While the Houthis seized the Red Sea, the West looked away

 A hostile army seizes one of the Middle East’s most critical trade routes at the same time as co-ordinated strikes blow up a pipeline transporting 4 per cent of global oil supplies.

In decades past, the West would have gone to war for less. Yet the Iranian-backed Houthis’ seizure of the Yemeni side of the Bab-el Mendab strait and the island of Perim, the gateway to the Red Sea, has drawn a strangely muted response. Donald Trump, his military already over-stretched blockading Iran, reportedly rebuffed a request from Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, for urgent military assistance. Europe, preoccupied with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, did not really even enter the conversation.

Yet it keeps getting worse. On Monday, the Houthis claimed two more Red Sea islands, killed eight government soldiers in a missile strike on western Yemen, and, a Houthi spokesman said, launched “dozens of ballistic missiles and drones” against the King Khalid Air Base in southern Saudi Arabia.

On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia issued alerts over possible missile attacks in the holy city of Mecca. And there were reports of more drone strikes on its east-west pipeline by Iranian-backed militias based in Iraq. In Yemen itself, the UN estimates 100,000 people have been displaced and more than two thousand have fled across the Red Sea to Djibouti.

It is tempting to think of the war in Yemen as a domestic affair. Houthi rebels from northern Yemen seized Sanaa, the capital, and the country’s most important port at Hodeidah, in 2014. The following year a coalition of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Sudan, intervened to restore the government, but ended up being drawn into a decade-long war and one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

That war had largely frozen by 2022. But the Houthis, who hung on to a chunk of the country’s north, including the capital, styled themselves as a state within a state – or even the state itself

“They want to be a small Iran. They do not want to be like Hezbollah or Hamas. They want to be a state,” says Mahmoud Sherah, a former Yemeni diplomat who spent the weekend taking the temperature among members of Yemen’s government-in-exile in Riyadh.

For the Saudi-backed, internationally recognised government, the past week has been a major “psychological defeat”, he adds. “It was a huge slap on the government’s face. So the government needs a victory now to raise morale, otherwise the Houthis will keep going like a snowball. They have other targets, like Marib and Aden.”

Marib, in northern Yemen, is the richest part of the country and possesses valuable oil and gas fields. The Houthis tried, but failed, to capture it in 2021. Aden, the temporary capital, is about 100 miles from the new frontline at the Bab-el Mandeb strait. Taking them would crown the Houthis’ domestic territorial ambitions and put them on the path to de facto recognition.

This kind of collapse is a worst-case scenario, however. More likely, the Houthis will now pause to dig in and digest the “very big elephant” they swallowed by capturing the port of Mocha and the Bab-el Mandeb littoral. That explains why they reached out to President Trump last week to promise that they would cause no more trouble provided America did not enter the war.

If they’re lucky, they might be able to establish long-term leverage as indispensable security guarantors of the Red Sea – rather like their Iranian patrons have over the Strait of Hormuz.

Yet the Houthis’ recent actions suggest they are more interested in their regional role than in their national ambitions. “If they were purely a Yemeni actor that is only concerned with their own hold on Yemen and their own power in Yemen, that’s exactly what they would do – they would prioritise Marib, and then, once they have taken that, they would go towards Aden,” says Cinzia Bianco, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The fact they instead dashed for Mocha and Perim to close the gates of the Red Sea is telling. That drones launched from Iraq severed Saudi Arabia’s critical east-west pipeline at the same time, doubly so. “It doesn’t make any sense unless you link that with the US-Iran war and the Iranian agenda of pressuring Saudi Arabia as much as possible to use their leverage on Trump on behalf of the Iranians,” says Bianco.

Hurting US allies in the hope they, in turn, lobby the US to go easy on Tehran is a long-standing Iranian strategy. And this particular application of the doctrine very much suits the Houthis, too. “The Houthis are always looking for that sweet spot where they can serve their own interests and also be good members of the Iranian axis of resistance. And right now they are in that sweet spot,” says Michael Knights, the author of Battle for the Red Sea, the third of a trilogy of books about the wars in Yemen.

Like it or not, then, the war in Yemen is a theatre of the American war in Iran. It also puts the Houthis within striking distance of Djibouti, home to US, French, Japanese and Chinese military bases, so, in theory, it should be a matter of universal concern. “No one should be saying, ‘Ho ho ho, look and watch’. Everyone will be bitten by this,” says Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni academic and research fellow at Chatham House.

Yet opposition in Yemen and abroad is badly fragmented. The Houthi victory last week was partly down to superior training, tactics and weapons. But it was also a result of mistrust among the mosaic of groups opposing them. A clever bit of deception was broadcasting an AI-faked retreat order using the voice of Tareq Saleh, one of the loyalist commanders on the Red Sea coast. That was so effective partly because Saleh, the nephew of the late dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is not the most popular or trusted figure in the pro-government camp, says Knights.

International solidarity is not much better. The UAE, Saudi’s principal ally in the 2015-2022 war, quit Yemen at the end of 2025 after a quarrel with Riyadh culminated in the Saudis bombing an Emirati-backed faction that had gone to war with the official government.

In theory, bin Salman could turn to Pakistan and Turkey, with whom he signed a mutual defence pact last month. Turkey, which is deeply involved in Somalia, has particularly direct interest in Red Sea security. For now, however, neither Islamabad nor Ankara has shown willingness to help. The Houthis have promised only to molest Saudi shipping.

Red Sea states would be the next logical place to look for allies. Bin Salman on Tuesday flew to Cairo for talks with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian president. In theory Egypt, which has seen its income from Suez-Canal transits plummet because of the Houthi threat to commercial shipping, has very good reason to make the Red Sea safe. But it is also constitutionally allergic to military alliances in principle, avoided embroilment in the 2015-2022 war, and is still scarred by its own ill-fated military adventure in Yemen in the 1960s.

Of the other Red Sea states, Sudan is racked by civil war. Djibouti, the tiny state on the other side of the strait, has no significant armed forces to contribute. And the foreign minister of Eritrea has declared there is “no military solution” – diplomatic code for a refusal to get involved.

“Some Gulf countries are looking at the Saudis and chuckling. The biggest strategic mistake of the Gulf Cooperation Council at the moment is they don’t have a co-ordinated policy in Yemen, but, rather, a combination of messages of ‘Told you so’”, concludes al-Muslimi. “It’s immature, to say the least.”

The outlook is not entirely bleak for anti-Houthi Yemenis, however. The coastal plain the Houthis have captured is poor, provides no cover from Saudi airstrikes and contains no large towns or strategic assets. Perim Island itself – flat as a pancake and with no source of fresh water – is essentially indefensible and the Houthis may already have abandoned it.

Now that Saudi Arabia has “woken up”, says Knights, they and Yemeni loyalists can probably contain the Houthis inside their newly claimed territory militarily. The likely chain of events after that, however, is that “the Houthis start hitting Saudi infrastructure harder, the Saudis don’t really have any way of getting the Houthis back because they can’t hurt them any more than they’re hurting already. So, at some point, the Saudis attempt to try and reach out to an intermediary – Iran, Oman, someone – and get them to bring the Houthis back into talks,” theorises Knights.

And that brings us back to grand strategy. Iran is hoping that, with enough pressure, Saudi Arabia and other Arab US allies will lobby President Trump to find a settlement in the Strait of Hormuz. It is not, in its own terms, a foolish strategy. It could bear fruit.

If it does not, there is still another longer-term benefit for Tehran: that more Middle Eastern countries begin to question the value of their relationship with Washington.

“To be honest with you, I think the real story here is US credibility,” says Bianco. Over the past six months, Iran has struck Jordan, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to demonstrate that “whomever the Iranians and their allies turn against, they suffer and they are vulnerable because they have premised their security on something” – the backing of America – “that no longer holds”.