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The Iran war has acquired a new front. Yemen’s civil war, largely dormant since an uneasy 2022 truce between the rebels of Ansar Allah, known colloquially as the Houthis, and the Saudi-backed “internationally recognized government,” roared back to life last week.
A Houthi lightning offensive swept to the Red Sea coast and down to the strategically critical port of Mokha and Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandab strait. As the Saudi-backed coalition forces collapsed, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly called Donald Trump to ask for American air support to no avail. Trump would claim that the Houthis had called him too and asked the U.S. to stay out—a claim the famously proud and independent Houthi leadership vociferously denied—and that “they have a problem with one country and we’ll solve it.”
While U.S. officials have been careful to emphasize in their statements to the public and the press that they are staying out of Yemen this time, a recent flurry of arms sales notifications to Saudi Arabia and reports of U.S. advisers on the ground tell a different story. The White House may not want its regional conflagration to spread to Yemen, but if it continues to enable the Saudis to avoid diplomacy, full-scale war will rapidly return, and a deeper oil crisis along with it.
The unusual diplomatic tact from Trump toward the Houthis is a product of the cease-fire that ended last year’s U.S.-Houthi flare-up. In March 2025, when the Houthis resumed attacks on Israel and Red Sea shipping sites in stated solidarity with Gaza after the collapse of the January 2025 cease-fire, Trump approved “Operation Rough Rider,” a multiweek air campaign in the name of “freedom of navigation” that killed hundreds of Yemenis, including at least 224 civilians, per the independent monitor Airwars.
This air campaign, though, failed to bomb the Houthis into surrender, much like the multiyear Biden- and Trump-backed Saudi air campaign before it, and in early May, the U.S. and the Houthis agreed to an Oman-brokered cease-fire based on a narrow agreement that separated Houthi attacks on U.S. shipping from those on Israeli targets. Israel would continue its own air strikes on Yemen, while Trump complimented the Houthis’ resolve: “They’re tough, they’re fighters, but they agreed to stop targeting U.S. ships.”
No matter how limited U.S. officials claim their involvement in Yemen to be, these recent developments troublingly resemble the original American foray in the country more than a decade ago.
The U.S.-Houthi cease-fire has held for nearly a year and a half, and Trump’s public dismissals of potential U.S. involvement in the current conflict demonstrate that the White House, for all of its militaristic braggadocio and leaning into the “FAFO” motto, is wary of stretching the military even thinner by opening yet another front. However, U.S. officials also appear to be pushing the limits of the cease-fire with their quiet support for the Saudi intervention.
On September 4th, the State Department posted a notice of foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia of more than 10,000 bombs and corresponding Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits, the weapons now infamous for their usage in alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Last week, CNN reported that more than 100 U.S. military advisers were on the ground in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint operations center to provide intelligence and targeting support in their anti-Houthi campaign. While the anonymous officials cited stressed that U.S. advisers were not participating directly in strikes, this denial may not hold water as the Saudis ramp up another air campaign against Yemen with that targeting support.
The pains to which U.S. officials go to deny direct involvement in Saudi strikes are a product of the yearslong grassroots and congressional efforts to end support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. During Trump’s first term in 2018, a rare bipartisan coalition passed a Yemen war powers resolution through both chambers of Congress before Trump vetoed it; a similar resolution would pass in the House the following Congress, though with a hostile amendment included that would safeguard intelligence-sharing with the Saudis. The Pentagon would attempt to avert passage of the 2019 resolution by announcing an end to U.S. refueling of Saudi warplanes in advance of the vote, a policy which U.S. officials claim holds to this day. During an abortive war powers push by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2022 that was fiercely opposed by the Biden administration, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) acknowledged that U.S. maintenance of Saudi warplanes helped keep them in the air.
While a formal Yemen war powers resolution has never been signed into law, the pressure campaign by Yemen war opponents and war powers advocates has pared down U.S. support to the Saudis to its current state, in which officials take pains to minimize the role they admit to playing.
Aftermath
This story first appeared in The American Prospect’s free Aftermath newsletter, a series on the economic consequences of the war in Iran.
No matter how limited U.S. officials claim their involvement in Yemen to be, though, these recent developments troublingly resemble the original American foray in the country more than a decade ago. In early 2015, the Obama administration announced a “Joint Planning Cell with Saudi Arabia to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence support” while “not taking direct military action in Yemen.” From these humble beginnings came the U.S.-backed Saudi intervention that killed thousands of Yemenis in airstrikes and hundreds of thousands more by unleashing the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. While circumstances on the ground have shifted significantly—the Houthis have already functionally “won” the civil war and govern a large majority of the country’s population, and appetite for a another major intervention is likely limited in both Riyadh and Washington—any renewed offensive risks a return to all-out war and its attendant consequences on Yemeni civilians.
The hawkish rationale for a major anti-Houthi campaign is superficially straightforward. The Houthis’ capture of Mokha and Perim is a boon to their ability to threaten Red Sea shipping and the Bab al-Mandab strait, upon which the Saudis have grown reliant for energy exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. The major Houthi advances and the devastating strike on the Saudi East-West Pipeline (reportedly by their Iraqi allies, according to Riyadh) at least temporarily shut off 4 percent of global oil supply and sent oil prices soaring, directly undermining the White House’s siege strategy against Iran, in which limited exports through the Strait of Hormuz under U.S. aegis reduced Iran’s leverage against the global economy. The diminishing of strategic oil reserves in the U.S., which currently sit at the lowest level since 1982, adds to this urgency, as experts believe that the long-anticipated impact of war in the Middle East is finally upon us.
The reality is even worse for the U.S. than this picture: The military is overstretched, past anti-Houthi campaigns have proven fruitless, and Trump has a strong incentive not to provoke additional attacks on shipping that will send oil higher still.
Washington policymakers are also beginning to accept that there is no military “solution” to their Houthi problem. Allison Minor, a former deputy to Biden Yemen chief Tim Lenderking, argued last week that any military effort in Yemen must center on girding the politically fractured Saudi-backed coalition so that they can resist the Houthis enough to force them back into diplomacy. The Houthis, for their part, say that they will cease fighting as soon as the Saudis end their own intervention, including the long-standing air and sea blockade that has fueled a deep economic and humanitarian crisis in Houthi-controlled territory. The Saudis have found themselves in the same predicament as the tiny Gulf monarchies before them: paying a heavy price for the United States’ Iran war, with the U.S. reluctant or unable to include them under the security umbrella.
The Houthis, frustrated by the glacial implementation of the 2023 U.N.-sponsored “road map” to peace that would include critical elements like the payment of $1 billion to $2 billion in withheld civil servant salaries to the Houthi-controlled area out of Saudi-held banks, no doubt appreciate their improved position at the negotiating table. While current and former officials like Minor may assert that the Houthis’ anti-Israel campaign stalled the peace deal’s implementation, the Saudis and Israelis are at least nominally independent parties with separate relationships with the Houthis. A Saudi offensive in Yemen, U.S.-backed or otherwise, only serves to prolong the deep suffering in the country while forestalling a real political solution. The war will end not with more bombs but with fiddly technical details like the execution of civil servant salary payments.
While the White House has roundly ignored both congressional war powers authority and sour public sentiment in continuing its war with Iran, a difficult political environment is likely nonetheless constraining Trump’s Yemen policy. While national security–concerned elected officials may be loath to further pinch their Saudi allies, any senator could force a vote on a joint resolution of disapproval on those recent bomb sales (like the April votes to block bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs to Israel) and force their fellow senators to go to bat for the unpopular Saudi dictatorship. Some hawkish members of Congress, like freshly appointed House Foreign Affairs Middle East subcommittee chair Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) of “you lie” infamy, have pushed for escalation in Yemen, but they’re swimming upstream. Trump’s own baseless assertions that the Iran war will end “soon” would be undermined by fully opening a new U.S. front.
The early signs that the White House uncharacteristically understands the limits of its own power are encouraging. Reuters reported that U.S. officials met with Houthi representatives in Oman over the weekend for talks. Houthi diplomats publicly recommitted to their pledge to hit only Saudi ships, and Trump may be happy to hold onto the 2025 cease-fire and maroon the Saudis on that island. However, as long as the U.S. is plying Saudi Arabia with bombs and intelligence, they will be fueling a volatile conflict—and its consequences for the global economy.
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