The Houthis Demonstrate Trump’s New Law of War
· The Atlantic
When U.S. forces launched air strikes against the Houthis in March 2025, Michael Waltz, then the national security adviser, celebrated in a Signal text chat with other senior Trump-administration officials (and the editor in chief of this magazine) by posting three emojis—the fist bump, the American flag, and fire. Steve Witkoff, the Middle East special envoy, dropped American-flag and prayer-hand emoji, along with a flexed bicep. President Trump, later that month, declared that the Iran-backed terror group in Yemen was “absolutely on the run.” He also predicted on Truth Social that they “will be completely annihilated” and later wrote that they had been “decimated.”
How hard could it be, after all, for the world’s mightiest military to vanquish a militia whose signature weapon is a machine gun mounted on a Toyota Hilux, and whose fighters, like most Yemeni men, spend much of their afternoons chewing khat, a narcotic plant?
Visit forestarrow.rest for more information.
“How are the Houthis doing? Not too good,” Trump quipped at a rally a month later, after the U.S. military had rained down sophisticated munitions in an operation that totaled more than $1 billion. By May of last year, it was over. The end to the fighting, brokered by Oman, meant that the U.S. would stop its strikes and the Houthis would stop targeting U.S. commercial ships in the Red Sea. Trump promptly claimed victory and said the Houthis had “capitulated.”
[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]
These days, it’s the Houthi leaders who are likely celebrating in group chats, assuming they have group chats. The Houthis have had an impressive run of military victories, apparently having used the time since being “decimated” to restock, reload, and return to the fight. The group has made significant advances inside Yemen, a highly dysfunctional nation of roughly 40 million that sits at the southwestern end of the Arabian Peninsula and is now in an all-out civil war. In July, the militia said it would impose a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia, its neighbor to the north, with which it shares the Red Sea’s eastern coastline.
That might have once sounded fanciful given that Saudi Arabia is a much wealthier country, a U.S. ally with close ties to the Trump administration that last year signed a record deal for nearly $142 billion worth of U.S. weapons. But earlier this month, the Houthis captured Yemen’s portion of the Red Sea coast, and repeatedly attacked the Saudis’ oil infrastructure. Last week, the kingdom reported its first civilian casualty since the start of this new phase of Houthi attacks. Over the weekend, the militia launched a ballistic missile at the Saudi capital, Riyadh. “How are the Houthis doing?” is, today, not a question whose answer the Trump administration would like.
The Houthis—whose motto, “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam,” at least has the benefit of frankness—have confirmed what might be called Trump’s iron-clad Law of Military Achievement: The number of times the president claims victory is inversely proportional to the actual extent of American military success. That law was already being amply demonstrated by the Iran conflict. Trump has said that war has been won or has almost been won dozens of times since it began in late February. Yet a sustainable, meaningful victory remains elusive. The consequences of the conflict, especially sky-high gas prices, are bedeviling Republican candidates in the lead-up to the midterms. “Hopefully we’re toward the end of the war,” Trump said last week, a more equivocal claim than his prior boasts. And in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly this week, Trump estimated that the war’s end would come later, rather than sooner: “I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election.” The U.S. military, meanwhile, has positioned its assets to remain in the region at least through the end of the year.
Iran is the major backer of the Houthis, and the Houthis’ advances have further complicated the already dismal U.S. prospects in the war against Tehran. In July, a day after the Houthis struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, Trump turned from declaring victory to renewing threats, along with expressing hope that the group might choose to retreat on its own. “If they do this again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the U.S. will hold Iran responsible, in that the Houthis are a Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran, and major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis, themselves, who I am very disappointed with in that they have, until now, acted very professionally and smart.” One can imagine a Houthi leadership text chat responding with the shrug emoji.
[Read: Trump loses the other strait]
The recent Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia have put the administration in a bind. On the one hand, the U.S. has obligations to allies. “We have a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia; we intend to live up to our commitments on it, we will,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week. On the other hand, the president seems highly disinclined to expand a war that he has repeatedly claimed already to have won, a move that would force Republicans to go even further on the defensive in states they thought were safe in the midterms. There’s also the question of resources. Before the pummeling of Iran made the low level of munitions stockpiles a recurrent worry for the administration, the U.S. had already “expended a lot of ordnance against the Houthis in the spring of 2025 with little to show for it,” Steven Cook, the director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Middle East program, wrote this week.
The Saudis have appealed to the United States for help for weeks—including through direct calls between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Trump. The president seems to have gone back and forth on what to do, but for now appears unwilling to launch more strikes.
The Houthis, a group that emerged in northern Yemen in the 1990s, have controlled parts of the country since 2014. The U.S. initially designated the Houthis as a terrorist group in 2021, during the first Trump administration. They have traditionally relied heavily on Iran for arms and funding, but some signs suggest that the group has recently grown more self-reliant, in part thanks to equipment from China, according to reporting by Bloomberg News. The Houthis now have access to drones and long-range missiles, as well as some military-related artificial-intelligence capabilities. Anthropic, in a report this month that disclosed “misuse” the company had tracked, identified a group of Claude users “based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs.” The Houthis are “nimble, they’re young, they’re a learning organization,” April Longley Alley, who has advised the UN special envoy to Yemen, told me. “And they have a lot of help from the Iranians, and so we shouldn’t underestimate them.”
[Read: The forever negotiation]
This greater sophistication has been accompanied by greater ambition. Just as Iran exerted control over the Strait of Hormuz, which was an open waterway before the U.S.-Israeli bombardment began in February, the Houthis are now menacing the Bab al-Mandab. The narrow passage between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa is another vital waterway for regional energy exports. In the past two weeks, the Houthis have captured two crucial islands in the area, giving Iran and its ally effective control over two choke points—and over global gas prices.
For years, the U.S. has sought to drive a wedge between the Houthis and Iran. But now “the tables seem to have turned,” Alley said. Iran and the Houthis are trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia—and succeeding, at least when it comes to direct U.S. support for Riyadh. And Iran and the Houthis are arguably in a stronger position geopolitically than ever before. According to Trump’s Law of Military Achievement, that means a declaration of complete victory over the Houthis is due from the White House any day now.