More than 11 years after Saudi Arabia launched its military intervention in Yemen, the Houthi front has once again confronted Riyadh with the same strategic dilemma, only under more dangerous regional conditions.
In the space of a few days over the past week, the Houthis advanced along Yemen’s western coast, taking the port city of Mokha and the island of Mayun in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, while Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline came under drone attack from Iraqi territory. Baghdad confirmed that the drones had been launched from Iraq and opened an investigation, while Riyadh held back from retaliating.
Saudi Arabia now faces pressure at Hormuz to the east, Bab al-Mandab to the west and even along the pipeline designed to bypass both choke points.
The situation raises a broader strategic question. Saudi Arabia has recently built new security arrangements, including the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement with Turkey and Pakistan and a multinational maritime initiative focused on the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab (Pakistan said on Thursday the pact ought to be activated following the Houthi attacks). Yet neither has so far produced a visible response to the present crisis. It may still be too early to judge these arrangements, but the current escalation is already becoming their first serious test. The deeper question for Riyadh is how to redefine security in a way that protects not only its borders, but also its energy infrastructure, trade routes and wider regional interests.
The escalation cannot be separated from what has happened to Iran elsewhere in the region. Tehran’s influence has contracted in Syria and Lebanon, while its networks in Iraq have come under greater pressure amid a broader confrontation with the United States and Israel. In that context, Yemen has become more valuable.
The Houthis are not simply an Iran-aligned force on Saudi Arabia’s border; they are a military actor capable of pressuring the kingdom in the Red Sea while Iran uses Hormuz as a bargaining chip. Yemen may not be Iran’s last card, but it has become one of its most consequential for Riyadh.
One of the principal security arguments for the Saudi intervention in Yemen in 2015 was to prevent an Iran-linked armed force from entrenching itself along the kingdom’s southern border. More than a decade later, the danger Riyadh warned about appears to have been real, but the intervention did not fully contain it. The Houthis are now more capable of threatening Saudi territory and Red Sea shipping, while years of Saudi support have not produced a stable Yemeni government capable of preventing their expansion.
The latest spark came on July 13, when Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces struck the runway at Sanaa airport to prevent an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation from returning from memorial ceremonies for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Saudi Arabia itself had sent its deputy foreign minister to Tehran to attend the ceremonies and convey condolences. The runway strike broke the prevailing calm between Riyadh and the Houthis. But it was a trigger rather than the deeper cause. Regional conditions were already pushing Yemen back into the center of the confrontation as the crisis around Hormuz intensified.
The economic dimension of the crisis is serious, but the damage now goes beyond oil. Saudi deterrence itself is under pressure. A state seeking to project itself as a regional security power is again confronting the more basic problem of protecting its own territory, infrastructure and export routes, with consequences for both its credibility and regional standing.
The East-West Pipeline — the kingdom’s plan B when Hormuz becomes unsafe — was hit. Saudi oil production had already fallen sharply, while loading at the Red Sea’s Yanbu terminal was disrupted and some European shipments canceled. Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, is now trying to restore roughly half the pipeline’s capacity within days. At the same time, Houthi attacks and advances have exposed vulnerabilities across several fronts, from Jizan, Khamis Mushait and Abha to the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab. The broader problem for Riyadh is that the Houthis are now able to impose military and economic costs across multiple parts of the Saudi security system at once.
Then there is the political and media pressure. The escalation is increasingly portrayed as evidence of Saudi isolation and military setbacks, and some criticism has shifted from policy to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally. Wider problems in Saudi domestic politics and economic policy are sometimes folded into the Yemen crisis, even when they do little to explain it. The more relevant issues are setbacks among Saudi-backed forces, gaps in intelligence and deterrence, and the increasingly regional nature of the conflict. Yemen has frustrated outside powers before, including Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and King Faisal’s Saudi Arabia; the current crisis cannot be reduced simply to one leader.
The American position reinforces the perception of Saudi isolation. Bin Salman reportedly sought direct U.S. military action against the Houthis, but Trump declined, and Washington instead offered intelligence and targeting assistance. U.S. officials have also held direct talks with Houthi representatives in Oman. The irony is that negotiations with the Houthis may be useful in containing escalation, but they also grant the group a degree of diplomatic legitimacy and greater room to maneuver on the ground. That dynamic is visible in the Houthis’ reported pledge to the United States not to target American, Israeli or other commercial vessels, while excluding Saudi vessels from that commitment. While the U.S. is obviously not siding with the Houthis, it is creating a relatively clear distinction: Do not threaten core American interests in ways that force U.S. intervention, and the costs of confrontation with Saudi Arabia will remain largely Riyadh’s problem.
This is where normalization with Israel becomes an essential part of the picture. Trump is heading into the midterm elections with the Middle East increasingly affecting domestic politics, and his administration has explicitly tied civilian nuclear cooperation with Saudi Arabia to normalization with Israel. Israeli media outlets have also reported U.S.-mediated Saudi-Israeli contacts over intelligence and defense against the Houthis. A day later, another report from a different source claimed that Israel had declined cooperation with Saudi Arabia “for the time being.” If accurate, that would suggest that Riyadh sought limited cooperation while still withholding normalization. Saudi Arabia has continued to link full normalization to a credible path toward Palestinian statehood. The real question is whether that position will hold when the incentive to compromise is strongest. For now, however, all of these reports rely on unofficial leaks. The coming days may clarify how far such contacts have actually gone.
What is happening, then, goes well beyond Yemen. Iran benefits from the Houthis’ ability to extend pressure on Saudi Arabia from Hormuz to the Red Sea, while Washington can use the crisis in its broader negotiations with Riyadh. Caught between these pressures, Saudi Arabia is trying to redefine its concept of security even as it seeks to present itself as the leading Arab and Islamic power in the Middle East.