A question was asked on why the Saudis initiated this war. This article in the normally Zionist Atlantic may be the answer.
Trump Loses the Other Strait
The Houthi advance is bad news for the U.S., and even worse news for Saudi Arabia.
By
Robert F. Worth
As recently as last week, the Iran war appeared to be turning in America’s favor. The Houthis—the Yemen-based militia that is Iran’s most formidable remaining ally in the Middle East—were under pressure from their local rivals, and the Saudi air force was pounding them with air strikes. T
he president of Yemen’s internationally recognized government issued a triumphant statement declaring that the Houthis’ miscalculations “will open the door to their complete collapse.” The next step was easy to imagine: With their Houthi partners wounded, Iran’s leaders would be forced to back down and agree to Donald Trump’s terms.
Yesterday morning, those delusions drifted away like smoke as Houthi forces broke through their enemies’ defenses and seized the towns and islands around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, one of the most important maritime choke points in the world.
That loss leaves Trump, who had been hoping to win back control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, with a bitter surprise. His enemies now control both of the two important straits in the Middle East, through which a combined total of about a third of the world’s oil shipments pass every day.
It also underscores a stubborn fact: For all the setbacks suffered by Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” over the past year or two, its forces retain an ideological fervor and an esprit de corps that is sorely lacking on the other side. The Gulf states’ failure to work together against the Houthis has been catastrophic, and it echoes Trump’s own failure to devise a plausible or coordinated strategy against Iran.
Although the Houthis already had the ability to threaten shipping in the Red Sea, the capture of the Bab al-Mandab “means you can literally sit on the coast and fire at passing ships,” April Longley Alley, a Yemen expert at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy and the former political adviser to the United Nations special envoy for Yemen, told me. “It makes it easier and cheaper, and it solidifies, from a military and political point of view, that they have a stranglehold on the strait.”
The United States might not be able to do much about this, even if the Pentagon launches a new round of air strikes on the Houthis. (The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, called Trump twice yesterday urging him to strike the Houthis,
Axios reported.) Bombs and missiles would achieve little without a ground force to take advantage of them, and America’s Yemeni allies are now battered and divided. The Trump administration waged a seven-week war against the group last year, and although it succeeded in killing some Houthi commanders, it did not dislodge the group or alter its ability to wage war, as Trump had promised.
The Houthi advance is even worse news for Saudi Arabia. For many years, the Saudis have been struggling to tamp down the Houthi threat on its border. Now the Houthis have inherited a great deal of Saudi and Emirati supplies left behind by the official Yemeni government’s retreating forces. A
video circulated yesterday of Mohammad Ali al-Houthi, one of the group’s top commanders and a cousin of its supreme leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, riding though Mokha in an Emirati armored vehicle.
The mess that Saudi Arabia faces in Yemen is partly of its own making.
The Houthis were born three decades ago in reaction to Saudi meddling in Yemen’s religious and political sphere. In December, tensions between the Saudi and Emirati leadership led Riyadh to demand that the Emiratis—their nominal allies—withdraw from Yemen, leaving the Saudis in charge of a patchwork of militias with divided loyalties. The various Yemeni factions continued to squabble among themselves even as their Houthi enemies were at the gates.
“There was no coordination between commanders, between the intelligence and the drones, between the coast guard and the army—nothing,” Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemen specialist at the think tank Chatham House, told me.
The Houthis have clearly benefited from the Gulf’s disunity. “Last time the Houthis made a breakthrough at Marib in 2022, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were able to jointly support a devastatingly effective Yemeni-government counterattack,” Michael Knights, the head of research at the consultancy Horizon Engage, told me.
The Houthis, meanwhile, were disciplined and focused. “They sacrificed hundreds if not thousands of fighters,” a member of Yemen’s officially recognized government, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions, told me. “Our bullshit activists were putting out fake news about victories, while the Houthis were working in silence.”
With the momentum on their side, the Houthis could now go on to seize more terrain in other parts of Yemen, including Marib province, where much of Yemen’s oil is located. They could also extend their power bloodlessly, by cutting deals with tribal and regional leaders in the south and east. All of this would further consolidate their power and strengthen their Iranian patrons.
The Houthi victories have already put into doubt the value of the Mecca Alliance, the mutual-defense pact formed in August by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Islamabad and Ankara have shown no inclination to help the Saudis, despite a rash of recent Houthi strikes on targets in southern Saudi Arabia.
Iran’s vaunted Axis of Resistance is not a bulletproof covenant either. The Houthis were absent earlier this year when the United States and Israel started bombing Iran.
But unlike their enemies, the Houthis and the Iranians have a deep ideological bond, one that their soldiers willingly die for. And the Houthis do not need to win every battle. As long as they can sink an occasional oil tanker, they will hold a whip hand over their Saudi neighbors, and over the rest of the world too.
Food transported via missiles 
