It's about time to have a serious talk with the Saudis and redirect all that money that is being stupidly spent on all those vanity projects such as NEOM and The Line towards pipelines running through the Desert , end point the port of Yunbu & Jeddah and make the Strait of Hormuz irrelevant .

This is the quintessential American project, the U.S. has invented and developed the oil industry in Saudi. Saudi Aramco was originally the "California-Arabian Standard Oil Company".

I don't know why this hasn't happened during the last 40 years where Iran has always been an enemy, Saudi Arabia has always been an ally and the U.S. has always had enormous amount of access to the Kingdom for the purpose of building oil infrastructure.

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logicchains 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn't matter how many pipelines Saudi has when Iran could just bomb them and the refineries again. The best strategy would be for Saudi and the UAE to invest in mass drone production; drones are becoming like WMDs, and MAD will similarly apply. The IRGC is more dependent on oil revenue than Saudi and UAE, and relies on that money for funding the massive militia that allows them to stay in power, so they've got more to lose in an extended war of oil infrastructure destruction.

	▲	JumpinJack_Cash 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok let's say buried pipelines under the sand , it's the ideal insulant against the relatively low power of suicide drones. Haven't you seen the amount of sand they displaced for the foundations of "the Line" project? Let's say dig a hole in the desert build the pipeline and then cover it with 15ft of sand that you previously excavated , can't be that hard for a country that is boasting about building a 1mi tall skyscraper and a 100mi long 1000ft tall Line , or a floating NEOM city The exception is that this project would actually have positive ROI . I agree that the point of arrival of the pipelines would present a vulnerabily but look at the map , Jeddah is about 1000mi from Iran coast. That buys you a lot of time and a lot of opportunities to intercept the drones > > extended war of oil infrastructure destruction. My point was that ingenuity could be used to avoid oil infrastructure destruction , which is not desirable anyways. Your point is to get there via drone MAD. I don't think Saudi and Iran can be trusted with MAD