The ghosts of empires haunt Yemen. This rugged land has been conquered and abandoned by the Ottomans, the British, the Egyptians, and—with backing from the United States—the Saudis. Now again, foreign warplanes darken Yemen’s skies.
In response to escalating Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping lanes, President Trump ordered large-scale airstrikes this week, targeting Houthi military infrastructure in the capital city of Sanaa. These strikes are intended to protect international maritime commerce as well as send a warning shot over the bow to Iran for supporting these pirates, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them yesterday.
“The minute the Houthis say ‘we’ll stop shooting at your ships, we’ll stop shooting at your drones,’ this campaign will end,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News, “but until then, it will be unrelenting.”
The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah (Supporters of God), are the de facto rulers of northern Yemen, including the capital, whereas the south is controlled by a mixture of separatists made up of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and various tribal groups. For decades, the Houthis were little more than an afterthought, a ragtag band of Zaidi Shia rebels with a grievance against the Yemeni government. Zaidi Muslims had ruled Yemen for over 1,000 years until they were overthrown in 1962 and a Saudi-backed Sunni republican government was established. The House of Saud has long hoped to spread its Wahhabi version of Islam in Yemen, both to push out Iranian influence before Tehran manages to put a military base on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, and to protect maritime routes given the fact that Yemen sits on the oil artery of the Bar el-Mandeb Strait.
As a result, Zaidi Shias suddenly found themselves increasingly marginalized in the very land they had ruled for a millennia. By the 1990s, a former member of the Yemeni parliament named Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi had grown sick of government corruption and Saudi influence in his native land. He founded Ansar Allah both to revive Zaidi faith and to oppose the Saudi-infected government of Yemen.
In the beginning, the Houthi movement was primarily a Zaidi cultural one, focused mainly on bringing back old traditions and celebrating their version of the faith. But in the wake of U.S. and Israeli policies following 9/11, Houthis adopted a new slogan:
God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.
In 2004, the Yemeni government tried to crush the movement and Hussein al-Houthi was killed in battle. But this only made him a martyr, and the movement grew stronger still. His brother, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, took over and by 2014, the Houthis had taken northern Yemen, capturing the capital Sanaa and sending Yemen’s internationally recognized government scrambling into exile.
This seizure of the capital triggered the Yemen Civil War, one of the bloodiest ongoing conflicts in the world today. In the years since, the Houthis have proven remarkably adaptable, evolving into a hybrid guerrilla force whose arsenal—courtesy of Iran—now includes drones, ballistic missiles, and sea mines, all of which they deploy with impunity. They have thrived in the chaos and power vacuum of civil war, terrorizing Saudi Arabia, hijacking Red Sea shipping lanes, and serving as a willing proxy for Iran’s regional ambitions.
But why should any of this matter to Americans? Because their reach extends far beyond the Yemeni highlands. Their missiles have targeted Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Their drones have harassed commercial shipping. Their naval mines threaten one of the most vital chokepoints in global trade. And because of our reliance on oil, the West literally cannot afford to ignore major disruptions of this nature. And yet, for years, the West has done precisely that.
The idea that the Houthis are merely a “regional problem” is therefore a decreasingly comforting delusion. And putting aside the global economic risks of letting pirates call the shots when it comes to the crude oil market, we also have to consider that Iran is using them as a proving ground for its drone and missile technology, not to mention the local risks and moral costs that come with Yemen remaining a festering wound of extremism and human suffering.
Left alone, the Houthis would not simply use Iranian backing to consolidate power in Yemen. They will expand their reach to threaten Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the stability of the Red Sea corridor. Picture the Somali pirates of the early 2000s. Now picture them armed with Iranian-made ballistic missiles and an ideological mission to kill all Israelis and Americans alike.
None of this means that Trump’s decision is beyond critique. The risk of escalation is real. The Houthis have vowed retaliation, and their Iranian backers may be willing to turn the conflict into a regional war. Yemen is already teetering on the brink of famine, and a bombing campaign is only going to lead to more lives lost. Plus, while Trump’s decision to strike is tactically sound, airstrikes alone will not end the threat.
So yes, the notion that the world could simply let the Houthis continue their maritime brinkmanship was a dangerous fantasy. Trump is right to send the message that global commerce cannot be held hostage by sociopathic pirates. Lives quite literally depend on those trade routes. Nor can we sit back and give Iran’s proxies a free hand.
But, on the other hand, the Houthis cannot be bombed into submission, so where does that leave us? Well, as Hesgeth put it so bluntly, they can be forced to choose between endless war and some form of negotiated settlement. But for that to happen, Washington must be willing to play the long game, and as we have seen with Ukraine and countless other examples before that, Americans have limited appetite for long-term war, especially when we’re feeling the economic pinch back home.
Arguably the greatest Yemeni poet of all time is Abdullah Al-Baradouni, the blind poet of Dhamar who wrote powerfully about the oppression and injustices his people suffered. Before dying in 1999, he wrote these lines in the poem “Exile to Exile”:
In the caverns of its death my country neither dies nor recovers. It digs in the muted graves looking for its pure origins for its springtime promise that slept behind its eyes for the dream that will come for the phantom that hid. It moves from one overwhelming night to a darker night. My country grieves in its own boundaries and in other people's land and even on its own soil suffers the alienation of exile.
Let us hope that Trump can disrupt this cycle of despair, this exile to even darker exile, without Yemen sinking further into chaos. To the extent that he can, Trump must restore freedom of navigation and curb Iranian influence in the region. I am confident he will do the former. The latter, perhaps. But as the world watches, we will soon discover whether this intervention will be the turning point that the people of Yemen so desperately need, or just another chapter in their misery.
I'm not sure how relevant it is to the Houthi phenomenon, but scratch the surface of Yemeni's rampant usage of qat, and it starts to look like a narcostate.