By Noah Rothman
Monday, September 21, 2026
We’re a long way from those heady days when the Trump
administration’s foreign policy theorists objected to finishing the campaign
against Yemen’s Houthi rebels that Joe Biden reluctantly and belatedly began
based on the supposition that defending maritime navigation rights constituted
“bailing out Europe again.”
Within the milieu Trump cultivated around himself in his
second term, the hostility toward Europe persists — as does its flippant
disregard for America’s role as guarantor of commerce and transit on the high
seas. But this White House is not as allergic to hostile engagements with
America’s adversaries as it seemed it would be in early 2025.
And yet, when it comes to the Houthis, the administration
betrays Biden’s trepidation.
Within weeks of taking office, and despite the cynicism
on display in the infamous leaked Signal chat, Trump 2.0 swiftly embarked on
a military campaign to degrade the Houthis’s power projection capabilities.
“As part of Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. has targeted
Houthi infrastructure and leadership to deter and “disintegrate” the Houthis,”
the U.S. Naval Institute reported in late April of last year.
After 45 days and with over 1,000 targets hit, USNI continued, Operation Rough
Rider saw “no end in sight.”
But the end would come about one week later with a
negotiated settlement between the Houthis and Washington in which the
Iran-backed terrorist proxy promised to avoid attacking U.S. ships transiting
through the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea and toward the Suez Canal.
Although their Iranian benefactors lobbied the Houthis to
open a second front throughout the war that began on February 28, the
separatist militia did not take up the call. That changed in early August when
the Houthis “launched strikes on the Saudi state oil company and announced a
blockade of Saudi ships passing through the Red Sea,” the Washington Post
reported, in response to a Saudi Arabian blockade of the Yemeni ports it
controls.
It turned out that the Houthis were not deterred by the
“weight of American power,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed. Rather, the militants were riven by
internal divisions that dissipated only when the Saudis raised the cost of
inaction to a prohibitive degree.
The fighting between Saudi-backed Yemeni government
forces and the Houthis intensified in September, with Houthi forces making
significant gains that could potentially threaten maritime traffic in the Red
Sea. Those gains are reflected in global energy prices — particularly in the
price at the pump, which had been held in check in August amid U.S. efforts to
exfiltrate all but Iranian energy exports out of the Strait of Hormuz.
Riyadh has been making some frantic calls to its partners
abroad in its quest to drum up support for its offensive operations against the
Houthis, albeit to no avail. Over the weekend, however, it seemed like the
president was about to ride to the Saudis’s rescue, only to back down at what
could very well have been the last minute.
The New York Times has the details:
Mr. Trump had met with advisers
just the day before and told them he did not favor strikes. But after speaking
with the Saudi crown prince, he reversed himself and told the Pentagon to
prepare for airstrikes against the Houthis.
But by midday Sunday, the
president appeared to have reversed himself again. There would be no U.S.
airstrikes against the Houthis — at least not for the time being, according to
administration officials. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to discuss military planning.
The decision came as Trump’s “commanders had approved
target lists” and while “troops were loading bombs onto U.S. warplanes,”
according to the Times. “Most of the president’s inner circle was either
deeply skeptical or outright opposed to joining the Saudi fight against the
Houthis.” And as both the Times and Axios’s plugged-in reporter, Barak Ravid, conspicuously note, the supposed cease-fire
between the U.S. and the Houthis still holds. After all, they’re not attacking
U.S. ships, are they?
That parochial outlook misses the point. The Saudis
responded to the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz by rerouting their crude
oil and petroleum derivative exports overland and by sea through the Bab
al-Mandab Strait. “Lloyd’s List reported in August that Saudi-linked vessels
were still able to obtain war-risk coverage, although at higher premiums
because of reinsurers’ concerns about Houthi attacks,” Newsweek reported earlier this month. “That gives the
Houthis leverage over the cost of moving oil even when the barrels themselves
continue to flow.”
Bringing the Houthis to heel would put even more upward
pressure on fuel prices, even if strikes on Houthi targets failed to result in
the resumption of full-scale hostilities in the region. But the Iranians still
expect Trump to do something. “Iran received information that the United
States, with the backing of some regional countries, is preparing to resume
actions against Iran,” Reuters reported on Sunday. Iran’s armed forces responded
by insisting “that any US attack will trigger sustained strikes on U.S. bases
and interests in the region.”
For now, it seems that threat alone was sufficient to
convince the president to back down. But it may not stay his hand for long.
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