Gulf’s Costliest Misjudgment: Why Houthis Were Never a Border Nuisance

Money buys almost everything, except an honest reading of the man across the table. In March 2015, officials in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi expected to put Yemen’s government back on its feet within weeks. Eleven years later, Houthi missiles are falling on the Saudi capital. On October 10, a strike on King Khalid International Airport killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300. I have watched this war for years, and I keep arriving at the same place: the Houthis are strong today mostly because the Gulf never quite worked out what sort of enemy it was fighting.

It started early. Between 2004 and 2010, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government fought six wars against the Houthis in their northern heartland of Saada, and not one of them finished the job. What each war left behind was a leaner, angrier movement that knew the terrain better than any army sent to dislodge it. Then 2011 hollowed out the state. The Houthis, who had every reason to hate Saleh, allied with him anyway and walked into Sana’a in September 2014; three years after that, they killed him. To call this a tribal quarrel was to not be paying attention.

Operation Decisive Storm, launched in March 2015, repeated the error on a larger scale. The plan was a short air campaign and a restored government. What it delivered instead was a gift, because the Houthis could now present themselves as Yemen’s defenders against foreign bombs. By 2018, with the coalition pushing up the Red Sea coast, the International Crisis Group’s Robert Malley and April Longley Alley were already cautioning (Newsweek Pakistan carried the warning) that no decisive outcome was coming.

“the Houthi front will not collapse.”
Robert Malley and April Longley Alley, International Crisis Group

Iran filled the gap that Yemen could not. A 2024 report to the UN Security Council concluded that Revolutionary Guard training and support had turned a local armed group into something far more formidable; in the report’s words:

“a powerful military organisation.”
UN report to the Security Council, 2024, as cited by The Week

I do not want to inflate Tehran’s part in this. Iran can arm only a movement that already has Yemeni roots (and the northern mountains would have beaten any outside army regardless). Still, the Gulf spent billions on Western air defences while a cheaper threat grew on its doorstep.

The fallout has long since left Arabia. The Red Sea usually carries up to 12 per cent of global trade. The Houthis paused their attacks after the Gaza ceasefire, then declared a ban on Israeli ships in June; by August they were hitting cargo vessels again, and one went down. September brought reports that they held Yemen’s whole Red Sea coast, with a firmer grip on Bab el-Mandeb. Force has not undone any of it. Washington’s 2025 campaign struck more than 1,000 sites across Yemen and still ended in a truce brokered by Oman.

Their opponents, meanwhile, were hardly a team. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi had a common enemy but never a common idea of how the war should end. Dawn, in an analysis, noted that Saudi Arabia, Oman and most foreign capitals had long stood for Yemen’s unity, and that the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council cut straight across that line.

“have sworn by a single Yemeni state.”
Dawn, “Two-and-a-half Yemens”

The break came last winter. In early December the STC seized Hadramawt and Al-Mahrah, and its leader spoke of building the institutions of a southern state. On December 30 a Saudi-led strike hit Mukalla port, where ships had unloaded weapons and vehicles; Riyadh called its national security a red line. Abu Dhabi insisted the cargo was meant for its own forces, and announced it was pulling out its remaining personnel. The two capitals argued over the south. The Houthis took the north.

Fear has pushed them back together. The UAE’s vice president went to Riyadh on September 29, the first such visit since the rift, and on October 17 the two agreed to cooperate again, with Saudi air cover for an anti-Houthi force. Will it hold? Nobody knows. Ahmed Nagi of the International Crisis Group, speaking in September, put the situation with unusual bluntness.

“significant deterioration in what is already a catastrophic situation.”
Ahmed Nagi, International Crisis Group

For readers in Pakistan this is no distant quarrel. Our remittances, our energy imports, our sea lanes: all of them run through waters the Houthis now threaten. The lesson, as I read it, is plain. Rich states lose to a patient movement when they treat it as a problem to bomb instead of a political reality to understand. The Houthis are not a proxy to be negotiated away whenever it suits. They are an established power, and the Gulf’s long refusal to see that is where its present predicament really began.