After more than a decade of war, the Houthis have achieved what a superpower-backed coalition spent ten years and tens of billions of dollars trying to prevent. They now sit astride the Bab al-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s critical maritime chokepoints, and they are once again raining missiles and drones on Saudi cities. And when Riyadh picked up the phone this week to ask Washington for help, the answer was no.
The advance to the strait
The fighting that reignited across Yemen in late August and early September 2026 is the most serious since the United Nations truce of April 2022 froze the front lines. The Iran-aligned Houthis, who have controlled the capital Sanaa and most of Yemen’s populous north for years, launched a large-scale offensive against the Saudi-backed forces of the internationally recognized government — the Presidential Leadership Council — reportedly killing hundreds in the opening days.
The government has not been passive. The PLC declared its own counteroffensive with the stated aim of retaking Sanaa, and claimed advances in Taiz, the capture of Yatma in Al-Jawf, and gains in Al-Bayda. But the strategically decisive movement has run the other way. Along the Red Sea coast, government forces withdrew from Hays and Al Khawkhah in Hodeidah and from the port of Mocha in western Taiz, falling back toward Dhubab at the mouth of the Bab al-Mandeb. The Houthis struck Mocha directly, and then — by their own account and early reporting — seized Mayyun (Perim) island in the middle of the strait together with Dhubab, effectively placing themselves in a position to threaten the waterway through which a growing share of Saudi oil now sails.
That last point is the one that matters beyond Yemen’s borders. With the Strait of Hormuz already disrupted by the wider war between Iran and the US-Israeli coalition, Riyadh has been leaning on the Red Sea as its alternative export route. A Houthi hand on Bab al-Mandeb closes the pincer: the same movement that spent 2023 and 2024 attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea is now physically advancing on the chokepoint itself. For good measure, the Houthis resumed direct strikes on the Kingdom, hitting Khamis Mushait, Abha, Jizan and Najran with drones and missiles, wounding scores and damaging oil facilities. Saudi Arabia has answered with dozens of airstrikes, including on Sanaa’s airport.
The battlefield reporting deserves the usual caution — many of the specific claims come from one side or the other and are difficult to verify in real time, and the lines are shifting daily. But the direction of travel is not in serious doubt.
Washington’s refusal
Into this, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, reportedly called President Trump twice in a single day to request direct US strikes on the Houthis. Trump declined. According to the Axios reporting that broke the story, US officials said the administration does not intend to take direct military action against the Houthis “at this time.”
This is not a total abandonment, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not. Washington is still providing Riyadh with intelligence on the Houthis and with targeting data, and roughly 200 American personnel are already in the Kingdom supplying what officials describe as non-kinetic support. The head of US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, flew to Saudi Arabia for urgent coordination. What the US has refused is the specific thing MBS asked for: American bombs falling on Houthi targets, and the open-ended commitment that would follow.
The rationale, as relayed by US officials, is a deliberate husbanding of force. Trump’s directive is reportedly to keep American military effort concentrated on Iran and on protecting the Strait of Hormuz, and to avoid opening a second front in Yemen. There is also recent history behind the caution. In May 2025, after months of costly US and British airstrikes failed to break the Houthis, the Trump administration accepted an Oman-brokered ceasefire under which the US stopped bombing Yemen in exchange for the Houthis halting attacks on American ships. That deal pointedly did not cover Israel — and it did not cover Saudi Arabia. Re-entering the fight now would mean tearing up an arrangement that got US vessels out of the Houthis’ crosshairs, in order to fight a war Washington had already concluded it could not win from the air.
So Riyadh finds itself where it least wanted to be: back in a hot war with the Houthis, without the American firepower it counted on for a decade. Notably, Saudi Arabia had said as recently as July that it could handle the Houthis on its own. That confidence is now being tested.
Ten years to this point
None of this is comprehensible without the arc that produced it. The Houthis seized Sanaa in September 2014. In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition — armed, fueled, and intelligence-fed by the United States across successive administrations — launched Operation Decisive Storm to reverse the takeover and restore the government. What followed was not victory but stalemate: more than ten years of bombing that flattened much of the country, produced what the UN repeatedly called the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, and killed well over a hundred thousand people directly with many more dead from hunger and disease.
The coalition never retook the north. By 2022, an exhausted Saudi Arabia signed onto a UN truce and, over the following two years, pursued a quiet exit — a de-escalation roadmap encouraged by its 2023 rapprochement with Iran. The Houthis, meanwhile, converted survival into strength. When Israel’s war in Gaza began in October 2023, they opened the Red Sea front, attacking shipping through Bab al-Mandeb and drawing the US and Britain into an air campaign that ran through 2024 and into 2025 — and that ended, as noted, in a ceasefire the Houthis reasonably claimed as a win.
The lesson the Houthis appear to have drawn is the correct one: they have outlasted everyone. They survived a decade of Saudi airpower, absorbed the best the US Navy and Air Force were willing to throw at them, and emerged still holding the capital and now reaching for the strait. The lesson Riyadh has drawn is that Yemen is a quagmire it entered in 2015 and has been trying to leave ever since. And the lesson Washington has drawn is that the Houthis are not worth a third simultaneous front when Iran and Hormuz command the priority.
The bottom line
The picture that emerges is one of Houthi ascendancy meeting American retrenchment, with Saudi Arabia caught in between. The movement that a superpower coalition set out to crush in 2015 is, in 2026, advancing on one of the world’s most important waterways and striking Saudi oil infrastructure at will — while the United States, having failed to defeat it from the air and unwilling to try again, confines itself to passing intelligence and targeting coordinates from the sidelines. For a Gulf monarchy that spent a decade assuming American power would ultimately be there when it mattered, the message from this week is stark.
What to watch is whether the Houthi position on Mayyun and Dhubab translates into actual interdiction of Red Sea traffic, and whether Trump’s refusal holds if Saudi oil exports — or oil prices already above $100 amid the Iran war — come under direct threat. The line between non-kinetic support and a third front is thinner than Washington would like to admit.
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I’m a day late in posting my interview with Mario:
Same with Nima:
Sulaiman and I discussed Iran’s continuing attacks on ships trying to evade Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz:
Here is the Friday INTEL Roundtable with the Judge, Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley and me:
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The Houthis Reach the Sea — and Washington Tells Riyadh to Fight Alone
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at Sonar21.