Vow to make Iran lose tankers ends with Saudi Arabia losing oil exports instead.

…(cont) Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on television and said Iran would "lose tankers" every time it tried to hit a U.S. ship — not a warning about missiles, a warning about tankers, the next target named in advance.

Four days after that, the invoice arrived somewhere else entirely. Saudi Arabia's oil exports fell to a 13-year low this week; the shipping lanes have gotten too dangerous to run at volume. Riyadh didn't fire a shot in this fight. Riyadh is paying for it anyway — the way it's paid before. In April 2016, Al Arabiya shut its Beirut bureau overnight and dismissed 27 employees, a casualty of the tension between Riyadh and a Lebanon it judged too close to Hezbollah. Tehran wasn't in that building either. The building closed.

The lanes were already tight before Rubio reached a microphone. By late August, the Ansarullah movement in Yemen had spent weeks disrupting Saudi exports on its own. What changed this month is who's doing the squeezing, not that the squeeze exists.

In Iran, the bill comes due in a currency with no exchange rate. Deputy Health Minister Mahdi Pirsalehi says the country is short roughly 800 medicines, dozens of them essential, with cancer treatment among what's affected. Pirsalehi says the shortage is deliberate, the U.S. targeting medicine as a pressure point. Deliberate or not, this week's effect is a bombing campaign and a blockade turning chemotherapy into a supply-chain problem.

Borders close and reopen on schedules set somewhere else too. Saudi Arabia closed its air, sea, and land borders in December 2020 over a new COVID variant, then reopened them on January 3rd, 2021, requiring a 14-day quarantine for travelers arriving from the UK, South Africa, and other countries where the variant was spreading. The tanker crews rerouting around the Gulf this month didn't get a vote on this schedule either.

Rubio's promising more tankers lost. The medicine isn't part of that promise.