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Saudi Arabia now diverts its crude westward from Yanbu through the Red Sea, Egypt’s SUMED pipeline, and around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly five dollars per barrel to reach its Asian customers. This maneuver secures export routes against the constant threat of closure at Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb.
The kingdom treats the added cost and weeks of transit not as waste but as the necessary price of preserving market access when hostile actors control the narrow gates of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Aramco’s willingness to absorb ten million dollars on a single cargo reveals a monarchy that places physical control of its lifelines above abstract assurances of open seas.
Western Christendom learned the same lesson after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Portuguese captains sailed around Africa to reach India rather than submit to Ottoman domination of the overland routes. That precedent established that trade sovereignty belongs to those who build alternative paths, not to those who rely on the goodwill of adversaries.
Modern globalist structures promise frictionless commerce while concentrating power in chokepoints easily threatened by regional powers or ideological coalitions. Saudi leadership refuses to play the role of passive supplier dependent on the managerial priesthood that polices those waters.
The governing principle remains unchanged across centuries: every nation under God must secure its own material foundations or surrender its independence to whoever holds the straits. Economic arrangements that ignore this truth collapse when tested by conflict or blockade.
Therefore the faithful remnant in the West must abandon reliance on distant supply lines and rebuild domestic energy capacity, border control, and parallel trade networks. Nations that will not pay the modest premium of foresight will pay the far greater cost of subjugation when the next crisis closes the gates.
Patriarchal monarchies and constitutional republics alike stand or fall by their willingness to act on this ancient rule of ordered sovereignty rather than trust the promises of supranational institutions.
