Were the Saudis Right About the Houthis After All?

Hussein Ibish

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Informed Americans finally seem to understand that the macabre slogan of Yemen’s Houthi militia group—“God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam”—is more than empty rhetoric.

The Houthis are a potent Iranian proxy group, and their slogan, adapted from Iranian revolutionary propaganda, is being made manifest in action. They’ve attacked Red Sea shipping lanes more than 30 times since October 17, under the implausible pretext of aiding Hamas and protesting Israeli military actions in Gaza.

Washington long held, against Saudi protestations, that the Houthis didn’t or couldn’t possibly pose a significant threat beyond Yemen. Now the United States is leading a large coalition of countries determined to restore maritime security against Houthi piracy in the Red Sea. Surely those behind Washington’s efforts are asking themselves: Were the Saudis right about the Houthis all along?

Saudi Arabia has taken the Houthi threat seriously since 2015, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman first emerged as an important Saudi decision maker. That March, Riyadh organized a coalition of Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, to stop the Houthis from taking over Yemen during that country’s civil war. The intervention was consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2216, but it met with only cautious approval from Washington. Barack Obama’s administration later reluctantly decided to support the action in exchange for Saudi Arabia’s help in getting Gulf Arab countries to approve, with even greater misgivings, Washington’s nuclear negotiations with Iran. Many Arab countries and Israel worried that the resulting nuclear deal would unduly strengthen Tehran.

Soon the war produced a humanitarian crisis, and American support began to erode. The UAE was relatively successful in the south of Yemen, but Saudi Arabia got badly bogged down in the north. Then came the brutal assassination of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018. That incident, together with the war, became Exhibit A in the bill of particulars that Democratic Party candidates, including Joe Biden in 2020, presented against Riyadh.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia met with a fate common to large powers confronting guerrilla forces abroad. Unable to develop reliable local allies who could successfully counter well-disciplined, albeit extreme, forces on the ground, Saudi Arabia relied on airpower, which was largely ineffective in holding territory against the Houthis and wound up hitting many inappropriate and unjustifiable targets. Saudi Arabia was plausibly accused, much as Israel is at the moment in Gaza, of using air strikes indiscriminately in Yemen. Groups such as the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and UNESCO condemned the actions of both sides, but only Saudi Arabia was vulnerable to the negative fallout of this criticism, as its erstwhile friends in Washington became alienated.

The U.S. media and Congress blamed Saudi Arabia almost exclusively for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and they did so with mounting anger. Saudi Arabia was, after all, a U.S. ally, while the Houthis were a virtually unknown entity. What was known about them—for example, that they conscripted child soldiers, who still make up much of their fighting force, and that they systematically abuse women and girls—was shrugged off as irrelevant because Washington did not in any way support the organization. For a time, prominent Democrats, including Senator Bernie Sanders, attempted to deploy a War Powers Resolution to require the administration to cut off all forms of support for Saudi involvement in Yemen, but they never amassed enough votes.

Saudi Arabia came under further criticism from Democrats in Congress in 2022, when Riyadh and Moscow made an agreement to restrict oil production to maintain a floor on the price of oil on the world markets (the corresponding jump in prices at the pump that many critics feared never materialized). But whatever the complaint, the Yemen war always featured prominently in the indictment—in fact, the Biden administration suspended sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia two years ago, and both the Trump and Biden administrations were repeatedly urged to suspend all military cooperation with Riyadh because of the war against the Houthis.

Now Washington finds itself not only in a conflict with the selfsame Houthis, but even striking a number of the very targets that Saudi Arabia hit, most notably in and around the crucial port of Hodeidah, prompting considerable criticism.

So were the Saudis right about the Houthis, and by extension, Yemen, all along? Yes and no.

Riyadh grasped the genuine fanaticism and growing power of the Houthis in a way that many in Washington did not. The threat the Saudis perceived applied as much to U.S. interests as to Saudi ones—especially if U.S. interests in the Middle East are understood to no longer be limited to oil, Israel, and counterterrorism. Three of the world’s great maritime choke points surround the Arabian Peninsula: the Strait of Hormuz, which controls ingress and egress from the Gulf; the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at one end of the Red Sea; and the Suez Canal, at the other, leading to the Mediterranean. At least 12 percent of global commerce passes through the Suez Canal. The Houthis have been wreaking havoc in and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, disrupting global supply chains and sending even the price of flavored coffee beans soaring this January.

The Houthis pretend that they are bolstering Hamas and striking Israel by disrupting international commerce that is apparently connected to neither. But what they may really be doing is expressing their enthusiasm for the so-called axis of resistance and, at the same time, legitimating the power they have grabbed by force in much of northern Yemen. The Houthis could even be seeking to compete with Hezbollah for primacy among the pro-Iranian Arab militias in the axis.

Iran, whose Quds Force maintains and coordinates this alleged axis, may be sending a message through the Houthis, too. The first part of that message is that there will be no maritime-security framework in the Gulf or the waters surrounding the Arabian Peninsula unless Iran and its Arab proxies are included in it; the second is that if Tehran is not at liberty to freely sell its oil—because of U.S. or international sanctions, for example—no one else will be able to engage in commerce unmolested, either. The Houthis may be the ones acting, under cover of the Gaza crisis and in the entirely unconvincing name of supporting Hamas and lashing out at Israel, but they are making a long-standing point of Iran’s.

Past experience, including with Somali pirates, has shown that attempting to patrol large bodies of water with a limited naval force isn’t enough to suppress piracy. Rather, the cost of such aggression has to be rendered unsustainable for the culprits. The Biden administration is now leading the international demand that the Houthis desist and that the security of international shipping and commerce in this all-important waterway be restored. The Houthis, for their part, appear to be relishing the prospect of a confrontation with the United States. That is, or at least must be made to be, their problem.

Virtually no one is publicly admitting that, although Saudi Arabia blundered into a quagmire in Yemen that it either should have avoided or been much better supported in by the West, Riyadh was essentially right about the nature and danger of the Houthis. And those who claimed that the Saudis were on a madcap, totally avoidable, and inexplicable adventure had no idea what they were talking about.