After seven and a half weeks of heavy airstrikes on more than 1,000 separate targets, the Trump administration’s bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen ended as abruptly as it began. On May 6, in an Oval Office meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, President Donald Trump simply announced that the Iranian-backed Houthis “don’t want to fight any more” and that the United States would “accept their word” and “stop the bombings.” Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad al Busaidi confirmed on X that his country had brokered a cease-fire agreement between Washington and the Houthis, in which the two sides agreed not to target each other. Despite the Houthis’ highly effective attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and continuing attacks against Israel, the agreement does not explicitly restrict Houthi actions against any country other than the United States; the absence from the agreement of Israel and “Israeli-linked” ships—a term the Houthis have interpreted broadly in the past—is notable.
What is puzzling about the White House announcement is that the Houthis’ position remains essentially unchanged from when the Trump administration began its escalated air campaign on March 15. Ostensibly, Operation Rough Rider—as the U.S. campaign was called—was launched to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and to reestablish deterrence against Iran and its proxies. When the operation began, the Houthis were explicitly targeting Israel as well as Israeli-linked ships—though not U.S. ships—and saying they would continue to do so until Israel ends its war in Gaza. Since the outset of the U.S. campaign, Houthi leaders have made clear that if Washington stopped the bombing, they would stop attacking U.S. ships, but their attacks on Israel would continue. After Trump announced the May 6 agreement, the Houthi spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam reiterated this position. In other words, after a U.S. military operation that cost more than $2 billion and supposedly had a far-reaching impact on Houthi military capabilities, the U.S.-Houthi cease-fire does little but codify the Houthis’ original stance. Although Trump claimed that the Houthis “capitulated,” the group retains its hold on power and has called the deal a “victory for Yemen.”
For the Trump administration, the cease-fire offered a quick end to what was an increasingly untenable campaign. Not only was the bombing enormously expensive; it was also raising concerns among policymakers in Washington that the United States could slide into another forever war in the Middle East. This scenario was no doubt pushed by Vice President JD Vance and the more neo-isolationist members of the administration, who have been skeptical of U.S. military adventurism from the start.
It remains unclear if this denouement will create a meaningful enough pause for the Trump administration to wash its hands of the Houthi problem. But if Trump turns a blind eye to continued Houthi attacks on Israel, there is reason to believe that the Houthis will, for now, avoid attacking U.S. assets. The Houthis would almost certainly have survived, even if the U.S. bombing campaign had continued, but its termination nevertheless has many upsides for them. The group’s leaders can now claim to have gone head-to-head with a superpower and won and be relieved of the pressure the U.S. bombing was putting on them. They can also focus on Israel, which is engaged in its own punishing air campaign in retaliation for Houthi strikes, including a ballistic missile strike near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport in early May. Importantly, the deal with the United States makes it very unlikely that Washington will support a ground offensive against the Houthis by the internationally recognized government of Yemen, an internally divided coalition of anti-Houthi factions which controls the southern and eastern parts of the country. Combined with airpower, such an offensive would arguably be the most effective way to truly pressure the group and loosen its hold on power—although it would carry significant risks.
The Trump administration was right to try to find an off-ramp to an increasingly costly and open-ended air campaign, but the one it chose may cause more harm than good. Unless Washington quickly coordinates with allies in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, in a broader effort to maintain military, economic, and political pressure on the Houthis, the group will continue to wreak havoc both in Yemen and across the region. There is a better alternative: by supporting the UN and other mediators such as Oman, the United States and its allies in the region and beyond can push for a larger political settlement in Yemen, one that can constrain the Houthis’ military capabilities and ambitions. This may seem like a heavy lift, but it would be far more cost-effective than the alternative. In the absence of such efforts, the Houthis will recover and regroup, and may soon present much the same security threat that provoked the Trump administration’s campaign in the first place.
A ROUGH RIDE
The United States first began striking the Houthis under President Joe Biden, who launched a limited campaign of airstrikes in January 2024 to respond to the group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and specifically to its attack on a U.S. warship. The Biden administration sought a calibrated strategy: the aim was to retaliate for the Houthi attacks without intensifying the conflict, causing civilian casualties, or triggering greater regional escalation with Iran. By contrast, Trump was far more aggressive, lambasting Biden for a “pathetically weak” response to the Houthi threat. His administration was also likely emboldened by a much-weakened Iran, whose aligned forces in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria have been dramatically degraded over the past year by Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah and by the fall of the Assad regime.
Even so, the scale of the campaign was unexpected. Operation Rough Rider has been the Trump administration’s biggest and most costly military intervention to date. It involved more than 1,000 strikes against a broad array of Houthi targets, including weapons depots, command-and-control facilities, air defense systems, critical infrastructure, and Houthi leaders. To carry out this ambitious operation, the administration deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and B-2 Stealth bombers, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses.
The Houthis’ position remains essentially unchanged.
Beyond dramatically stepped-up airstrikes, the administration also ramped up economic and political pressure. In March, it redesignated the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, which carries heavy economic and diplomatic penalties. The FTO designation has choked the banking system in Houthi-controlled areas, restricted its ability to import fuel, and also rendered elements of a proposed UN-backed agreement to end the war, which was being negotiated before the Houthi’s Red Sea attacks began, impossible to implement. The implementation of this deal, which is supported by U.S. allies in the Gulf, would have resulted in a cease-fire and the beginning of a political process to determine power-sharing arrangements in Yemen. It also promised significant economic benefits, including a formula to pay all public salaries in Houthi-controlled areas. Given Yemen’s limited resources, this would have required significant external financial support, but an FTO designation by Washington criminalized financial transfers to the Houthis, making this element impossible to implement.
Washington’s actions put real pressure on the Houthis. Over the course of the campaign, Houthi ballistic missile launches against Israeli and U.S. targets declined by 87 percent, and drone attacks declined by 65 percent, according to the Pentagon. In addition, U.S. strikes forced most of the group’s leadership into hiding and slowed internal communications. The Houthis’ internal security services also stepped up arrests of Yemenis believed to be revealing targeting information to those who may share it with the U.S. or its allies.
The U.S. strikes also temporarily shifted the group’s military calculus. After the FTO designation, for example, the Houthis initially sought to take over oil and gas fields in the Marib governorate, east of the capital, Sanaa—a strategic resource that would have blunted some of the impact of the terrorist designation. But the U.S. air campaign temporarily delayed that ambition, which, if realized, would have bolstered the Houthis’ resources and paved the way for further offensives on other oil-producing governorates in the south and east now under Yemeni government control.
Before the May 6 cease-fire, the strikes also raised expectations among Yemen’s internationally recognized government that it could secure U.S. and regional backing for a new ground offensive to recapture Houthi-controlled territories. Yemeni government officials lobbied Washington hard for support, understanding the fleeting nature of the opportunity and knowing that if they did not take advantage, the Houthis would be able to use the “victory” of having withstood an American military campaign to strengthen their position further. The threat of a ground operation was deeply concerning to Houthi leaders who label any domestic opponents as agents of Israeli-American aggression.
ENDURANCE TEST
But Trump’s pressure campaign had limits and within a few weeks they began to show. U.S. forces hit Houthi targets almost daily, with enormous quantities of munitions, and the Pentagon claimed to have killed top Houthi leaders. There is little evidence, however, that members of the group’s top command structure have been eliminated; its inner circle is very much intact. Also important, the group’s ability to strike U.S. and Israeli targets does not appear to have been significantly diminished. The Houthis, for their part, claim to have shot down at least seven U.S. Reaper drones, each of which costs about $30 million, since March. On April 28, a $60 million U.S. fighter jet was lost at sea when its carrier made a hard turn to avoid Houthi fire. In early May, the Houthis also managed to get a missile through Israeli air defenses, with its strike near Tel Aviv airport, prompting a blistering response from Israel.
In short, U.S. tactical gains were coming at an increasingly high cost and with grave risks. Continued operations raised the chances that U.S. service members might be killed—a scenario that would almost certainly draw Washington further into the conflict. The United States was also burning through munitions at an alarming rate. The Defense Department was already struggling to keep up with weapons demand, having been stretched by earlier U.S. commitments to Israel and Ukraine, as well as by the Biden administration’s strikes against the Houthis and by the U.S. effort to defend Israel against direct Iranian attacks. Some U.S. officials were concerned that the sheer number of long-range weapons being used against the Houthis, as well as the movement of a Patriot air defense battalion from U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to the Middle East, could weaken the United States’ readiness to address threats from China.
The cease-fire offered a quick end to an increasingly untenable campaign.
What’s more, U.S. airstrikes were increasingly harming civilians and civilian infrastructure in Yemen, a fact the Houthi media was quick to turn to the group’s advantage. A U.S. attack in mid-April on the fuel port and export terminal of Ras Issa in Hodeida, for example, killed more than 70 Yemenis, and a strike in early May on a Houthi-run detention center holding African migrants killed dozens, including civilians. The course of the earlier civil war demonstrates that such incidents do little to weaken domestic support for the Houthis: during a Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen in 2015, punishing strikes that resulted in high civilian casualties worked to the Houthis’ advantage, allowing them to deflect criticism and rally support against an external enemy.
From the beginning of the Trump campaign, the Houthis said that they could outlast the pressure and even emerge stronger from it, as they did after the Saudi-led intervention in 2015. After all, the Houthi movement’s greatest strength has always been armed struggle. As a radical offshoot of the Zaydi branch of Islam that is deeply anti-Israeli and anti-Western, the group was forged in war against the Yemeni government beginning in the early 2000s. Ensconced in the country’s rugged mountainous highlands, the Houthis have years of practice hiding their leadership and weapons. They also have a tremendous tolerance for withstanding attacks and losing fighters and weapons. Moreover, although their principal backer, Iran, has been greatly weakened, the Houthis have been able to diversify their supply lines. By developing new weapons smuggling networks, which now extend beyond Iran and into the Horn of Africa, and by building opportunistic ties with China and Russia, the group has become even more resilient.
In short, although the U.S. campaign put the Houthis under tremendous pressure, they were far from deterred, much less defeated, at the time of the cease-fire. By early May, the United States was making tactical gains in destroying weapons and capabilities, pushing the leadership underground, and stirring up Houthi fears that a new ground campaign against them might soon be launched. But the United States was unable to turn these pressure points into strategic advantage.
THE MISSING STRATEGY
It is possible for the United States to both limit its military engagement and support a path to settlement—or at least to containing the Houthi threat—by working with its allies to put military, economic, and political pressure on the group. To do this, the U.S. policymakers must first disabuse themselves of the notion that there can be a neat line drawn between what happens within Yemen and what happens in the Red Sea or the broader region, particularly in the Gulf. Both Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have conveyed disinterest in what happens in Yemen. In Vance’s words, if the Houthis stop shooting in the Red Sea, they can “go back to doing whatever it was they were doing before attacking civilian vessels.” The problems Washington and its allies face in the Red Sea, however, are precisely a product of Yemen’s internal power dynamic. As an increasingly well-armed and unchecked power, the Houthis have the ability to project power and threats beyond Yemen’s borders, and they will continue to do so until they face real domestic constraints. The United States cannot micromanage Yemen’s complex politics, and it does not need to lead on Yemen policy—but at a minimum, it must have one.
To ensure that Yemen maintains some balance on the ground, the United States should give the Yemeni government’s Gulf backers, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the security guarantees they need to continue to support the government politically and militarily. The two countries are the key suppliers of arms and money to Yemeni government forces, but they have both said publicly that they are not interested in reigniting the war. They also know that if Yemeni forces were to advance against the Houthis on the ground, the group would likely target them, too—possibly even if they had only assisted their Yemeni allies in defending current frontlines. Although Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are concerned about the long-term security threats posed by the Houthis, they are eager to shift their focuses to domestic economic priorities.
The United States was unable to turn pressure points into strategic advantage.
By offering Riyadh and Abu Dhabi security guarantees, Washington would in effect be pledging to protect its allies, allowing them to reinforce the forces that are opposing the Houthis domestically, and thus increasing the chances that a balanced power-sharing deal be reached. In addition, the United States could encourage Saudi Arabia and the UAE to better coordinate their military and political support for Yemeni government forces, divisions within which are often amplified by the two backers—for example, by Abu Dhabi’s long-standing aversion to working with fighters connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. This coordination is more important than ever, as disappointment among Yemeni government forces by the U.S. withdrawal, coupled with mounting economic distress and internal political infighting, threatens the government’s collapse—and with it, the very real possibility of Houthi expansion or an al-Qaeda resurgence in government areas.
Pressure on the Houthis must have a realistic goal. A military air campaign alone was never a practical option. With the U.S.-Houthi cease-fire, ground-level military pushback also looks increasingly unlikely. Reaching a deal with Iran that includes Tehran’s commitment to stop supplying the Houthis with high-tech weapons would be helpful, but it would not be a silver bullet to contain Houthi ambitions. A cease-fire in Gaza would also provide an opportunity to test the Houthi commitment to stop its attacks in the Red Sea and to pressure the group through coordinated multilateral diplomacy. But there is no easy solution to Yemen and no substitute for a more comprehensive, coordinated regional approach.
The United States and its partners should thus focus on an achievable, if difficult, goal: advancing a UN-backed agreement that provides stronger guarantees for Red Sea security, limits on Houthi weapons, and assurances of domestic power sharing. This could start with the parties’ reevaluation of the proposed UN agreement previously under negotiation—strengthening its cease-fire provisions, amending its financial distribution scheme to accommodate the FTO designation, and instituting stronger guarantees to back a power-sharing agreement between the Houthis and government forces. Achieving any of this, however, would be completely contingent on the Trump administration working with Gulf allies and Yemenis to hold the frontlines in Yemen and to continue exerting economic, political, and military pressure on the Houthis. If it fails to support the development of a balanced domestic power-sharing formula, Yemen’s problems will not stay within Yemen.
EMBOLDENED EXTREMISTS
In pulling the plug on its Yemen campaign, the Trump administration faced a hard reality: continuing to strike the Houthis at this rate could soon become both unsustainable and aimless, even as it was harming U.S. military needs elsewhere. Moreover, an air campaign and a terrorist designation, in themselves, were highly unlikely to resolve the Houthi threats to Red Sea security and to Israel. At the same time, U.S. support for Yemeni government forces would be risky, given the forces’ deep internal divisions, and it would be antithetical to Trump’s stated aversion to forever wars in the Middle East. Perhaps recognizing the need for a quick exit, Trump made the surprise announcement on May 6 to stop operations.
The abrupt halt, however, only emboldens the Houthis, likely aggravating the very security threats the United States had set out to address in the first place. The Houthis are now turning their attention to Israel and have reserved the right to hit “Israeli-linked” ships—the scope of which is completely unclear. More important, even if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, the Houthis, having experienced the leverage of holding Red Sea shipping hostage, might be tempted in the future to again use this tool for political gain. They may also try to continue to charge ships for safe passage through the Bab al Mandeb Strait, as they have done with commercial shippers in their Red Sea operations.
The Houthis bet from the beginning of the strikes that they could outlast the United States—and they did. Equally important, the cease-fire has dashed Yemeni hopes of U.S. support for a ground campaign, and there is a real chance that the already divided Yemeni government could buckle under the weight of financial pressure, which has been building since the Houthis blocked its oil exports in late 2022, as well as from the Houthis’ perceived victory. A potential collapse of the government would almost certainly lead to Houthi territorial expansion and/or allow al-Qaeda to make gains in the country’s south. Saudi Arabia, already wary of Washington’s reliability as a security partner, will now need to deal with a battered but emboldened Houthi movement on its southern border.
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