The market did not wait for the confirmation: Brent settled at $100.69, up 7 percent, its first close above $100 since May 26, though still short of the war’s $114.40 peak close.

Washington’s answers came in stacked declarations. The President told Axios he is “considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before,” warned that Iran will answer for its Houthi proxy, and, in a separate post, made the day-old Saudi nuclear pact “totally subject” to Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords, a condition nobody had attached on Wednesday, including us. Tehran’s joint command answered with a threat to stop “even a single drop of oil” leaving the Gulf.

And because chokepoints are this week’s whole story, tonight’s Special Feature follows the Forum’s Umud Shokri to the one that runs overland: the Ceyhan pipeline, and the $1.47 billion arbitration award Turkey still refuses to pay Iraq. Passage has a price everywhere now. Read the board.

Gregg Roman · July 23, 2026

In this evening’s brief:

• The siege spreads: first blood under the Houthi blockade, and a $100 close
• The massive-attack question: Axios, a twelfth night, and the first B-1
• The Saudi whiplash: a signed deal repriced by post
• Special Feature: the Ceyhan file, Iraq’s $1.47 billion judgment against Turkey
• The Levant board: a “pale shadow” assessment, and Hamas’s new chief speaks

First blood under the blockade, and a hundred-dollar close.

The Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia produced its first actual attack late Wednesday. A projectile struck the Saudi tanker Encelia roughly 70 nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq, setting a fire at her bow; Riyadh’s Transport General Authority confirmed the hit and said all crew are safe, while UKMTO logged the strike and the UK risk firm Vanguard called it an “unknown projectile” (Reuters via Al-Monitor, Washington Times/AP).

The Houthis claimed two tankers, the Encelia and the Layla, attacked with missiles and drones for “violating” their embargo; the Layla strike remains unconfirmed (AP via US News). Five more tankers changed course to avoid Bab el-Mandeb, and a US defense official told Axios that Iran may be directing the Houthis to open a Red Sea front (Axios).

The President’s warning came by Truth Social: “if they do this again, the U.S. will hold Iran responsible, in that the Houthis are a Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran, and major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis, themselves, who I am very disappointed with” (CNBC). Secretary Rubio’s version was almost paternal: “The Houthis largely were smart and stayed out of all this throughout the conflict, but they now apparently have gotten themselves suckered into this... I hope they will de-escalate, because I think the Houthis, frankly, got snookered into this thing by the Iranians” (AFP via Al-Monitor).

The market priced the new front without sentiment. Brent settled at $100.69, up about 7 percent, its first close above $100 since May 26, still short of the war’s $114.40 peak close; WTI topped $92 (CNBC). RBC’s Helima Croft warned the pressure could send Brent past the 2022 high of $128, and Goldman sees above $120 in the fourth quarter if Hormuz stays disrupted; Wolfe Research notes Houthi attacks now threaten the roughly 4.5 million barrels a day Saudi Arabia pushes through its East-West pipeline to Yanbu, the workaround the blockade exists to close (CNBC).

At the Security Council, the Secretary-General reached for the vocabulary he keeps filed for this region: “The situation is getting out of control... It is teetering on the edge of the unimaginable,” adding “It is time to step back” and that navigation through Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb must be fully restored (Arab News). US ambassador Tammy Bruce answered with the American condition: “Absent a decision by Iran to reengage in diplomacy, the US will act to help restore conditions in the Strait of Hormuz.”

The Hormuz Mandate said from April that a chokepoint doctrine licensed to one actor is licensed to all of them; the Encelia’s burning bow is the license exercised. Watch what the blockade is actually for: since Hormuz closed, Riyadh’s oil lives on the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, so the Houthi campaign is not harassment, it is an attempt to close the workaround and complete the siege of Gulf energy in both directions. That makes the Accords Logic answer arithmetic rather than sentiment: the coalition of the shot-at now includes every barrel Riyadh ships, and the only exit is the one Bruce named, restored navigation, not another communique about restraint.

An Axios interview, a twelfth night, and the first B-1.

The President put the question on the record himself, in an interview with Axios: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.” Israel, he said, “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” though “We don’t need anybody,” and Israeli participation would carry “consequences.” His summary of Tehran’s position: “They haven’t received enough pain yet” (Ynet, The Hill). Two US officials told reporters no final decision has been made and no new orders issued.

The campaign supplied the baseline. CENTCOM completed a twelfth consecutive night Wednesday, striking “maritime capabilities, missile and drone storage facilities, coastal surveillance sites, and air defense assets,” and updated its blockade scorecard: nine commercial vessels redirected and one disabled (CENTCOM). Iranian state media reported two killed near Shalamcheh (Reuters via Al-Monitor). A thirteenth night had not been announced by press time.

The hardware escalated too. Axios revealed the war’s first B-1 bomber mission since fighting resumed this month, flown Tuesday against IRGC targets from a British airbase (Axios); the IRGC warned London it would bear responsibility for hosting the bombers (Ynet).

Tehran’s counter-threat went to the region’s utilities. Iran’s joint military command warned that if the President executes his bridges-and-power-plants formula, Iranian forces would target regional oil, gas, electricity, and economic infrastructure and prevent the export of “even a single drop of oil,” per Iranian state media via Reuters (Reuters via Al-Monitor). The claims department kept pace: an unnamed tanker ablaze on a “mined route” the IRGC says proves the strait is “completely closed,” with no UKMTO log to match, answered by CENTCOM’s flattest line of the war: “Fact: Iran does not control the Strait of Hormuz.” The Guard also claimed strikes on a communications tower in Kuwait and on Jordanian bases; no host nation has confirmed any of it (IranWire).

Washington’s other branch weighed in narrowly. The House adopted a war-powers resolution 214-208; the Senate blocked its companion 49-47 (NPR). And the week’s cost came home Wednesday at Dover, where the President attended the dignified transfer of four soldiers: 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach; Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton; Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, killed in the barracks strike at Muwaffaq Salti; and Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, killed at Erbil disposing of a downed Iranian drone (Army Times). “For me,” the President said before leaving, “it’s one of the hardest things to do as a president.”

Read the Axios interview as leverage, not a war order: the Reciprocity Standard works precisely when the next blow is priced and visible before it lands, and “we are all set for it” is the price tag shown to a regime that only counts. But hold the standard honestly in both directions. Twelve nights have not stopped the ship attacks, the proxy front just opened, and the counter-threat now runs through every Gulf utility; escalation dominance is proven at the chokepoints, not in the transcript. The fallen at Dover are the accounting’s real column, and the case for finishing this fast instead of managing it forever.

A signed deal, repriced by post.

Wednesday’s nuclear pact lasted eighteen hours as reported. Thursday morning the President posted that the deal “will be approved,” but that it “is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” adding there would be “no enrichment of material” and that the pact “pertains only to non-military use” (CNN, NBC). Press secretary Karoline Leavitt reinforced it: the President “is always the final dealmaker,” and the deal is off absent normalization, per pooled reporting (Reuters via US News).

A correction is owed here, and we pay our debts: Wednesday’s reporting, this newsletter’s included, carried the deal as signed with no normalization condition attached. Thursday the President attached one, in public, after signature. The Washington Post called it “throwing pact into doubt”; Harvard’s Matthew Bunn was blunter: “Trump post bears almost no relation to what just got signed” (WaPo, Bulletin). Riyadh, which has long conditioned normalization on a Palestinian-statehood pathway, has said nothing publicly.

The nonproliferation critique sharpened in parallel. The signed text, as reported, omits the “gold standard” the UAE accepted in 2009, forgoing enrichment and reprocessing and signing the IAEA Additional Protocol; instead it contemplates a two-year enrichment feasibility study, a possible US-built “black box” facility on Saudi soil, and bilateral verification in place of the Additional Protocol (Reuters explainer via Al-Monitor, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). The Arms Control Association’s Kelsey Davenport says it “sets a terrible precedent”; Carnegie’s James Acton calls it “tantamount to the United States giving up on nonproliferation.” Congress now has its review window.

Jerusalem’s alarm crossed party lines. Naftali Bennett: “The nuclear agreement that is coming together with Saudi Arabia, over Israel’s head, is a serious strategic failure that endangers our security.” Avigdor Lieberman: it “will end in nuclear weapons and will lead to a crazy arms race throughout the entire Middle East” (Reuters).

Yesterday we called the no-condition deal the Post-Aid Alliance thesis at its sharpest edge; today the President reattached the one lever we said had been traded away. Take the win provisionally. A condition announced by post, after signature, is leverage only if it survives contact with Riyadh’s counter-ask, which remains a Palestinian-statehood pathway priced far above what Jerusalem’s current politics can pay. The Accords Logic grading rubric is unchanged: normalization before enrichment, safeguards text before headlines, and no deal is better than a deal that teaches the region America’s signature is a first draft.

Iraq’s $1.47 billion judgment, and the price of the overland route.

The Forum’s new analysis reads the chokepoint nobody watches. Energy strategist Umud Shokri’s piece, published this morning, follows the Iraq-Turkey arbitration over the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline: on March 10, made public July 13, the Paris Court of Appeal rejected Turkey’s bid to partly annul the 2023 International Chamber of Commerce award compensating Baghdad for years of unauthorized Kurdish oil exports through Ceyhan (MEF / Shokri). “Despite losing the case, Ankara has yet to pay Baghdad the $1.47 billion, and dispute now looms over accrued interest.”

The judgment lands on a pipeline running at a fraction of itself: roughly 177,000 barrels a day by April against some 1.5 million of capacity, with the pipeline agreement extended twelve months ahead of its July 27 expiration, four days from now. Shokri’s read of the leverage: “The award against Ankara shifts bargaining power toward federal Iraqi control without removing Baghdad and Erbil’s mutual dependence on each other,” and “Erbil no longer can assume that Turkey will facilitate exports of oil from Kurdistan without Baghdad’s approval.” He expects Prime Minister al-Zaidi to press the award conservatively, protecting ties with Ankara while pocketing the precedent.

Set the file in this week’s frame and it stops being a legal footnote. With Hormuz strangled and Bab el-Mandeb under fire, overland routes like Ceyhan are the region’s remaining pressure valves, and the arbitration establishes that passage through them has an owner and a price. The scholarship has already run the numbers on what happens when the valves close: Oxford Economics modeled a Hormuz-closure scenario at roughly $130 Brent with US inflation peaking near 6 percent (Scholar Gateway: May 2025, Economic Outlook), and its wartime update this spring called energy prices “the dominant channel” through which this conflict reaches the world economy, with a fifth of global oil and LNG transiting the strait daily (Scholar Gateway: May et al. 2026, Economic Outlook). The longer history is blunter still: oil supply disruptions were “an important contributor to US recessions between the 1970s and the early 1990s” (Scholar Gateway: Loungani 2009, International Finance).

The week’s thesis in one sentence: every conduit in this region now has a price list, Hormuz in barrels, Bab el-Mandeb in insurance premiums, Ceyhan in arbitral judgments. The Daylight Doctrine point of Shokri’s file is that the overland routes are governed by contracts and courts, which is to say by leverage that compounds quietly while the kinetic fronts burn, and Washington should treat Baghdad’s award as an asset: a legal precedent that the region’s pipelines answer to law, not to whoever hosts the pumping stations. The No-Vacuum corollary: July 27 is four days away, and whoever writes the next Ceyhan agreement writes a piece of the post-war map.

A “pale shadow” assessment, and Hamas’s new chief speaks.

The sharpest Hezbollah assessment of the week came from the man who ran the file. Lt. Col. (res.) Or Horowitz, who headed Military Intelligence’s Hezbollah desk and is now a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, told The Jerusalem Post: “Hezbollah, in my view, has been dramatically weakened. It still exists; we have seen tragic fatalities, but I remind you that this is an organization that once dreamed of destroying the State of Israel, and now it is a pale shadow of those capabilities” (JPost).

Two more Horowitz lines complete the picture. On the Lebanese army: “We are seeing the Lebanese Army, which in the past did nothing; its activity against Hezbollah was absolutely zero, and now that is changing. Alongside very deep American involvement, they are affecting both the motivation and the capabilities.” And on why Tehran spares Israel: “One of the reasons Iran is not firing at Israel is its desire not to restart the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah... Hezbollah is in a difficult military state everywhere there is friction with IDF troops. I think Iran and Hezbollah understand that as well.” The Forum cross-published Lazar Berman’s companion read this morning: Israeli defense officials told the Netanyahu security forum “there is an active debate in Tehran over whether to bring Israel into the line of fire” (MEF Online / Berman).

The diplomacy stayed contested. FDD’s David Daoud and Ahmad Sharawi argue the Aoun visit “did not resolve Lebanon’s central problem: Hezbollah’s weapons”; Bilal Saab counters that the meeting “went spectacularly well” and that “Mr Aoun’s real test lies at home” (FDD, The National). Prime Minister Salam, Wednesday, planting the flag in Zawtar al-Gharbiya: “We will continue mobilizing our political and diplomatic efforts to secure a complete Israeli withdrawal from the south” (AFP via Defense Post). Israeli reports carried by Kan say Damascus has prepared contingency plans against Hezbollah, to be executed if necessary; President al-Sharaa has publicly rejected Trump’s suggestion that Damascus take on Hezbollah (INN). The next round convenes August 4 in Italy.

In Gaza, the new management introduced itself. Khalil al-Hayya’s first address as political chief vowed to continue the path of Sinwar and Deif, declaring Hamas’s first priority the end of the IDF’s “occupation” of Gaza and full Israeli withdrawal (JNS). A day later, Oxfam published a reconstruction plan built on the $71.4 billion recovery assessment, finding rebuilding will cost seven times the last twenty years of reconstruction combined; the unmentioned irony is that Oxfam sits among the 37 organizations whose Israeli registrations lapsed in the NGO vetting fight (UPI, The National). And tomorrow in New York, the ICC’s member states hold the first prosecutor-removal vote in the court’s history: 63 of 125 needed, secret ballot, a vote about Karim Khan’s conduct, not about Israel (The National).

Horowitz’s three lines, from the officer who ran the desk, are the Carthage Doctrine’s progress report: the deterrent is working, the LAF’s motion is real but new, and Tehran’s restraint toward Israel is a hostage to Hezbollah’s weakness, which means the pressure that produced the weakness is the peace, not a threat to it. On Gaza, grade al-Hayya by the only sentence that matters in his address: continuity with Sinwar’s path is a promise of Govern-or-Get-Out’s next failing grade, and a $71.4 billion reconstruction appeal cannot outrun the Board of Peace’s own finding that decommissioning comes first. Reconstruction priced without disarmament is not a plan; it is a subsidy schedule for the next war.

The arbitration award Iraq holds against Turkey for years of unauthorized Kurdish oil exports through the Ceyhan pipeline, upheld by the Paris Court of Appeal in a ruling made public this month, and still unpaid, with the pipeline agreement extended twelve months ahead of its July 27 expiration. The week the region’s sea lanes acquired price tags in barrels and insurance premiums, the Forum’s new analysis reads the judgment that priced the overland route. Passage is never free; the only question is who collects. (Source: MEF / Shokri.)

• Umud Shokri, What Does Iraq’s $1.47 Billion Arbitration Victory over Turkey Mean for the Future? (Observer, July 23): tonight’s Special Feature
• Michael Rubin, Visa Ban Will Undercut American Interests for a Generation (Observer, July 23, reported from Benghazi): “they have never accused a Libyan student of terror”
• Lazar Berman, Israel Remains on Sidelines of U.S.-Iran Fight, Which for Jerusalem Is Just Fine for Now (MEF Online, July 23, from The Times of Israel)
• Giulio Meotti, After 500 Years, Spain Returns to Al Andalusia (MEF Online, July 23)

Forum in the news: World Israel News carried the CAIR Plaza investigation in full; FDD’s overnight brief lists Michael Rubin’s Washington Examiner piece on pricing the F-35 for Ankara among its must-reads; Jim Hanson’s Fox Business segment on the Saudi deal continues to circulate. CAIR, for its part, has yet to respond to either of this week’s Forum investigations.

Two favors this evening. Forward this issue to one person who still thinks chokepoints are a shipping story rather than the war’s actual terrain, and if you want the Forum reading the judgments, the manifests, and the transcripts every day, support the work directly. The price of passage is going up everywhere except here.

That is the board for Thursday. Reply and tell me: should Washington answer the Houthi front directly, or keep the fire on Hormuz? I read every answer.

Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

You are receiving this because you subscribed at mef.beehiiv.com. Unsubscribe