Trump’s Détente with the Houthis

National Review Online

Thursday, May 08, 2025

 

Donald Trump took the desultory air campaign that he inherited from the Biden administration against the Houthis, and kicked it into a higher gear.

 

“Joe Biden’s response was pathetically weak, so the unrestrained Houthis just kept going,” Trump declared at the outset of his campaign against the Iranian terrorist proxy in Yemen. He was right about that. In contrast with his predecessor, Trump’s Pentagon executed well over 100 strikes on a range of targets inside Yemen that Biden would not touch. Those targets included not just military sites but also the command-and-control nodes embedded within civilian-dominated urban areas, where the Houthis’ leadership believed they would be safe from American retribution.

 

Trump’s campaign has been a costly one. The United States has expended millions of dollars’ worth of defensive and offensive ordnance. It has lost at least nine MQ-9 Reaper drones to enemy fire and two F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets to accidents. But increased risk is the cost of increased efficacy on the battlefield, and the administration’s approach to the Houthi menace has generated a return on that investment.

 

Public reporting indicates that the United States had augmented its intelligence-gathering capabilities against the Houthis in recent weeks. As a result, the accuracy of its strikes on Houthi launch sites and supply depots had improved, and the U.S. was successfully interdicting more illicit Iranian shipments of drones and rockets before they reached their cat’s paws on the Arabian Peninsula.

 

The terrorist groups’ frantic missile attacks on Israel may be less a show of strength than a sign of weakness, even if some of those missiles and drones have evaded Israeli air defenses and landed in unnerving proximity to targets of interest. The Houthis may be in “use it or lose it” mode, firing off what they can while they can. Meanwhile, the terrorist sect has been rewarded for its efforts by Israeli strikes culminating in the total destruction of the Sanaa airport.

 

That’s why perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he had received word that the Yemeni militant group was suing for peace.

 

The Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore,” Trump said. “They say they will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s the purpose of what we were doing.” The militant group has “capitulated,” according to the president, “but more importantly, we will take their own word.” As a display of American good faith, “We will stop the bombings.”

 

But the president’s declaration of victory may be premature. The terrorist outfit’s campaign of hijacking, marauding, and savagery in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait may have waned in response to the Pentagon’s growing pressure on the group, but we should not accept a pinky promise to avoid attacking shipping in the future at face value. Piracy is a game the Houthis have played, with varying degrees of intensity, for a decade.

 

Moreover, the international shipping interests that rerouted their vessels away from the Suez Canal continue to avoid the area, increasing global transit costs and calling American naval supremacy into question. There aren’t any mechanisms they can rely on to verify the Houthis’ submission and disarmament.

 

The cease-fire, at the end of the day, may have more to do with Iran than its proxy. “The stand down is expected to serve as momentum towards the overall US-Iran talks over an Iran nuclear deal,” sources close to the negotiations told CNN.

 

If that’s true, Trump needs to avoid getting sucked into the same dynamic that led Barack Obama to forge the desperately flawed 2015 Iran nuclear accords. Obama’s singular goal was to ink something that could be called a nuclear deal, even one that legitimized Iran’s uranium enrichment and missile program.

 

Trump is correct when he says, as he often does, that Iran cannot be allowed to develop a bomb. The Islamic Republic has demonstrated the suicidally eschatological will to use it, and it can deliver a warhead over American cities and those of our allies. But Trump cannot fall into the Obama trap of wanting a deal no matter its merits. As Trump’s more muscular attacks on the Houthis have shown, he’s only going to get results by rejecting the weakness of his progressive predecessors.