The rapid takeover of Yemen’s entire western coast and major islands in a matter of days by Ansar Allah, widely known as the Houthis, is an alarming though not surprising development. Its most consequential implication is that Iran and its regional allies have strengthened their hold over the Middle East’s two most strategic maritime chokepoints, Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, creating additional leverage over adversaries and international shipping.
The timing is particularly important and revealing. The Houthis are advancing amid a broader reshuffling of the regional order, as the Iran war, U.S.-Iran negotiations, and emerging discussions over maritime security and administration are generating new incentives and perceptions of what is possible. The group appears intent on improving its position before that fluidity gives way to a new deadlock—and, critically, before Washington and Tehran reach arrangements that could affect Yemen without Houthi participation.
Such major changes in the strategic environment are inherently dangerous. They change threat perceptions, shift alignments, encourage actors to test the limits of their power, and push others to build alliances to manage risks. What mediators might see as a rare opportunity to talk, belligerents may interpret as a fleeting chance to push their agenda more aggressively before the ground settles beneath them. This across-the-board recalibration also creates a high-risk environment in which actors may misread their opponents or overestimate the alignment between their own objectives and those of their allies.
Broadly speaking, the military developments unfolding in Yemen are one manifestation of this dynamic following years of relative impasse. The volatility is likely to continue for a while before a new equilibrium emerges, making it too early to judge who has overreached or miscalculated. Important variables differ from the events of December and January, when the Southern Transitional Council’s rapid advance in eastern Yemen was followed by an equally rapid retreat. But that episode demonstrated how quickly an apparently decisive gain can be unexpectedly reversed.
The Houthi takeover should come as no surprise. For at least six months, the group had publicly declared that it was preparing for a battle, with extensive mobilization and recruitment openly underway. Yet a rapid reversal remains possible. Such an outcome would require at least two conditions: a rival force on the ground with solid leadership, a dynamic military strategy, and a guiding and unifying military doctrine; and reliable, significant, and timely backing from a broad base of allies, acting before the Houthis entrench in the mountains, cut supply lines, and consolidate.
The Yemeni government’s miscalculation may have been its order of priorities, where it had put more weight on the backing of allies. Instead of focusing sufficiently on strengthening its internal capabilities, it leaned on the public relations case—made successfully and correctly—that stability in Yemen is crucial to regional stability and to the global economy. International and regional powers rallied around that argument, with the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Saudi Arabia supporting efforts to strengthen the government. But that support was seemingly mistaken for a commitment by outside powers to fight its battle, read its own local terrain, and put its military strategy in order on its behalf.
The resulting damage to Yemen’s central government goes beyond the loss of a battle. Military setbacks are an ordinary feature of warfare; the more consequential loss has been political. Yemenis who held on to the hope of restoring their republic and rebuilding a measure of security at home instead witnessed a breakdown in leadership, disconnected communication lines, and a chaotic retreat. Video footage showed fleeing soldiers humiliated at the gates of Aden, made to surrender their arms before entering. Ultimately, rebuilding the government’s credibility among its own supporters and allies may prove difficult.
In contrast, the Houthis are perceived by regional powers primarily as a threat to be contained. This also leaves the group room to reduce pressure by temporarily de-escalating or demonstrating restraint. Regional states remain strongly interested in limiting the expanding set of threats whose costs are increasingly difficult to bear.
Absent a more fundamental change in the military balance, however, outside intervention could simply reproduce another cycle in which drones and airpower push the Houthis out of the exposed coastal plains and into the mountains that run parallel to the coast, only for them to eventually return; a back-and-forth dictated by geography more than anything else.
The Tihama coastal plain is exceedingly difficult to hold without controlling the mountains overlooking it and securing the supply lines connecting Taiz or Aden to the coast. That is why the battle was fierce over areas like Jebal Al-Nar and Hays and the commanding peaks parallel and adjacent to the coast of Al-Khawkha and Al-Makha, and the importance of the fall of the Khaled ibn Al-Waleed camp, one of Yemen’s largest military installations, positioned along these natural defenses. The Houthis are mountain people, who earned their combat experience in the rugged highlands of the north, so they are in their element in a mountain fight, while the coast exposes them. The front may therefore move back and forth, without producing a decisive outcome unless the conditions needed to change the military balance materialize.
Why Al-Makha and Why Now?
Since the signing of the Iran–U.S. memorandum of understanding (MoU) on June 17, the Houthis have displayed renewed confidence and raised their demands on Saudi Arabia. But this latest offensive appears to be about more than extracting concessions from Riyadh. The group chose to move ahead of the U.S. midterm elections and before any arrangement between Washington and Tehran could proceed without them. The Houthis want to be part of whatever bargain emerges.
The timing also reflects a favorable strategic window. Saudi Arabia has demonstrated it can absorb a great deal of pressure before resorting to major unilateral military action, while the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement and emerging maritime alliance still need time to operationalize. For both the Houthis and Iran, a snap operation offered an opportunity to alter facts on the ground before those constraints hardened.
This also explains why the Houthis were not easily drawn into other fronts the government tried to activate, including al-Jawf and al-Bayda. Their sight was set on al-Makha, and they were not distracted by long-sought governorates like Marib, which is rich in oil and gas, nor toward Taiz city, which would have opened the way to al-Makha but taken far longer. Against expectations, they chose a front strongly fortified by the well-equipped and trained National Resistance, despite knowing that control of this coastline would set off alarm bells among international powers from the United States to China.
It is difficult to read this as anything but the Houthis making sure they are not left out of any big U.S.-Iran bargain, on the one hand, and an extension of Iran’s effort to impose its own maximum pressure on the Trump administration ahead of the midterms. Tehran and its allies may calculate that the political environment in Washington will limit or delay a major response, while Gulf states continue to favor de-escalation and containment, including in negotiations over the future of Hormuz.
The timing of the announcement by the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, of an expanded maritime restricted zone in the Strait of Hormuz is also significant. Viewed alongside the battle for Al-Makha, it points toward a possibility that the Houthis see an opportunity to replicate Iran’s position to extract monetary value from administering the chokepoint. In other words, control of Bab al-Mandab is not only about the ability to significantly disrupt transit, which was already achieved in 2023–2024, but rather positioning itself at the top of any maritime governance scheme that emerges from the war. In that sense, the outcome of Hormuz negotiations could set the precedent for Bab al-Mandab, and the recent seizure of territory could prepare the ground for that.
What makes this moment so dangerous is that its volatility invites miscalculations. For the Yemeni government and those who pinned their hopes on it, the promise of restoring the republic remains unfulfilled. It has also, for now, pushed any prospects for a Yemeni political process further off the rails and resulted in another massive humanitarian crisis. For the Houthis and Iran, the sense of a wide-open opportunity may prove just as deceptive if their overreach draws a response they cannot absorb. But amid this fluidity, the one shift that may prove durable is the erosion of freedom of navigation through the region’s critical waterways. Bab al-Mandab, like Hormuz, risks becoming not simply a chokepoint that can be disrupted in wartime, but a passage through which transit is increasingly conditional.
