Almost 18 months after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the Middle East looks decidedly different. The Assad regime, which ruled Syria brutally for more than five decades, is no more. The senior leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas, including operational commanders, has been decimated. Amid these tectonic changes, Yemen’s Houthis are benefiting from the vacuum created by the Assad regime’s dissolution and the weakening of Hezbollah, which now finds itself in the crosshairs of its erstwhile ally, the Syrian army.
With the precarious cease-fire between Israel and Hamas falling apart, the Houthi threat is yet again front and center; the Iran-aligned group claims to have attacked the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier with drone and missile strikes, and the United States has launched a fresh wave of airstrikes against the group, which has vowed to escalate by resuming its attacks on international shipping.
Almost 18 months after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the Middle East looks decidedly different. The Assad regime, which ruled Syria brutally for more than five decades, is no more. The senior leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas, including operational commanders, has been decimated. Amid these tectonic changes, Yemen’s Houthis are benefiting from the vacuum created by the Assad regime’s dissolution and the weakening of Hezbollah, which now finds itself in the crosshairs of its erstwhile ally, the Syrian army.
With the precarious cease-fire between Israel and Hamas falling apart, the Houthi threat is yet again front and center; the Iran-aligned group claims to have attacked the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier with drone and missile strikes, and the United States has launched a fresh wave of airstrikes against the group, which has vowed to escalate by resuming its attacks on international shipping.
While the Houthis have close ties to Iran—and the Trump administration has threatened to hold Iran accountable for their attacks—the Houthis are also weaving a web of ties to Russia and China, complicating matters. The United States, Israel, and allied partners should attempt to counter the group’s efforts to forge international alliances but should understand that the Houthis are unlikely to be deterred, let alone displaced, easily.
The Houthis, who have ruled Yemen since seizing power in 2015, are politically independent from Iran but have taken actions that further Tehran’s regional ambitions because they share similar aims. Notably, in 2019, the Houthis targeted Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure, taking offline half of the country’s oil production for two to three weeks, and have also targeted the United Arab Emirates with drones and missiles thought to be supplied by Iran.
Since the Oct. 7 attack, the Houthis have fired more than 200 missiles and 170 drones at Israel, hitting a playground and school building. The Houthis have also leveraged their uniquely strategic geographic position to have an outsized effect on international security. Their targeting of ships in the Bab el-Mandeb strait—through which around 30 percent of the world’s container cargo flows—has disrupted global supply chains and international shipping routes.
As it has watched Israel slowly weaken its self-proclaimed Axis of Resistance, Iran has simultaneously strengthened ties with Western adversaries, most notably Russia. In January, Tehran and Moscow concluded a partnership treaty, adding to their already robust collaboration—which has included a Shahed drone production facility in Tatarstan to support Russia’s war on Ukraine and the two countries’ linkage of their payments and settlement systems. The Houthis are likely to benefit from this collaboration.
The Houthis, unlike other Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, are getting stronger and more resilient. In March 2024, the group told China and Russia that their ships could sail through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea without being targeted in exchange for political backing at bodies such as the U.N. Security Council. In addition to this diplomatic backing, the Houthis have also provided and received military and economic support from Russia and China.
According to the Wall Street Journal, two Houthi officials traveled to Moscow last August to discuss the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons from Viktor Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death” whom the United States released in a 2022 prisoner exchange. During the trip, representatives for the Houthis, who have also received targeting data from Russia for some missile launches, also discussed the possible purchase of Kornet anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons.
This advanced conventional weaponry could improve the Houthis’ ability to target international shipping and help the group’s leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, make good on his promise to hit Israel-linked maritime targets as far as the Indian Ocean en route to the Cape of Good Hope.
According to a former U.S. special envoy for Yemen, Russia now has personnel on the ground in Sanaa and is planning to reopen its embassy in Aden this year. With the fate of Russian bases in Syria still in flux and an agreement now underway to build a Russian naval base on Sudan’s Red Sea coast, growing military cooperation between Russia and the Houthis would allow Moscow to further project power in the region. For their part, as of late November 2024, Houthi officials had facilitated the travel of Yemenis to Russia, where they were forcibly sent to fight on the front lines in Ukraine.
While they target Western shipping and trade, the Houthis benefit from Russian- and Chinese-enabled illicit shipping and logistics. Days before the Yemeni mercenaries story broke, Russia clandestinely delivered grain from the occupied Crimean port of Sevastopol into Yemen, according to Bellingcat. The Iran-based Houthi financial facilitator Said al-Jamal has helped smuggle Iranian oil and provide financial facilitation to Iran and its proxies through entities in China, according to several U.S. Treasury Department designations.
Interestingly, one recent designation revealed not only the existence of China-based Houthi operatives facilitating weapons and dual-use components into Yemen but also that Jamal had evaded sanctions using cryptocurrency, not surprising given his ties to Iran and the country’s deep experience with digital assets.
Yemen is not an easy country to handle. Ali Abdullah Saleh—who after 22 years as Yemen’s president briefly allied himself with the Houthis, only to be ignominiously killed by them in 2017 after seeking reconciliation again with Saudi Arabia—once compared ruling Yemen to “dancing on the heads of snakes.” The nation has always been a victim of its extraordinarily fraught circumstances, from its civil war, tribalism, and secessionist movement to its war against al Qaeda and the Islamic State to its battle with famine and disease. The Houthis’ growing ties to China and Russia introduce an equally complex set of thorny calculations among key players in the region, including Moscow itself.
If Yemen takes Syria’s place as the Russian military’s next Middle Eastern warm-water port, this could raise the stakes for deconfliction between Israel and Russia, as happened in Syria during its civil war. Israel and the United States have long been acutely focused on Iran, and both countries have struck Houthi military targets in Yemen, raising the risk of unintentional escalation if Russian advisors or troops are increasingly in the vicinity.
In spite of its growing ties to the Houthis, Russia must simultaneously maintain positive relations with Saudi Arabia, especially in the context of OPEC. Saudi-Israeli normalization seems an unlikely prospect in the near term, especially if the latest calls for “resettlement” of Palestinians outside Gaza and Riyadh’s reactions are any guide. Yet the Houthis might be tempted to play spoiler by targeting Saudi and/or Israeli interests, putting them at odds with Russia’s efforts to maintain productive relations with both regional heavyweights.
The United States has reactivated its own “maximum pressure” campaign, which sought unsuccessfully to force Tehran to renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or abandon it altogether, and has asked Russia for help in negotiations with Iran.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have staked their economic transformation on huge artificial intelligence investments with leading U.S. companies, including data centers and related infrastructure. That gives the Houthis a whole new set of potential targets.
Many of the JCPOA’s critics pointed to its failure to curb Iranian support to terrorism and regional groups, yet wanting to halt Iran’s nuclear progress and support to proxies, the United States now finds itself asking for help from Russia as it simultaneously provides support to Iran and the Houthis—playing the role of arsonist and firefighter, as some have observed. If diplomacy with Iran fails and the United States or Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear program, the Houthis will almost certainly be a part of Iran’s asymmetric response, and Russia will have to decide whether it can afford to stay neutral.
As long as the Houthis remain committed to attacking civilian and military vessels in the region, the United States, Israel, and allied partners should continue to degrade their command centers and weapons caches through targeted airstrikes and other means. Economic and military tools can exert some pressure on the Houthis, with a broadening array of targets, given their growing relationships with Russia and China.
But any resolution to the Houthis, as tangled as they are in wider regional and global problems, needs a local solution. For close to a decade, the Houthis withstood the Saudi-led offensive to unseat them and appear more intent on threatening global commerce than addressing the dire conditions they exacerbate for those living under their rule, including famine, cholera, a lack of potable water, and economic decline.
Despite its singular geographic advantage among Iran’s proxies, the group might also suffer painful setbacks from its own strategic miscalculation, as was the case with Hamas on Oct. 7 and Hezbollah’s continual targeting of Israel with drones and rockets. Israel’s security establishment is now “waking up” to a largely overlooked Yemeni theater. This could eventually weaken the Houthis’ grip on the country through a combination of air power and kinetic operations, making space for different political arrangements. Until such time, in the absence of a change in ideology, the Houthi threat is one that can be mitigated and managed but not solved outright.
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