May 28, 2025:
The new American president has developed relationships with the rulers of Saudi Arabia. Together, the American president and the Saudi leader have accomplished a lot lately. This includes arranging prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. The Saudis and Russians have long enjoyed good relations because both nations are major oil producers and can influence oil prices to their advantage.
The Americans and Saudis are hosting Ukraine War peace talks in what everyone considers a neutral and very comfortable location. The hotels and royal places of Saudi Arabia are seen as neutral territory that provides luxurious accommodations for negotiators. It’s also where the Americans and Saudis negotiated a deal for Saudis Arabia to obtain $109 billion worth of weapons and military equipment from the United States.
All this notoriety as able negotiators has enabled the Saudis to create peace in African nations like Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Before the Saudis became active, other Gulf oil countries like Qatar, Oman and the Gulf Cooperation Council or GCC have negotiated peace or trade deals with foreigners in the West and Africa. Iran used to participate in all this but in the last decade Iran has become a pariah state. Eventually Iran will sort itself out. This will be with the help of Qatar who will help get its old friend, ally and trading partner Iran back in business.
The Persian Gulf oil states are extremely wealthy but militarily weak. They depend on adroit diplomacy and powerful friends to survive. Thus, despite the Ukraine War, the Saudis remain on good terms with the Russians, Ukrainians and Americans. Saudi diplomatic, military and economic connections with the United States keep the kingdom safe and its wealth secure.
The Saudis are also new at this international diplomacy, and do not have a legacy of past failures or disappointments. That will change as long as the Saudis remain active in regional and global affairs. That is difficult to avoid because as a major oil exporter the Saudis have customers worldwide.
Closer to home the Saudis have an enduring problem with their southern neighbor Yemen. The Shia Houthi rebels there have been at war with Saudi Arabia for over two decades. The Houthis are now trying to disrupt maritime traffic in the Red Sea, which directly impacts the Saudi economy.
The Iran-backed Shia Houthi militia is losing but refuses to make peace out of fear of the consequences. Yemen occupies the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula while Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States occupy the rest, including all the oil wealth. In Yemen the Houthi militia used their Iran-supplied rockets and missiles to fire at merchant ships heading up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. One of those missiles landed in Israel. Because of all this Houthi mischief both Israel and the United States launched air strikes on Houthi operations as well as economic targets in Yemen. Iran is no longer able to resupply the Houthis with missiles and UAVs because Israeli air strikes destroyed key elements of the Iranian missile production industry. It’s been a bad year for the Houthi militia and several countries planned to make 2025 an even worse year.
A century ago, before oil income dominated Arabian politics, Yemen was the Arabian peninsula’s land of promise. Yemen is the only portion of the Arabian Peninsula that receives enough rain for crops. Since World War II Iran has become wealthy and powerful because of oil wealth but made so much trouble that since 2015 economic sanctions have crippled the economy and military adventurism has brought devastating armed reprisals.
Yemen proved to be an embarrassment for Iran and the Saudi/UAE-backed Yemen government. The other Arabs are not willing to suffer the heavy casualties a quick victory would require over the militant Yemen Houthis. The war dragged on into 2025 but is now faltering because Iran is no longer manufacturing missiles for the Houthis to use. Iranian withdrawal from Houthi support occurred over the last year because Iran was overwhelmed by sanctions and Israeli reprisals.
There are also growing popular protests in Iran against the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Despite that, Iran smuggled in more and more weapons. These were not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war but for use against targets designated by Iran. Until late 2017 there was not much progress in the Yemen fighting, a development that favored Iran. But by early 2018 the Shia rebel coalition began unraveling and Iran suddenly had its own domestic uprising to deal with back home. Yemen unrest evolved into a full-scale civil war in 2015. That was when Houthi Shia rebels sought to take control of the entire country. Neighboring Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, quickly formed a military coalition to halt the Houthi advance. The Arab coalition succeeded and by 2016 pro-government forces were closing in on the rebel-held capital. The coalition did not go after the capital itself because of the expected heavy casualties and property damage in the city. The coalition concentrated on rebuilding the Yemeni armed forces, recruiting allies from the Sunni tribes in the south and eliminating al Qaeda and ISIL groups that had grown stronger as the Shia rebels gained more power. As the fighting intensified in early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing.
Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to seal the deal. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since. This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This whole nation idea is still looked on with some suspicion by many in the region. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate or their modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.
For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Houthi Shia Islamic militants in the north. They have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam religious leader. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962. After 2007 Yemen became the new headquarters of AQAP/Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists. Now there is Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL, and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors. By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerate or even support AQAP and ISIL. The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf state, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Shia rebels were from northern Yemen and controlled the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last two decades the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. More recently, the rebels received longer range ballistic missiles that could hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast.
After the October 2024 Hamas attack on Israel, the Houthi also fired missiles at ships passing the Yemen Red Sea coast controlled by the rebels. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source for Egypt, bringing in nearly $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make that success possible. At the end of 2023 Iran ordered the Yemen rebels to open fire on shipping in the Red Sea, which moves along the Yemen coast on its way to or from Saudi ports or the Suez Canal. Ships unable to use the canal must take the longer route around the southern tip of Africa. This takes more time and increases costs for the shipping company and their customers. In 2024 Americans and Israeli airstrikes devastated ports on the west coast of Yemen and destroyed most of the missiles smuggled in from Iran. Meanwhile Iran was running out of missiles and a tighter naval blockade reduced the number of weapons reaching the Shia Houthi militia in Yemen.
The Saudis are stuck in the middle of this mess economically, politically and militarily. While the Saudis have been able to help negotiate peace deals for many other countries, they have been unable to placate or defeat their southern neighbor.