His hand may not be stayed for long, however.
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.