A New Wrinkle in Trump’s Iran War: The Houthis
There’s another strait in the region with high strategic potential, and Yemen’s Houthis watch over it.
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With less than three months to the midterm elections, Iran’s leaders have successfully proven that President Donald Trump is nearly out of options when it comes to opening the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, a fifth of the world’s energy and a significant portion of the world’s fertilizer remain hostage to a stalemate that neither side is likely to win.
Although Iran has no real incentive to let the US off the hook before the midterms, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been desperately trying to negotiate a way out.
Now the self-imposed conflict has run into a new wrinkle: Yemen’s rebellious Houthis.
Along with the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, the Houthis are among Iran’s most important allies in the Middle East. What distinguishes them from the rest is their potential ability to close access to the Red Sea, which until now has provided a limited way of bypassing the blocked Strait of Hormuz.
Before Trump launched his war of choice against Iran, a little more than 20 million barrels of oil a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz. With the strait closed, the Saudis were still able to move nearly 7 million barrels a day through their East-West Petroline pipeline, enough to feed tankers circulating freely in the Red Sea.
Enter the Houthis
However, tankers entering the Red Sea need to pass through another narrow waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is vulnerable to attacks from Yemen’s Houthis. Shutting off access to the Red Sea would effectively block access to the Suez Canal, which could have an even greater impact on an already stressed global economy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s inability to exit the quagmire he created in the Persian Gulf has sent a clear message to Gulf states that the US may no longer be capable of ending a conflict that is hurting everyone.
With the US administration floundering, Oman, which had played a leading role in trying to mediate the conflict, has begun making its own contacts with Iran.
The betting is that, with the US essentially paralyzed, Iran is likely to emerge as the newly dominant regional power. Better to make a deal now than to risk having to deal with anger in Tehran at a later date. Trump has responded by angrily threatening to bomb Oman, which until now has been one of America’s most important allies in the region.
During his 2016 election campaign, Trump boasted that as a businessman he knew how to solve problems. He promised to be a “transactional” leader who would not get bogged down by technicalities. Instead, he would solve one problem at a time, correcting America’s burgeoning ills.
The problem is that business is usually a one-dimensional affair, but in the Middle East hardly anything that happens is one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
From the beginning, Iran made it clear that any peace deal had to involve Hezbollah. Iran demanded that Israel stop attacking Hezbollah, and it also asked that Israel reach an accommodation with Lebanon.
The US managed to arrange a few rounds of direct peace talks between Israel and Lebanon, although progress has been sketchy. The US hasn’t mentioned Hezbollah, while Israel continues with its targeted assassination of the movement’s leaders.
A Distinction With a Difference
Iran created and funded Hezbollah, so its concern for the movement is easy to understand, but in the end Hezbollah poses a threat only to Israel. The Houthis are a totally different kettle of fish, so to speak, and their concerns are more complicated than those of Hezbollah.
The Houthis, who trace their origin to the Zaydi branch of Islam, are native to Yemen. Whereas Iran created Hezbollah as an armed resistance group that eventually morphed into a social and political giant, the Houthis began as an independent religious and cultural group before turning to politics.
The distinction matters because Iran’s control over the Houthis is much looser than it is over Hezbollah. In short, the Houthis are more likely to make their own decisions independent of Tehran’s priorities.
From a global perspective, that matters because just as Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis are able to control entrance to the Red Sea through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which is within easy missile and drone range of Yemen’s coast.
Bab el-Mandeb connects the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean Sea. Between 12 and 15 percent of the planet’s seaborne trade and 30 percent of global container traffic pass through the Bab el-Mandeb waterway annually. That traffic includes not just oil, but much of the agricultural, electronic, and consumer goods destined for Europe, Asia, and North America.
If one adds that figure to the current blockades of Hormuz, the potential impact on global trade becomes much clearer and considerably more dire.
In the regional context for Yemen, the Houthis have long suffered from what they see as being involuntary collateral victims on a military playground where the two leading players on the Arabian Peninsula — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — compete for regional power. Both are Trump allies, not to mention potential business partners of Trump’s son-in-law Kushner.
Saudi Arabia has involved itself militarily in Yemen since the mid-2010s. From the start, the Saudis sided with Yemen’s former Presidents Ali Abdullah Saleh and Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in their struggles against the Houthis, who are located mostly in northern Yemen and share a long border with Saudi Arabia. Exchanges of gunfire between Saudis and Houthis firing across the border were frequent.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE engaged in major ground and air force operations in Yemen in 2015 when the Houthis were on the verge of capturing the southern Yemen port city of Aden, which also had become the seat of the internationally recognized Hadi government. The UAE exited that coalition last December.
Peace talks in 2023 calmed the situation, until a few weeks ago when the Houthis attacked shipping in Bab el-Mandeb and volleyed missiles into Saudi Arabia. That sparked fears that Yemen might be on the point of engaging in a new civil war.
Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a senior researcher at the nonpartisan Sana’a Center think tank in Yemen, suggests that the recent Houthi attacks reflect the fact that both the US-Iran talks and the Saudi-Houthi talks have been primarily influenced by domestic politics.
“There are two parts to the recent [Houthi] escalation,” Shuja al-Deen says. “The escalation in Bab el-Mandeb was clearly connected to Iran and the regional context. The escalation inside Yemen is designed to get economic leverage in the negotiations in Oman.”
The on-again, off-again Oman talks, facilitated by the United Nations, are being conducted between delegations from the Houthis and the Saudis. They have been going on since April 2023. Their objective is to arrive at a lasting economic, political, and military framework that can end the Yemen crisis, which has been ongoing for several years.
Shuja al-Deen notes that the US “vetoed” the agreements on a roadmap intended to resolve the Saudi-Houthi crisis in 2023 after the Houthis launched attacks against ships in the Red Sea to show their support for the Palestinians in the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza.
“The Americans,” she adds, “saw the economic leverage the Houthis were asking [in the UN negotiations] as a reward they could not give.” After recent Houthi attacks, negotiators have tried to get the talks started again.
It has been suggested that an accommodation of Houthi demands might weaken their ties to Iran, lower the temperature with Saudi Arabia, and decrease Iran’s leverage throughout the Middle East.
Shuja al-Deen has her doubts. She says that the Houthis may be able to survive without Iran’s help, but there is not much chance that they are going to break ideologically with Iran.
“[The Houthis] have the ambition to be a regional actor,” she says.
She adds that the connection to Iran is more than ideological. “Without Iran’s support, and its supply of weapons and missiles, not to mention Tehran’s permission, it’s unlikely that they would have carried out the recent attacks in Bab el-Mandeb.”
The Houthis have lost considerable support inside Yemen, and they have their backs to the wall.
“They are under economic pressure internally,” she says. “They don’t enjoy popularity, even in their controlled areas. They have failed to build any political or social alliances in their controlled areas in the past 10 years. So, this has weakened them very much, but they will not disappear as an ideology,” she says.
The signing of a joint defense agreement between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey at a meeting in Mecca earlier this month could inject yet another unknown into the Middle East equation.
According to Shuja al-Deen, the Saudis may have engineered the agreement as a precursor to another full-scale attack against Yemen if they feel there is a danger that the Houthis might escalate attacks inside the kingdom.
“The Mecca agreement and the coalition to protect shipping in the Red Sea is the Saudi way,” she says. “The Saudis like to have regional and international political cover before they act militarily. You never know what might happen in the region, and this might lead to an all-out war in Yemen.”
If that happens, Washington may find it even harder to maintain a regional alliance aimed at containing Iran.