Lawfare Daily: The Houthi War Against Saudi Arabia

[Intro]

Gregory Johnsen: They certainly are not going to stop. They’re an incredibly expansionist group, and any political deal that they’ve signed, the Houthis have basically looked at these agreements as something that they sign to buy time, which allows them to sort of refit and regroup and then make another try to get some of the things that they actually want.

Daniel Byman: It’s the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Daniel Byman, foreign policy editor with Lawfare, with Greg Johnsen, nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf State Institute.

Gregory Johnsen: They feel that Saudi Arabia’s vulnerable, and they’re trying to squeeze. And that... If you if you take that sort of understanding and lay that onto what it is that you’re seeing in the news, then I think what the Houthis are doing makes a little bit of sense, both domestically in Yemen as well as sort of from the broader regional strategic level.

Daniel Byman: Today, we’re talking about the Houthis and their war against Saudi Arabia, and the dilemmas it poses for the United States.

[Main Podcast]

The current offensive of the Houthis, both within Yemen and their attacks on Saudi Arabia and on the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandab area, has put Yemen again in the headlines. And Greg, I have a dozen questions I wanna go through with you.

So, let’s start with the basics, just to make sure that we’re all on the same page as we go forward. Tell us about the Houthis today. If we were having this conversation over a decade ago, at least I think we’d be talking about a more local movement. But how should we think the— about them and their role in Yemen?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah, that’s a good question. So obviously they’re a group that controls much of northern Yemen, so they control the capital city of Sanaa in, in Yemen. They’ve held that really since about September of 2014, so over a decade now. They’ve been... The Saudis for a while, the Emiratis, the US, a number, Israel, a number of countries have tried to basically bomb them into submission.

That hasn’t worked particularly well. In recent years, they’ve started to project power, not just inside of Yemen, but actually out into the Red Sea. They fired missiles at Israel in late ‘23, early 2024. And then I think as many of your listeners will know, they started to carry out several attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea for a period of several months, almost a year.

Eventually, that sort of declined. And then more recently, they have really started, saw the, the U.S.-led war in Iran as something that they could take advantage of, and they see Saudi Arabia and particularly its, the route that it uses to get its oil to market, as something that they could press on. And so that’s been really driving their offensive over the past couple of weeks, where the Houthis have, if you have sort of a map of Yemen in your mind, western Yemen is right along the Red Sea coast. The Houthis had a few ports up in the north, but what they’ve done is pushed south, which brings them very close to a strategic choke point, the Bab el-Mandab.

And so, they’ve been able to take that territory, some of the islands in the Red Sea, and from there they are able to actually hold at risk many more Saudi oil tankers that are going through there. So, what you’ve seen is a group that’s evolved from sort of this local insurgency that basically captured the state, or at least part of the state, and now it’s a group that has very maximalist claims and wants to continue to project power not only inside of Yemen, but out throughout the region and into the Red Sea in a way that is causing some significant costs for Saudi Arabia in particular, but also for the global economy.

Daniel Byman: So, if we were handicapping this 20 years ago or 25 years ago, I would say, okay, you’re gonna tell me about a relatively local group in Yemen that is going to, first of all, become probably the strongest single force within Yemen.

In addition, it is going to deal with an intervention from Saudi Arabia, from the United Arab Emirates, from Israel, from the United States, and emerge pretty strong.

Obviously, it’s got weaknesses that we’ll talk about, but I think quite impressively. What explains the Houthi resilience? What explains their success?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that we often sort of miss when we talk about the Houthis is exactly what you were saying. Like, go back you know, a quarter of a century, and the Houthis have basically been fighting for that long.

I mean, they started fighting the Yemeni central government in 2004, and initially it looked like the, the Houthis were gonna be defeated. Their initial leader, a guy by the name of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, was killed in September of 2004. The leadership of the movement basically passed to his very old, kind of frail father, and then eventually to one of his half-brothers, the current leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi.

So, you— well, while we think of the Houthis as an organization that has been sort of active in 2023 or ‘24, maybe we heard about them in 2015 when Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen, this is a group that views itself as having won a local war against the Yemeni government. So, they fought six successive wars from 2004 to 2010, and they didn’t really take a lot of territory, and they didn’t really do much, but they managed to survive.

And for that, and that’s a pretty low bar, but for an insurgent group like the Houthis, that was all that they had to do to win. Then, of course, the Arab Spring comes. Their main rival, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president, overthrown, and the Houthis are able to basically take advantage of a chaotic situation.

From 2011, 2012, the U.S. was trying to restructure the Yemeni military, which basically just broke the Yemeni military and didn’t put anything good in its place. So, there were all these sort of fractures and fissures in Yemen that allowed the Houthis to basically march on Sanaa and take the city without much of a fight, to be honest.

That’s 2004 to 2014. So, they look... They won this domestic fight, and then Saudi Arabia with this 10-country coalition gets involved in 2015, starts bombing the Houthis. This is a war that goes on really from, like, 2015 to about 2022. And again, the Houthis don’t do much, but they manage to survive, so air power allow alone is not able to defeat them.

And so, the Houthis look, okay, we fought a local war and we won, and now we fought a regional war against Saudi Arabia, and we won that as well. And so, then you saw them in ‘23 and 2024 fighting what they thought was an international war against the United States and Israel, and the U.S. obviously carried out about two months of pretty heavy airstrikes in 2025.

And again, they destroyed a lot of things. But, the Houthis survived, and they view that as a victory, and that’s the situation that they’re in now. And so essentially, they feel that they have a pretty strong hand, particularly against Saudi Arabia, that they can put a lot of pressure on Saudi. And they’re doing this, I think, for a couple of different reasons.

One, they’re doing this for their own domestic political purposes. So, the Houthis would like to take more territory in Yemen. You saw them move sort of south and take some of the Red Sea coast, but they also wanna move east and inland and take some of the oil and gas facilities in Marib and Shabwa and Hadhramaut.

That’s something the Houthis have long had their eyes on because this would give them the economic base to really rule Lem— Yemen long term. So, they wanna do that, but they also want to assist Iran, which has been backing them and has helped them over the years.

And as Iran has closed down the strait, the Houthis looked at that and say, hey, we can do a similar thing in Bab el-Mandeb, and we can put pressure on Saudi Arabia, and we can get Saudi to give us some financial incentives. We can potentially get some more recognition. We can continue to project power out into the region and show that we really are a force.

So, this is a group that has just moved from local to regional to international, and even though it hasn’t done a whole lot, it’s mostly taken advantages of the weaknesses and the divisiveness and the divided nature of most of its domestic adversaries.

Daniel Byman: So, you’ve said a lot there, and I wanna kind of drill down on a few of your points. There’s, you know, so much to discuss. So, when we think about the Houthis within Yemen, are there, I’ll say, realistic goals? Obviously, everyone, Yem— everyone in Yemen has ambitions, but are there realistic goals to control the entire country, or do they just want to dominate parts of it and make sure that their position is secure?

Effectively, how aggressive and expansionist are they within the country?

Gregory Johnsen: Incredibly expansionist. So, what it is that they want, and you can see this, and this has been pretty apparent for, you know, about the past eight years, really 2018 on, the Houthis... So again, if you, if your viewer or listeners have sort of a, a map of Yemen in their head, the Houthis have basically the northwest quadrant of the country, and this is largely the mountainous area of Yemen.

And they wanna move from that out east, directly east from Sanaa, out into this governorate called Marib. And Marib has traditionally been part of northern Yemen. It’s tribal. The Houthis haven’t been able to take this territory, largely because of Saudi airstrikes. And so, as you move east out of Sanaa, you move out of the mountains into sort of some, eventually some low foothills and then some rolling, and then you get— by the time you get to Marib, you’re out in the desert.

This is Queen of Sheba territory. This is where archeologists work. But it’s also where Yemen’s oil and gas fields are. So, the Houthis wanna move directly east out of Sanaa into Marib. Once they control Marib, then they want to move sort of southeast into Shabwah. Now, this would bring them down into the south, and it would bring them actually right onto the coast of Yemen, where sort of the Gulf of Aden is.

And by doing that, they would get access to the Gulf of Aden, which they want, ‘cause then you have access to the Red Sea, as well as the Gulf of Aden. You have the oil and gas fields in Marib, as well as in Shabwah, but you also split the southern half of Yemen. So, if you move into Shabwah, to the west of Shabwah is Aden.

This is Yemen’s second city, and it’s sort of the temporary capital of what’s often called the Internationally Recognized Government, which is basically just a, a made-up name for a fictitious group that is, you know, divided within itself. But you split Aden, the capital, from Hadramaut, the wealthiest province.

So, my, my sort of read of it is, and this is a long way off, but this is what the Houthis would like to do, move into Marib, move southeast into Shabwah, and then move back northeast into Hadramaut. So, by doing that, you would effectively break the south, and then you would take all three of these sort of major oil and gas fields. That’s Marib, Shabwah, Hadramaut.

And one analyst, and I think he’s right on this, refers to this as sort of Yemen’s triangle of power. This is... Yemen’s an incredibly poor country. But, really the only exports it has is these oil and gas fields. So, if the Houthis control those fields, they control the entire country, and then they can just pick off Aden and Taiz and the rest of it.

And I don’t think their expansionist goals stop with Yemen. There are a couple of provinces right over the border in Saudi Arabia, Asir and Najran, which prior to 1934 were actually part of Yemen, and there at least traditionally has been a strong Zaidi Shia element, and that’s what the Houthis are.

They’re Zaidi Shia. And they’ve talked often of taking that territory but also moving on. And so again, it’s one thing to have this sort of lofty rhetoric. It’s something else to actually make it… put it into practice on the ground. That’s what they’ve been trying to do. They’ve been unsuccessful, but they certainly are not going to stop.

They’re an incredibly expansionist group, and any political deal that they’ve signed, the Houthis have basically looked at these agreements as something that they sign to buy time, which allows them to sort of refit and regroup and then make another try to get some of the things that they actually want.

Daniel Byman: So, you also mentioned in your initial remarks Iran, and of course, for many people that’s, you know, the, the key component here are the Houthis ties to Iran. And a big question is, you know, first of all, how much do the Houthis, if at all, take orders from Iran? And then beyond that, are they dependent on Iran?

Like, how should we think about this relationship both from a diplomatic sense and also from a military sense?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah, it’s a really good question, and this is one of the questions that I think divides the people who look at Yemen and look at the Houthis. I think you have— It’s one of those cases where, at least in the open-source reporting, you have so little evidence, and the evidence that you do have fits almost any narrative, that people are able to project their own views onto what it is the relationship is between the Houthis and Tehran.

So, having said that, I will say that for me, I tend to think of the Houthis as being not necessarily under the command and control of Tehran, but rather, the Houthis and Iran, their interests align rather closely, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. But it’s also a relationship that’s changed pretty significantly over time.

Iran did not create the Houthis. The Houthis were sort of born out of local grievances in Yemen that date back to the 1960s and so forth. And then the Houthis have... You know, once they seized the state in 2014, they were then able to— They had a number of missiles which basically only went about three hundred kilometers or so.

So, a bunch of Scuds and sort of knockoffs like that. And in 2017 and 2018, the Houthis were incredibly dependent upon Iran because they needed these sort of advanced medium-range ballistic missile components. And so, I was on the UN Security Council’s Yemen panel of experts at that time, and we were investigating a lot of these transfers.

And you can see very clearly in sort of 2017 when the Houthis started to acquire these Iranian missile components, and it allowed them to start to fire stuff at Abu Dhabi and Dubai as well as at Riyadh. And so, at that point, the Houthis were very much dependent upon Iran and IRGC advisers, and particularly Iranian missile components.

But over the course of the past, you know, five, six years, the Houthis have really put together a pretty interesting— And there’s a great report out from Peter Salisbury and his team at the Century Foundation that has looked at some of this. And they’ve done a really good job of sort of building up a, a defense industrial base of their own that has allowed them to either produce some of the things that they would need, or to be able to buy them off the shelf from different places and u— and utilize those.

So, their dependency on Iran has gone down a little bit, but at the same time, they’re seeing what Iran is doing in the Strait of Hormuz. They’re seeing how they can work together, and there’s still IRGC officers on the ground with the Houthis, but it’s not as if they’re saying, Hey, Houthis, you should do this, or this, but they’re saying, this is sort of, you know, in Michael Scott from The Office parlance, This is win-win for both of us.

Daniel Byman: Always good to have an Office reference when you’re talking about Yemen. When we talk about the strength of the Houthis, I always, you know, urge people to think about, you know, strength in relative terms. And as you mentioned, you have this kind of, you know, internationally recognized government that’s really just, you know, a group of different factions that fight each other as much as they fight anyone else.

How should we think about the strength and weakness of the Houthis’ enemies? Is this the sort of thing that if Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States, if outside powers got behind the opposition more squarely, could it make a significant difference, or are they just too broken?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah, they’re too broken, and not only are they too broken, but Saudi Arabia and the UAE, their relationship is too broken to sort of, I think, salvage, at least in Yemen at this point.

So, you know, in, and I’ll just sort of give you a little rundown of the Houthis’ enemies, and these are people that is often called the anti-Houthi coalition or the Internationally Recognized Government or the PLC or, you know, all these terms that we in the West use which make it think as if we’re dealing with a single entity.

But when you’re actually on the ground, it’s not a single entity. It’s seven, eight, nine, 10 different groups, all of whom are fighting one another, many of whom have diametrically opposed views. So just to give you one example, Tareq Saleh is the nephew of the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. So, he was actually allied with the Houthis for the first couple of years of the war.

He was fighting with them from about 2015 to the end of 2017. Then when the Houthis killed his uncle, he defected. He joined the anti-Houthi coalition. His forces, the National Resistance Forces, they were the ones in Mocha, this port city on the Red Sea coast that the Houthis just took. And his group is at odds with a group called the Southern Transitional Council, which is a group of people in the south that wants to see an independent southern state.

And the people in the south hate Tarek Saleh because of what happened, the history of a 1994 civil war, when the north basically came back and colonized and sacked the city of Aden. So, there’s all these past histories that are involved, and what’s happened is that any time the anti-Houthi coalition will make any sort of an advance, then they’ll be scrambling for...

You know, they’ll start, oh, I want this territory. No, I want... And then you see fighting that actually breaks down between these different groups. And this came most into focus almost a year ago now in late 2025 when STC, the Southern Transitional Council, the group I was just talking about, they made a play to actually take control of the state.

So, in the same way that we just talked about. The Houthis wanna move to Marib, to Shabwa, and then out to Hadramaut. The STC was moving from Aden to Ha— Hadramaut, basically making the same play, that they wanted to take all of the south and then basically declare an independent southern state. And the STC was a UAE client, and so they were getting funding, they were getting arms, they were getting training from the UAE.

Saudi Arabia was very opposed to this move in December of 2025, and you actually had the very odd optics of Saudi Arabia bombing UAE shipments that were coming into Yemen to support the STC. And after that, Saudi Arabia pushed the United Arab Emirates completely out of Yemen, and it basically said, we’ll take Yemen.

And so, all the different proxy militias that had been aligned and that had been receiving support from the UAE, Saudi Arabia tried to fold them all into its umbrella. But of course, there’s a lot of history, there’s a lot of, you know, past grievances for... So for instance, you know, and obviously we’re getting a little bit into the weeds, but not to go too far, Tariq Saleh, the guy that I just mentioned who had fought with the Houthis for a long time, he doesn’t have a great relationship with the Saudis because his uncle, Ali Abdullah Saleh, former president of Yemen, when he sort of broke with the Houthis and asked for Saudi support, the Saudis were nowhere to be seen.

And so, then Tareq Saleh is supposed to be fighting the Houthis. Saudis are supposed to be backing him. And so, you have all of these different sort of temporary alliances in which nobody really trusts one another. And the Houthis who have a unified group and they have one goal, they’re able to take advantage of these different divisions and fissures and fractures and all these things that are going on.

And it’s not that they’re just stronger than every other group put together. It’s just that they never have to fight every other group put together. Even Saudi Arabia and the UAE can’t get on the same page. I am of the opinion... So, there are some people when they look at the Houthi, sort of the Houthi problem in Yemen, they think s— the U.S. has basically five options.

There was the initial option of sort of defend traffic in the Red Sea, defend only, put the U.S. naval carriers out there. Then there was the option of, well, we should attack Houthi mobile missile launchers. The U.S. tried this in early twenty twenty-four with Operation Prosperity Guardian. Then there was those who said, okay, we should really go big against the Houthis.

U.S. tried this in Operation Rough Rider in twenty twenty-five. Then there are those who say, well, the Houthis are just sort of a symptom of a deeper problem, which is Iran, so you just go after Iran, you cut off the head of the snake. Obviously, we, the U.S. tried this in twenty twenty-five with Operation Midnight Hammer, and then in twenty twenty-six with Operation Epic Fury.

But door number five is, hey, we should really back this anti-Houthi coalition, which I think gets to your question, Dan, and really sort of put the full backing of the United States behind them, and then they can roll back the Houthis. They can be the ground troops, you know, the counter-ISIS campaign, where the Kurds are the ground troop, U.S. provides the air cover.

We’ll do all of this. The problem with that, of course, is that most of these groups in the South, there’s pretty significant human rights violations, so you’d run into U.S. domestic law against partnering with many of these different groups. And also, there’s no guarantee that these groups are actually gonna be successful, and in fact, I don’t think that they would be.

And so in order to really push back the Houthis, you’re going to need some sort of foreign ground troops that the U.S. doesn’t wanna provide, UAE isn’t gonna provide ‘cause they’re not there, and Saudi Arabia isn’t gonna provide, which means that nobody is really able to solve the Houthi problem, which means it just keeps metastasizing and getting a little bit worse, a little bit worse, and they’re able to hold more and more things at risk.

Daniel Byman: Le— let’s go now to the latest territorial gains of the Houthis. How should we think about this? Obviously, getting territory on the Red Sea coast seems significant, but is this really just a tactical advance, or is this a tremendous shift in power both within Yemen and in terms of the Houthis’ ability to threaten other states?

Gregory Johnsen: I think it’s a pretty significant shift. So the Houthis were targeting ships, obviously, from the Red Sea, from the coast there, but they needed to use sort of longer range ballistic missiles in order to target the ships. And now what’s happened is that as the Houthis have moved south, they’ve managed to actually get some of that territory, which means that, A, they can disperse their stuff along a greater coastline, so it’s harder to actually target for the United States, and the ships that they’re targeting are sort of more congested because they’re in the choke point.

And, then the third issue, is that the Houthis don’t have to use some of their more advanced weaponry to target the ships. They can actually target them with sort of, you know, lower level weapons, dumb weapons, things that they can go after and just sort of hit the ships that way.

Daniel Byman: When we look at the attacks on Red Sea shipping, what is the primary purpose?

You know, the rhetoric is a lot about Israel. There is a question about, you know, demonstrating support for Iran, as which, as you mentioned, is an important backer of the Houthis. I’ve also heard the theory that frankly, they want a bigger bribe from the Saudis, and they’re trying to, you know, basically extort money from Saudi Arabia.

How do you see the goals of the Houthis when it comes to attacks on Red Sea shipping?

Gregory Johnsen: So, I think there, it’s important here to distinguish the two types of attacks that are happening. So, initially it was twenty-twenty three, twenty-twenty four, and that the Houthis said was done in defense of sort of the Palestinian cause.

They were responding to the Israeli response to the October seventh bombings and then the Israeli move into Gaza. But really for the Houthis, you know, think of it like a, a surfer doesn’t launch the wave, but the surfer rides the wave. And the Hou- Houthis needed a wave, and they were riding this wave for all it was good for.

So basically, what they were doing is there had been a ceasefire in Yemen starting in about twenty-twenty two and for the Houthis, they’re, perhaps not surprisingly, not very good at governance. They are in fact very poor at governance. And they sort of are able to spur a lot of domestic antagonism by the way that they govern, which is very heavy-handed and authoritarian.

So, for a while, the Houthis if there’s not a war going on, then the Houthis can really struggle. And what they need, war is basically good for the Houthis. So, the Houthis sort of saw this opportunity, and they took advantage of it ‘cause they thought, A, Palestinian cause incredibly popular in Yemen.

Doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum that you fall. If you are pro-Palestinian, then that’s something that everybody gets behind. And so, the Houthis could s— wrap, basically wrap themselves in the Palestinian flag and say, hey, we’re doing this on behalf of the Palestinians. Nobody else is fighting for them. The Saudis aren’t doing anything. The Egyptians aren’t doing anything. We’re the ones who are actually fighting for them.

And then in doing that, they invite strikes from Israel, from potentially the United States, which happened, and then they can say, we’re also the defender of the Yemeni state, and we’re here fighting, and the Houthis use this to recruit more and more fighters to actually come into their ranks.

So that’s what they did in ‘23, ‘24. What they’re doing now is something different. What they’re doing now, they’re saying, we’re not just targeting commercial shipping writ large in the Red Sea, which is basically what they’d done before. They’re saying any, any ship that has any ties to Israel, that’s who we’re going after.

Now they are saying, and they’re very explicit about this, saying, we’re only going after Saudi oil tankers. And the reason that they’re saying that is they are, A, trying to keep the United States out of the conflict because they’re not... Unlike in 2025 when they were sort of trying to bait the United States into a bigger conflict, the Houthis don’t have an interest of fighting the United States right now.

I think the, the Houthis made a bet that basically they could absorb more punishment than the U.S. was willing to dole out, and I think they probably won that, but it cost them a lot more than they were than, than they had initially realized. So what they’re doing right now is they’re taking advantage of Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which makes Saudi Arabia vulnerable, ‘cause Saudi, basically, they can send their oil to market through the Strait of Hormuz, which is the best, the easiest, and the cheapest, most cost-efficient route, or they can send it sort of on the east-west pipeline to their western coast and then down south through the Red Sea, through the Bab el-Mandeb, and then out to Asia. That’s sort of route number two.

Or they can send it to the Western Coast and then up through the Suez Canal. But then you have to go, if you’re going to Asia, obviously you have to go all the way back around Africa, get all the way out there. Very long, very costly route. So, Iran has closed down that eastern route.

The Houthis say, hey, we can close down this southern route and put a lot of pressure on the Saudis. I think they’re doing that, as you alluded to in your question. They would like to get the Saudis to pay civil servant salaries. They’ve even at different times, they’ve asked Saudi Arabia to pay the salaries of Houthi fighters who are fighting Saudi Arabia, which, you know, on the face of it is just, you know, sort of the chutzpah that it would take for a, for, for somebody to make that actual demand, that you should pay for both sides of the soldiers on both sides of this war.

But they feel that Saudi Arabia is vulnerable, and they’re trying to squeeze. And that, if you if you take that sort of understanding and lay that onto what it is that you’re seeing in the news, then I think what the Houthis are doing makes a little bit of sense, both domestically in Yemen as well as sort of from the broader regional strategic level.

Daniel Byman: Let’s flip the perspective a bit and go to Saudi Arabia. As you noted, you know, in 2015, Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched this war that was, at least from my point of view, you know, largely disastrous for them, ineffective, made them look both kind of cruel and weak. But fast-forward over a decade, how is Saudi Arabia approaching this conflict?

And what are their options, both if they have the United States by their side or if they don’t have the United States by their side?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah, I don’t think Saudi Arabia has great options. In many ways, what they’re dealing with now is the same sort of scenario that they faced in 2015. So, they fought for a decade, they’ve wasted a bunch of munitions, they’ve killed a bunch of people in Yemen, many of them innocent civilians, and yet they’re no closer to what it is that their goal is.

And if you may remember, I mean, you were in D.C. in 2015, right on the eve of the war, Saudi Arabia was coming, and the Obama administration’s in power at the time, and the Saudi envoys are telling the Obama administration, we think this air campaign will last about six weeks, and then the Houthis will be... You know, they’ll be pushed out of power.

Hadi, who was the president at the time, he’s since passed away he— we’ll be able to restore him to power. And that, that never seemed like a, an analysis of the situation that was grounded in any sort of reality. But the Saudis are l— are looking at Yemen, and they have a few options.

Option one is, well, we could basically just do nothing and let the Houthis take the state. But as we talked about earlier, the Houthis are very expansionistic, and so there’s nothing in Houthi history would suggest that once they came to any sort of a political deal, that it would last longer than, than it would take the Houthis to sort of rearm and feel that they’re strong enough to take a little bit more territory.

Saudi could do nothing, but that’s probably not gonna work. Saudi Arabia could put in ground troops and really try to press the Houthis out, but the terrain in Yemen is very unforgiving. It’s mostly mountainous, so any sort of a conflict is gonna be long and bloody, and the chances of success of a ground conflict are not particularly high.

So, then the Saudi says, okay, well, maybe we just do airstrikes and hope for something to change on the ground, which has basically been the Saudi approach over the past decade. But if anything, that’s only made the, the Houthis stronger than they were otherwise. So then Saudi Arabia turns to the United States and says, hey, can you guys help us? You guys can carry out airstrikes.

U.S. has tried this. The Houthis were able to withstand it. The U.S. and the Houthis came to some sort of a ceasefire. And so now, really, Saudi Arabia is looking at its options on the menu and is now casting about for new options, which I think is one of the reasons that Saudi Arabia’s reached out to China to try to put pressure on Iran, to put pressure on the Houthis to get them to back down.

So, Saudi’s just casting about to try to find a way out of this conflict because they’ve gotten in, and there’s no real good way for them to get what it is that they want, which is the Houthis out of power.

Daniel Byman: You’ve covered up really a remarkable amount of material in a very clear and succinct way, but frankly, it’s been pretty depressing.

And I would like to end simply by asking you, you know, what might be a plausible set of positive developments for Yemen in the near term? And we don’t have to go to, you know, total peace and amity— Mm-hmm ... in Yemen. Just what might make things look a little better if we’re doing an update podcast in a year or two?

What has gone well, and frankly, what can the United States or other countries do to kind of move in that direction?

Gregory Johnsen: Yeah. I wish I had a good answer for that one. I think one of the, you know, one of the challenges with the Houthis is that it’s not— I don’t think this is going to be a problem in sort of U.S. national security policy that is unique to Yemen and the Houthis.

But basically, how does the U.S. handle groups like this that are able to exert some sort of geopolitical leverage, whether it be over a waterway, in this case, or over a natural resource or something like that, when the U.S. doesn’t want to have a full-scale invasion, obviously, and yet airstrikes alone are showing that they’re insufficient?

So, what are the other tools in the U.S. toolbox that it can use to sort of push this group back or at least find some way to neutralize some of their advantages? And you see, you know, the U.S. often does things like sanctions. But in Yemen, the sanction regime was basically set up to sanction the Houthis and to sa— sanction the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been allied with the Houthis.

So, there was an asset freeze and a travel ban. But that really impacted Ali Abdullah Saleh in that his— he had international assets to freeze, and the Houthis didn’t. And so, all the sanctions actually did was weaken an internal Houthi adversary, and then the Houthis were able to kill him and basically co-opt his network, which in the long run has made the Houthis stronger than they would’ve been otherwise.

So, I think this is a real challenge, and this is j— basically just my long-winded way of saying I’m not sure there’s a lot of positive hope for Yemen right now. Saudi can’t do it with airstrikes. The US, although there have been recent reports on President Trump deciding, yes, I will. No, I won’t, when it comes to airstrikes.

Airstrikes alone aren’t going to do much to push the Houthis back. At best, they’re sort of a holding action that kicks the can down the road. But the Houthis have strategic patience, which it seems Saudi Arabia and the U.S. don’t necessarily have, which puts the Houthis in a stronger position. So, until there’s any sort of a, a unified front on the ground in Yemen, which I’d I don’t see happening anytime soon, then I don’t think that there’s anything actually positive.

It just... You know, in a year or two, if we’re having this podcast, then we think back to today, and we think of this as sort of the good old days where things actually looked a little bit better than they do in ‘27 or ‘28, and that’s pretty unfortunate and pretty depressing. But usually, when you’re talking about Yemen, this is the place that you end up.

So, if you think back, 2015 was bad. It’s worse now. 2022 was bad, but there were some glimmers of hope, but it’s worse now. And the problem is, most of the groups, the UN, the United States, Saudi Arabia, they just, they’re not willing to pay what it is that the Houthis want. They don’t trust the Houthis for very good reason.

And so— and they’re not willing to go all in to fight the Houthis, which means that the Houthis continue to grow and get a little bit stronger, a little bit stronger, and then the problem gets a little bit worse and a little bit worse.

Daniel Byman: Well, unfortunately, that seems like a fitting, if depressing, end to this discussion.

Greg Johnson, thank you very much.

Gregory Johnsen: Thanks so much, Dan. I appreciate it.

[Outro]

Daniel Byman: You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You’ll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine.

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