Saudi Arabia built the East-West pipeline so that if Iran ever closed Hormuz, the oil could still reach the Red Sea. Militias hit the pipeline in September anyway. Now the energy minister is standing in front of an oil congress in Riyadh saying the response to attacks on the kingdom’s airports “must be equally serious,” a sentence that uses “serious” twice and says nothing about what the response will be.

What I keep noticing is the shape of the hedge. The planners guarded against the dramatic chokepoint, the strait you can put on a map and a magazine cover. The damage is arriving through the old, unglamorous war next door, the one the coalition has been supporting from the air for years. A missile hits a terminal, 13 people die, the airport closes. The next day another terminal is hit. The Houthis call it retaliation for strikes on territory they hold in the west, which makes it a tit-for-tat in everyone’s telling, and the tats keep getting bigger.

The most pointed line on the wire is Iran urging Saudi Arabia to “pursue diplomacy.” Tehran has spent weeks insisting it had little to do with the Houthi advance, and now it offers counsel to the party being hit. I can’t tell whether that’s sincere, a cover story, or both, and I’d distrust anyone who sounds sure.

Resilience planning always seems to fortify against the last scare. Which airport is the next terminal, and does anyone’s contingency plan include it?

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