Trump leaves Saudis in the lurch with hands-off response to Houthi advances
President Trump is taking a notably hands-off approach as Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen rapidly gain ground in their bid to secure a Red Sea choke point that could further roil global energy markets and box in Saudi Arabia.
Trump has reportedly rebuffed a request from Saudi Arabia to launch strikes on the Houthis, though the U.S. has sent advisers to support the kingdom, which also saw key energy pipelines attacked in recent days.
Vice President Vance said Monday that while the U.S. has been “keeping pretty close tabs” on the situation, officials are “going to keep on monitoring it, and making sure that America’s best interests are represented.”
On Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee insisted the fighting is “really not a big expansion” of the larger U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, noting the Houthis have refrained from hitting American targets.
“In this case I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” Huckabee said of the Houthis’ actions on Newsmax. “What we do have is a for sure skirmish between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but it has not really gone across the region. … That’s the good news.”
The approach marks a stark contrast to the early days of the Trump administration, when the president in March 2025 ordered strikes on the Houthis in response to attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea — plans that were famously shared by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on a Signal chat that included The Atlantic’s editor in chief.
But the U.S. is reluctant to step into the fray this time around, given its insistence that Washington has all but wrapped up its fighting with Tehran, a narrative to be further called into question should a new battleground open up, according to analysts.
“War with the Houthis right now would counter [Trump’s] narrative that this conflict is essentially over,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.
“It would be inconvenient to the reality he’s trying to project that there’s nothing to see there anymore, that the war is basically over. It’d be hard to sustain that narrative if you’re suddenly opening a second front,” he told The Hill.
Feltman added that even as it maintains its distance, the U.S. is likely to eventually get pulled into the conflict should the Houthis continue to seize more strategic territory after already taking Yemen’s port city Mokha and three islands crucial to controlling the Red Sea. The land grab has further strained energy markets, with the cost of a barrel of oil hitting $109 on Monday. A gallon of gas in the U.S. cost an average of $4.23 per gallon as of Wednesday morning.
“What happens when it hits $6 a gallon?” he added. “I think it’s inevitable that at some point the United States is going to have to engage.”
For now, the U.S. position has Saudi Arabia between a rock and a hard place as the
Houthis have choked off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a passageway to the Red Sea. That comes after the Saudis had to close the critical East-West Pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions after it was reportedly attacked by Iran-backed militias in Iraq.
The pipeline — a major alternative export route for the Saudis to get oil to the Red Sea after Iran cut off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz — is expected to be closed for weeks, sending Riyadh’s economy into crisis,
Bloomberg reported.
The world’s largest oil exporter before the war in Iran began, Saudi Arabia has been hampered by Iranian-backed attacks in the past month as Tehran looks to gain leverage in the fighting. A Saudi oil tanker was hit in the Strait of Hormuz late last month in an attack that killed two sailors.
That comes after Houthi rebels in early August
fired missiles and drones at Saudi military targets in the eastern city of Marib, Yemen, where two people were killed and more than a dozen were injured.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly pressed Trump to take military action against the Houthis, which the president has so far declined. Instead, he has agreed to help by sharing military information and sending advisers to aid in developing targets on the Houthis,
Axios first reported.
Vance on Monday told reporters that the U.S. has “been in constant contact with the Emiratis, the Saudis and others who are affected in the region,” and it has been “engaged in direct conversations with the Houthis themselves.”
Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), also met with the crown prince Monday in Jeddah,
according to Saudi state media. Centcom only said that the two discussed “regional security cooperation.”
But the U.S. “is very limited in its ability to provide direct support to this, given how bogged down it is” with Iran and trying to maintain a naval blockade on the other side of the Gulf with the Strait of Hormuz, according to Jason Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
The events further demonstrate to the Saudis that “the U.S. isn’t as capable of providing security as perhaps they had hoped,” he told The Hill.
Michael Ratney, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under former President Biden, said the development is “truly frustrating” for the Saudis, who have invested heavily for decades in a stronger political and strategic partnership with the United States.
“They would do it for just this sort of eventuality, a moment when they’re under attack,” Ratney
told NPR. “And President Trump seemingly, at this point, wants to sit on the sideline. So I think it’s irritating, to say the least, truly frustrating for them.”
Death to israel almost 4 deacdes . the country who fired fisrt missile is free from any threat . its strange for me
The enablers and defenders of Israel, which is the GCC and other aspirants, have to be neutered first.
Stop making bad-faith arguments to derail this thread. Thanks.
