DDP Ehsan Safran-Najjal and Ryan Dawson on Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Zog-ites
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Hello and welcome to the Deep Dive Perspective. With me today, I have Ryan Dawson joining and also Ehsan Safran-Najjal. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Ehsan and Ryan, both well known to our audience on DDP. Of course, Ehsan is on Political Oficionado, his own YouTube channel. And Ryan, you can find him on Substack ryandawson.org Do like, share, subscribe to all of these channels. Absolutely riveting. And today’s truth. Yemen, Bab al-Mantib, that little waterway which happens to control a large amount of the world’s trade and energy routes is back in the frame. Of course, there was a wind-down with the Saudis And the Yemeni Ansarullah de-escalating the 14-, 15-year never-ending war which was inflicted on the people of Yemen by the Anglo-Zionist empire, with the Saudis fronting it. Well, it’s back. It happens to be in action again. I’m going to ask Ehsan, first of all, just to give us an overview of the context of this Closure, certainly for Saudi tankers. Many have been returned. Some have been hit, from what I gather. And what this is all about in the context of the greater war across the region, which is being inflicted on the axis of resistance?
Well, the blockade has started. Following this Iranian airliner traveling to Yemen in order to pick up the Yemeni delegation. And then you had the Saudis trying to harass them, trying to shoot down that airliner. They also attacked the airports in Yemen. And then the airliner had to go to another port inside the country. And the same thing happened again. So as you know, the Saudis for a long time have been putting a naval and air blockade against Yemen. But this was sort of the final straw for the Yemeni government. I’m referring to Ansarallah. And they decided that it’s the right time for them to impose a blockade on Bab al-Manda. And this is not a full blockade. It’s not all vessels. It’s just mostly on Saudi vessels, as you mentioned. For example, I think it was yesterday or the day before that. I mean, we’re talking about July 22nd, if I remember correctly. And the Yemenians targeted two ships 70 kilometers off the coast of Yemen. So the Saudis, they can’t export their oil through Bab al-Manda to East Asia, right? This brings up a fundamental flaw in the way that the Saudis have to now export their oil. They have to use the Swiss Canal. Now, the problem is that if you go through the Suez Canal, you can’t use those big tankers. So you have different classes of oil tankers. You have ULCCs, ultra-high crude carriers, and VLCCs, very large crude carriers. You can’t use either of them. They can transport 1.9 to 2.1 million barrels of oil. You can’t use them, so you have to now use smaller crude carriers like Afromax, Panamax, and this fundamentally limits your ability in order to export more oil. This becomes important in the concept of understanding that The Strait of Hormuz is now closed because of the U.S. reneging on its commitment within the memorandum of understanding that it has signed with Iran. So now Saudis, they can’t use the Strait of Hormuz. Their alternative path was to export oil through the port of Yanbu. Well, thank you
for that overview. That really provides the context. The implications of this, Ryan, at the moment, of course, it’s limited supposedly to Saudi. But you know, Saudi oil is a massive, massive output, possibly the biggest in the world. And without that oil coming either from the homers or from the Bab al-Mandib, that affects the entire oil market, I assume. I assume it will also affect inflation across the world. What impact can you see this having in terms of any extended lockdown on these tankers? And for that matter, why have the Saudis even done this?
Well, let’s point this out too. Oil is the most important commodity, but it’s not the only commodity that shut off by cutting out what I call the Maritime Silk Road. And it’s trickled down. That’s about, you know, about 7 million barrels could have gone on the large tankers. That’s down to about 1.2 to 1.6 going through the Suez, plus a much larger route, obviously. Why are they doing this? Well, they’ve had cyclical battles with Yemen. They have two options. They have the Red Sea or they have the Strait of Hormuz. Most of their infrastructure was in the northeast part of the country, near the Strait of Hormuz, because prior to the discovery of oil, there was the Pearl Trade, and that’s where the ports and infrastructure already existed, and they just grafted on to where the city’s imports already were and built their oil that way. That’s closed because of the Zionists and the Americans’ war on Iran where they’ve been constantly reneging on their half of deals. So the Saudis at least had, if that dropped from 20 million barrels a day, where they had 7 million barrels a day, now it’s about 1.6. So they can’t get through that. And it’s not just the physical blockade, it’s the hiking insurance rates and reinsurance rates on ships. So it compounds on that. And it’s not just oil, it’s LNG, it’s imports too. Let’s not forget mostly food products. So anything you can’t move on rail, anything that takes container ships, And as far as the port at Yanbu, not only can Yemen affect that, that was hit twice by Iran. At that distance, they proved they can tag the southern half of Saudi Arabia as well. So they’ve walked right into it. He was thinking, why? Why would you do this? All you had to do was stop bombing Lebanon and there could have been a deal and the straits, both straits could have been reopened. And why did Saudi bomb Sana’a twice? And restart this, knowing how fragile everything was with the Northern Strait already closed. But they did. But these states don’t act in their own interests. They do what they’re told. And you’ve seen the consequences, especially for Kuwait and Bahrain. Qatar and the UAE have decided to try to not allow the U.S. to strike Iran from their airspace because of the consequence of Iran hitting them back. But some of these other states are still complying to U.S. demands and they’re paying the price for that. As far west as Jordan, they’ve been getting hit. And so I expect this to continue. You would think if you think in real politic terms, this goes against the national interests of everybody other than Israel. Why would they behave this way? But real politic is dead. Nations don’t always act in their own interests. They act in the interest of the donor class or the Epstein class in the case of the Americas. And so even though it goes against their own national interests, their own economies, their own standard of living is going to be dropped because of this pointless fighting with Iran and Yemen, they’re going to do it anyway, because this is what Israel demands.
Ryan’s kind of laid out the line, and he’s hinted that actually the Saudis aren’t in control of their own policies. Do you think it’s the Americans and the Israelis who’ve triggered this? And what benefit is there? Certainly for America, I can’t see. I don’t see any benefit in any of the war at the moment, but trying to make some sense out of this for me, I can’t understand why the Saudis would want to be blockaded on both fronts. They knew perfectly, well, that’s going to happen, because the Yemenis had done it before. They had chipped shipping down in that region, and they actually scared away most of the U.S. Navy. Certainly the bigger warships had withdrawn, because the Yemenis were really serious. Why are they continuing with this kind of futile effort to repeat the same old tactics which have failed before?
Look, when you look at the monarchs in the Persian Gulf, in the Arab Zionist countries of the Persian Gulf, they’re not really educated people. And they have problem understanding raw politics. Someone like Mohammed bin Salma is... I mean, he has different issues, right? Aside from his snorting and everything, he has different issues. For example, he was talking about bringing the war to Iran, right? And when he says that it’s one thing to listen to him, to his transcript being translated to English, it’s another thing to listen to him in Arabic, right? As some kind of Because as you know, the Sassanid Empire was invaded by the Arabs, right? But there is this underlying feeling in people like Mohammed bin Salman that they have a duty in order to fight the Persians. They still see it as in that context. It’s a cultural thing, right? One thing that I know, and it’s very sad, I don’t know why Saudi Arabia Kuwait, all these countries do this to themselves. So UAE and Israel, they had a joint plan. As you know, UAE has this rivalry with Saudi Arabia, right? So they’re trying to eclipse them in order to put more pressure on them. UAE and Israel were working on plans in order to cut off the access of Saudis To Bob Al-Mandab and straight off almost. They were actually working on this, right? And seeing that now as a result of the attack that has happened on Iran and Yemen, the Saudis themselves have walked into that kind of program. It really makes you question as to what Mohammed bin Salman actually thinks. But again, the problem is that The prejudice, the hostility in that historic context clouds the judgment of people like Mohammed bin Salma. We had the Beijing Accord with Saudi Arabia in which Iran and Saudi Arabia, they sort of had a rapprochement. But they didn’t last because the Saudis are not serious. I think that they thought that they can get away with it, that if they get rid of Iran, they can become the hegemon in this region. I mean, the truth is that Israel is playing all of them against one another, the same UAE that has been given carte blanche in different parts of the world in order to carry out atrocities. It will only be used as long as it contains Saudi Arabia. Once Iran is gone and they inflict the kind of damage that they want to inflict on Saudi Arabia, the UAE itself will become more unstable. We’re talking about seven cities. The UAE, United Arab Emirates, it’s just seven cities. It’s very small. But they don’t understand that you don’t, and apologies for saying this, you don’t defecate where you eat. You don’t defecate where you sleep. You know, you look at the Europeans. The Europeans go to Africa and start wars there. But this is not the mentality in these Arab Zionist countries.
Ryan, lots of points there, but staying with the Saudi thing... And Assad’s made a strong case for the Saudis not really knowing what on earth they’re doing, to be fair, and probably goes for most of those Gulf Arab monarchies. And we could go into the reasons for that. Seems to be a lot of that going around. Hmm. I mean, they bombed Yemen to smithereens. They were bombing weddings and funerals. They were genociding the Yemenis before the Gaza genocide began for maybe about a dozen years or something like that. You know, I was watching Mount I was watching for many years and reporting on the Saudi’s Air Force hitting, as I said, you know, weddings and funerals, water installations, infrastructure, you know, war crimes. And they were doing it with, you know, American jets. They were doing it with probably the logistics being given to them by the Anglo-Zionist empire. And yet again, they’re here, of course, triggering that again. As someone says, it’s obviously, you know, a kind of a trap that they’re falling into. The mind boggles how Saudis could really score this kind of own goal. What’s your take on what’s going on in the background and why they’ve come through on this policy now?
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