Have Saudi Arabia and Ukraine entered the war against Iran?

LONDON – Ukrainian long-range drones have struck an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea, while Saudi Arabia’s jets hit military installations belonging to the pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Two recent military operations, 3,000km apart, were launched by countries with little in common except a deep grievance against Iran. The temptation is to see them as evidence that the US-Iran war is spilling outwards, attracting new belligerents.

Yet the Gulf war is not spreading, although the military intervention of new parties should serve as a warning of just how much is at stake in the current US-Iranian confrontation.

Iran’s decision to make the Strait of Hormuz a weapon – traffic is down from roughly 110 transits a day to barely a dozen – converted a regional confrontation into a global one; everything, from the price of energy commodities to insurance premiums, refinery margins and freight rates, now moves with the targeting decisions of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and the responses coming from Washington.

Furthermore, Iran’s broader strategic footprint always risked retaliation. The Iranians have supplied their Shahed drone airframes to Russian troops invading Ukraine since 2022. And Iran ferried anti-ship missiles to the Houthis in Yemen for longer than that. As a result, the Islamic Republic has made itself a target for Ukrainians and Saudis alike.

Still, what we are watching now is not the war spreading so much as Iran beginning to pay a price for a behaviour they always assumed they could pursue with impunity.

Since the US and Israel exercise almost complete control over Iran’s airspace, the only direct way Iran and Russia can trade reliably is by shipping goods across the Caspian Sea.

Much of this trade is in parts and frames for the Shahed drones, one of Iran’s most successful military exports. Iran’s decision to ferry these drones across the Caspian was critical in sustaining the firepower of the Russian troops in Ukraine, particularly in the early stages of that war.

The Caspian route’s importance rose even further as Russian ships were increasingly threatened by Ukrainian drones and missiles in the Black Sea, which used to be the traditional route for exports of Russian cereals. Some of these cereals are now going directly to Iran, bypassing the US blockade of the Gulf.

Thus, the landlocked Caspian Sea – the world’s largest lake – remains a smugglers’ paradise. Russian and Iranian vessels regularly turn off the transponders that allow their tracking. And the Caspian is far away from US and Israeli airbases.

Far, but not far enough. US satellites have been tracking movements on the Caspian for years, and Israel struck the Iranian Caspian port of Bandar Anzali in March. Israeli military assets based in neighbouring Azerbaijan are also watching Caspian developments.

Officially, Ukraine claims that its July 26 drone attack on an Iranian ship, which killed one Iranian sailor and injured several others, targeted a Russian warship. But as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky subsequently claimed on the X social platform, his country intends to continue its long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea, including against “vessels used in military cargo shipments involving Iran”.

The Caspian attack is clearly part of a broader Ukrainian strategy to hit targets deep inside Russia. But it is also designed to serve as a signal to US President Donald Trump that Ukraine is ready to help broader US strategic interests.

Over the past few months, Zelensky has courted a number of far-right US influencers, including Laura Loomer, the activist with considerable sway in the White House. Loomer is now championing the Ukrainian cause to her almost two million followers on X, and Ukraine’s Caspian operation is intended to cement this political transformation among Trump’s closest influencers.

Nonetheless, Zelensky has neither the reach nor the interest in becoming embroiled in the Gulf, so he is not about to expend scarce deep-strike capacity on a theatre that does little for the battlefields in south-eastern Ukraine, where the bulk of Ukraine’s fighting against Russia is continuing.

In flexing its military muscle, Saudi Arabia’s calculation is narrower still. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s effective ruler, has spent years constructing a policy of active neutrality with Iran, restoring relations with Tehran and moving away from the use of force against the Iranians.

What the Saudis won’t tolerate, however, is any attempt by the Iranian-supported Houthis to close the Bab el-Mandeb strait, which is the only shipping route out of the Red Sea.

The Iranians now want their Houthi proxies to close off shipping in the Red Sea, since this would add pressure on the US. But for the Saudis, any closure of the Red Sea would paralyse the approximately 5 million barrels of crude oil that they export daily through that route, the only source of export revenue the Saudis have while Gulf shipping routes are out of action.

The Saudis already signalled their determination to prevent a closure of the Red Sea on July 13, when they bombed airfields in Yemen, as a warning to the Iranians not to airlift any new military supplies to the Houthis.

Now the Saudis have intensified their messaging with strikes in response to Houthi attacks on Saudi-flagged shipping and installations in Yanbu, the key Saudi oil port on the Red Sea.

With no hint that he is aware of the irony, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has claimed that Ukraine’s attack on the Iranian commercial vessel is a “blatant violation” of international law, while Iran is doing precisely the same to other ships in the Gulf.

Araghchi has warned the Ukrainian action “cannot go unanswered”. However, all the evidence suggests that this threat is largely performative.

Iran has also been largely silent about the Saudi action against the Houthis. Indeed, the one Arab country the Iranians have refrained from attacking during the past two weeks of renewed fighting in the Gulf has been Saudi Arabia, largely because Iran knows that such a move would lead to a reprise of an all-out war.

In the days to come, the confrontation between the Saudis and Houthis can get much worse. And there is no question that Iran’s adversaries are multiplying.

Still – and at least for the moment – both Ukraine and Saudi Arabia are acting alone, in their own theatres, and for their own reasons.