Iran Snuggles Up with the Houthis in Yemen

Photo of Houthi rebels in Yemen

Yemen, despite all the odds being stacked against it, has recently become strategically significant. If you’re not familiar with Yemen, it is geographically isolated, mountainous, hard to govern, only has a small pocket of fertile land, and has a long history of being unimportant.

The Egyptians and British can attest to how ridiculously difficult it is to control Yemen, but the Iranians are trying a new tactic. Iran is leveraging Houthi militants in Yemen by supplying them with missiles and other military support, as a way of replacing the influence they lost in places like Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. So, Red Sea shipping gets disrupted without having to commit major Iranian resources.

Most terrorist organizations are hard to uproot, but the Houthis might take the cake. However, that doesn’t change the fact that Yemen itself doesn’t matter much, just that it’s currently serving as a platform for an Iranian proxy conflict.

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Transcript

Hello from Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah. And this is Peter Zeihan coming to you from 2000ft above the Colorado River. And today we’re going to talk about why anyone cares about Yemen. Now, Yemen is one of those places that I’ve gone out of my way to denigrate. I’ve called the Houthis who which are the primary militant group. 

They’re the most incompetent terrorists and alive today. So why does anyone care? Why should anyone care? Well, the topic, of course, of the moment is that the Houthis are using Iranian missiles in order to target shipping in the Red sea as part of their effort to show solidarity with the Gazans. 

But the history of Yemen is more than just that. Basically, if you wonder why anyone has ever cared about this zone, you just have to look at a precipitation map. Most of the Middle East is shockingly desert. Most of the places in the Middle East that where we’re familiar with the history is because the put simply, you can have civilization. 

There’s water. So you have the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, you have the Levant, maybe the Hatay going up into Anatolia, and of course, the Nile. These are the places where civilizations can exist. Well, Yemen is a little pocket. Basically, you’ve got this knot of mountains that rises up at the southwestern point of the Arabian Peninsula that gets just high enough to wring a little bit of moisture out of the air. 

And as a result, you have a sea of desert with this island of green in the middle, and that green is Yemen. And so when whenever any regional empire rises up and starts to establish themselves, they look around for the parts that are worth conquering. And Yemen, because it actually has green makes the list. The problem is twofold. 

Number one, there’s a lot of brown around Yemen. So you have to project a lot of power just to get to it. And then second, there’s nothing near Yemen. So you can’t really project from Yemen anywhere else. Actually let me throw in a third one. Mountains. Brown people are ornery. And the same thing happens in Yemen as happens in West Virginia or jets near you. 

They become tribal, almost Scottish. Actually, it’s a lot like Scotland, but surrounded by brown. So if you can actually project power there, you then spend all of your time at the end of a very long supply line trying to maintain control. And it has never worked out well for anyone. You can go back to the time of the Pharaohs, when the Egyptians first tried and basically got a finger cut off. 

Then the Romans tried. They got some fingers cut off. Later on, the Arab empires based out of Damascus are back. But that tribe didn’t end up very well for them either, although they did at least nominally, maintain control. Then the Ottomans, then the Brits. Everyone has basically gone through who has tried to build an empire in the region. None of them have had a great time. What is different this time around is that no one is trying to control Yemen. 

Someone is trying to use Yemen as a lever. And so Iran, having lost in Gaza, having lost in Lebanon, having lost in Syria, losing very quickly in Iraq, is discovering that most of its tools for triggering paramilitary operations throughout the region have collapsed in on themselves, and they don’t have much left. 

But then there’s Yemen. The Iranians don’t care at all what happens to the Yemenis. But if you provide them with a little technical equipment and some hardware, they can cause some problems. And anyone who wants to then subdue the Yemeni discovers just as many problems as everybody else. So what’s happened most recently is the Iranians have basically provided missiles, a little bit of anti-aircraft. 

And, you know, the technologies of how to dig a hole in order to build bunkers. And the Yemeni are proving sufficiently entrenched that an air campaign cannot root them out. So the Trump administration comes in, is looking for a quick and easy military operation. And Trump gives the U.S. military 30 days to get results. Well, shocker, if after 2500 years, no one is functionally subdued Yemen, it wasn’t going to happen in 30 days by air. 

So the Trump administration has declared a truce. And the real talks with Iran are progressing. Whether or not they will succeed in anything too soon to know. The talks, however, are real. And the Yemeni are nothing but a tool for the Iranians. And so something that without Iranian support, the Americans can simply ignore. And that’s where we are now.

US Navy Strikes Houthi Forces in Yemen

Photo of Houthi rebels in Yemen

Things in the Red Sea have ramped up yet again. The Houthis, who are an Iranian-backed Shiite group in Yemen, launched a series of missile and drone attacks on international shipping. Early today, the United States conducted a retaliatory air assault on Houthi targets.

In response to an increase in assaults on commercial shipping and an anti-ship missile being launched toward US naval assets, the US targeted Houthi command and control systems, radar, and ammunition storage facilities. Only time will tell if the US is serious about getting involved in this region, and it will likely depend on Iran’s willingness to engage in discussion with the Biden Administration.

Everything about this region is complex (and I have very little desire to dive too deep), so we’ll leave it at “complex.” In all likelihood, we’ll see Iran push the Houthis away from a conflict with the US in favor of directing any assets toward their regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Phoenix Airport today and talk about a part of the world that I really don’t care for at all. And that’s in Yemen. There’s been an insurgency going on in Yemen since, I don’t know, Paleolithic period, multiple sides. You’ve got a relatively secular ish government. You’ve got a Sunni militia that’s kind of an officially or semiofficial affiliated with Al Qaeda.

And then you’ve got a Shiite group called the Houthis that are wildly incompetent at most work and really can’t hold themselves together. There’s very little that’s worth fighting over that you have a little natural gas. But once this boiled up, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago, everyone puzzlingly got out of that business. The water tables crashed. Most agricultural production isn’t even going to food.

It’s going to something like Qot, which is a mild narcotic. That’s kind of a very, very mild version of like cocaine and shrooms put together that most of the population is high on all the time. Really not a lot going on there that matters to anyone but the detailed depth you need to command in order to say anything.

Intelligence extreme. So it’s like that perfect mix of irrelevance and tedium that I just Treadwell avoid at all costs. Unfortunately, since the Gaza war got started, they’ve started to be cooking off missiles and drones at international shipping going through the Red Sea. Their position is on the eastern side of the bubble MANDEB, which is on the extreme southern southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

And they actually do have the ability to reach in there if they put their minds to it. Of course, they are incapable of making their own weapons. I mean, this is a place where sticks and stones are the highlight of the technology. So all the weapons are brought in from Iran. Who is specifically backing the Houthis in this multi-sided fight?

The Iranians like to do that because it’s on the far side of Saudi Arabia, who is the regional rival. And everyone’s while the Houthis are, let’s be honest here, every once while the Iranians use Houthi cover in order to launch some missiles and some drones into Saudi targets. For their part, the Saudis have not really taken the bait in the traditional sense.

I mean, yes, they have invaded, but really they’re just using everything in Yemen as target practice because they know there’s no way that they’ve got the military capacity to actually root out these groups. So they basically aim for the blue roof is what I like to call it, in anticipation of someday the Iranians actually driving down through Iraq and Kuwait to the Saudi oil fields.

Basically, the Saudis are preparing by getting their fighter pilots some target practice, which, you know, it’s not stupid, it’s just inhumane. Anyway, back in 2022, the Saudis and the Houthis signed a side that makes it sound so formal they agreed to a peace deal or ceasefire anyway. And since then, the Houthis with the Iranians have been stockpiling weapons in anticipation of the next outbreak of hostilities.

Well, and the aftermath of the October 17th assault on Israeli targets by Hamas, we now have this war in Gaza. And the Houthis are saying that they’re cooking off missiles and attacking shipping that is affiliated with Israel and by affiliated Israel. What they really mean is anything that happens to go by because they don’t really have a good way to identify anything.

So they’ve just been shooting whatever they see. Well, local time in the middle of the night on January 12, the United States launched a moderate sized air assault using some Tomahawks and some fighter bombers on who the targets saying that they were targeting a few command and control systems, a little bit of radar and mostly the ammo dumps and processing facilities where the Houthis launch these things from.

Now, this is a fairly big chunk of territory. This isn’t like the tiny little pipsqueak of territory that Gaza is. This is actually, you know, something almost size Colorado. I think I’ll get back to you on that one. So clearing out the Houthies is definitely not an option without a Iraq style invasion, and that is not in the cards.

The question, of course, is how serious is the Biden administration about this? We’ve seen 12% of global trade get disrupted by these drone and missile assaults. So they’d have to put their back into it if the United States really wanted to stop this. It’s not clear that that’s the goal. And in fact, I’m fairly certain it’s not. You see, there was a precipitating event earlier in the day before the strikes.

The amount of assaults on the commercial shipping have been incrementally increasing. But what was different about the 12th is that a ballistic anti-ship missile was launched to U.S. naval assets and within hours, the United States shot back. It’s not that the United States is overly concerned about shipping, despite the PR, but you shoot at a Navy vessel if you vessel will return fire.

So I’m sure the message is being delivered quietly to the Iranians right now is like, you know, you do what you feel you need to. Just know that if you target us again, this is going to be a lot more involved. And it’s not just going to be the Houthis that are getting shot back at. Remember that every drop of oil that Iran exports goes to the Strait of Hormuz and everyone likes to make an unknown about the possibility of Iran closing the strait.

But they actually need it more than most of the other producers in the region. Will that be enough? I mean, time will tell, but there’s reason to be at least partially optimistic because something similar happened back in 2016 when the Houthis targeted an American naval asset and a lot of their stuff got blown up within the next couple of days.

And there haven’t been threats against U.S. naval assets since until today. So there’s some capability here for this to be smoothed out, but ultimately comes down to whether or not the Iranians are willing to actually have a conversation with the Biden administration about anything. Now, the Iranians do have a stronger support relationship with the Houthis than they do with, say, Hamas.

Hamas is Sunni and Arab, whereas the Iranians are largely Persian and Shia. So the Iranians have always seen Hamas as completely disposable. They don’t really care about it. They’re happy with what’s going on in the Israel Hamas war in Gaza, but they’re not going to intervene in any meaningful way to protect something that they don’t even consider to be an asset.

Who these little bit different? They are Shia. And so there’s a little bit more camaraderie and like needling Israel, which is, you know, convenient and fun and good for PR in Iran and around the Arab world, maybe only in Saudi Arabia. Their primary regional foe is a much more strategically important thing. So there’s leverage on both sides here.

But ultimately, the Iranians would love to keep the Houthis focused on Saudi Arabia because that’s where the money is and that’s where the future conflict for the Iranians ultimately will be. And they would love for the United States to stick out of this. So they’ve been basically needling the United States and needling Israel because it’s good P.R. across the Middle East.

But I don’t think they’re really interested in bleeding for it, because their real fight requires every asset they have later on. So I would guess that we’re going to see things simmer down in Yemen and I can go back to ignoring it.