Voters have ‘had enough’ of Mideast turmoil. But the Houthi conflict is just getting started.

Por Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing and Nahal Toosi — POLITICO – TOP Stories

Saudi Arabia has no plans to consider a ceasefire with the Houthis until it regains recently lost territory in Yemen — making it likely the fight will escalate ahead of midterm elections in which Middle East conflict and oil prices are on the ballot.

The Saudis don’t want to look weak, and they worry the Yemeni militant group would use any pause to seize more territory, according to half a dozen people tuned into Riyadh’s thinking, including regional officials. Some were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

The Iranian-backed Houthis have been in a fight with Yemen’s government for more than a decade and control a substantial part of the country, including the capital city of Sana’a. Though a 2022 ceasefire tamped down fighting, the conflict has intensified in recent months. The Houthis seized strategic land along the Red Sea in September, and the Yemen-aligned Saudis launched an offensive this week to reclaim that territory and wrest back control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — a key transit point for Saudi oil.

Continued fighting means it will be risky for ships to cross the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea for the foreseeable future — adding to the pressure on global oil and other commerce already strained from the U.S.-Iran standoff over the Strait of Hormuz. And that’s bad news for GOP candidates or anyone else hoping for economic turmoil to ease before November.

Even if U.S. voters don’t know the intricacies of the Houthi conflict, they will respond to the ensuing market reaction, said Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett. The Houthis had already instituted a naval blockade against Saudi ships and knocked a crucial Saudi oil pipeline offline before the latest round of strikes.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Whose side are we on here? I don’t care. I’ve had enough of it. I care about affordability and the price of gas,’” said Bartlett, a former appointee to the State Department in the first Trump administration. President Donald Trump’s popularity has nosedived as a result of his handling of the Iran war and the surging gasoline prices that have followed.

While the U.S. is aiding the Saudis behind the scenes, Trump has declined to order U.S. airstrikes against the Houthi rebels.

As long as the Houthis are “holding this territory along the Bab el-Mandeb, and they’re firing rockets and drones towards Saudi Arabia, I think the Saudis can’t even talk about deescalating,” Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said in an interview while in Riyadh this week.

A person familiar with United Nations negotiations on Yemen voiced the same sentiment: “It’s impossible to say when this is going to end.”

Even though the White House isn’t directly engaged, voters are likely to lump the Yemen conflict together with the unpopular Iran war, argued GOP strategist Alex Conant. And given years-old military ties between Iran and the Houthis, the odds are rising that the two wars will grow more entangled.

“They’re going to own it, whether they like it or not,” Conant said of Republicans going into the midterms. While Trump has tried to lower prices through other means, such as pressuring the G7 to release stockpiles of oil, there’s ultimately not much the White House can do to deflect, Conant added.

Saudi Arabia’s reluctance to pursue a quick diplomatic end to the conflict is all but guaranteed to worsen the global energy market, according to Brett Erickson, managing principal of the consulting firm Obsidian Risk Advisors.

It’s “a remarkably dangerous gamble” on the Saudi’s part, Erickson said, adding that “Saudi Arabia has demonstrated remarkably little ability to prevent the Houthis from striking critical energy infrastructure across the kingdom.”

Riyadh’s oil exports have already taken a hit because of the naval blockade the Houthis declared against Saudi Arabia in July. According to maritime intelligence firm Windward, Saudi-flagged ships have stopped crossing the strait almost entirely since July, and tanker transits dropped by more than a quarter.

But the Houthis have used prior ceasefires to rebuild their arsenal.

A regional official, granted anonymity to disclose sensitive thinking, said “negotiations that merely give the Houthis time to regroup, rearm and prepare their next escalation are not peace.”

Any future peace agreement must include “credible guarantees,” “clear obligations” and effective enforcement mechanisms, the official added. Even if Riyadh were inclined to take a diplomatic route, those goals could be hard to achieve quickly.

A Houthi official did not reply to a request for comment. The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

The United States is providing intelligence to the Saudis, including targeting information on Houthi locations, and air refueling for Saudi planes on defensive patrols, two U.S. officials familiar with the situation confirmed. More than 200 U.S. intelligence and military analysts are part of the effort.

But the U.S. has not carried out its own strikes against the Houthis. Trump appears wary of breaking a truce with the Houthis that he reached last year after a major U.S. military operation against the group had limited impact. The Houthis have promised not to fire on American ships in the region amid their latest offensive against Saudi Arabia.

Still, Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserted this week that the U.S. “has a defense and security agreement with Saudi Arabia and we intend to live by it.”

The White House declined to comment on its plans on the Houthi conflict.

It’s an awkward balance for Washington, which must weigh its defense commitments to Saudi allies against the repercussions of getting dragged into yet another military conflict — especially while the Iran war remains unresolved.

The Saudis have, in the meantime, activated a recently formed defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey known as the Mecca Alliance. In a vague joint statement on Monday, the group suggested that Turkish and Pakistani troops might join the Saudi effort, though it was not clear in exactly what capacity.

The Houthis claim they abandoned the 2022 truce because Saudi Arabia did not live up to its agreement to lift a blockade on Yemen. The rebel movement, inspired by the Zaydi branch of Shia Islam, also says it is angry over Saudi airstrikes against the Sana’a airport in July, which came as an Iranian plane was about to land.

But current and former U.S. and foreign officials dismiss some of the Houthi grievances, saying, for instance, that the Saudis had significantly eased the blockade in recent years. The big difference today is that the Iran war has badly damaged Saudi ability to export oil, making the kingdom appear vulnerable and the Houthis believing they had leverage.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a vocal critic of Trump’s foreign policy, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh this week. He told reporters afterward that not only is Riyadh trying to take back territory the Houthis snatched, but the Saudis could be looking to push farther.

“It just creates a risk that this is going to be another long military engagement inside Yemen with massive consequences,” Murphy said. In a social media post Tuesday, Murphy called the overall situation a “full blown regional war.”

Murphy — alongside Senate Democrats more generally — has opposed adding U.S. airstrikes to the Saudi campaign against the Houthis, but several other lawmakers have said they’re at least open to the idea.

“I don’t think you rule out options,” Republican North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven told POLITICO last week. “We don’t want them choking off trade in the Red Sea,” he said of the Houthis.

The person familiar with the U.N. negotiations on Yemen said the Saudis had wanted to wait for the Iran conflict to stabilize or come to a resolution before pursuing more in-depth talks with the Houthis about the future of Yemen. But the Houthis escalated instead.

Kristin Smith Diwan, a Middle East analyst who is in regular touch with Gulf Arab officials, said even if there are no negotiations anytime soon, there are almost always backchannel contacts between the various players in the Yemen conflict.

“It’s a bit of a continuum,” Diwan said. But overall, the situation is “dangerous because these things can always escalate in unpredictable ways.”

Among those most in danger are millions of Yemeni civilians. They have endured brutal hardships, including widespread displacement and hunger, since the war’s origins in 2014. According to U.N. humanitarian officials, cases of cholera are on the rise and 21,000 people have been displaced in the past week alone.

James Bikales, Paul McLeary and Gregory Svirnovskiy contributed to this report.

A version of this article previously appeared in POLITICO’s National Security Daily newsletter. Like this content? Sign up below!

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