Iran Outsourced Its Maritime Threat, and Lost Control

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For most of the post-revolution period, Iran’s maritime threat was a Hormuz threat. Its proxies were land-based, oriented against Israel and US forces in Iraq and Syria. Sometime around the middle of the last decade, Iran began transferring serious naval capability to the Houthis in Yemen, and the maritime threat picture extended to Bab el-Mandeb. The campaigns of recent years demonstrated what that capability looks like in practice. The Iranian theory was that a distributed maritime threat across two chokepoints multiplied leverage. The actual result was that Iran lost control of half its maritime card.

Proxies on Hormuz.net

Iran Outsourced Its Maritime Threat, and Lost Control