The monthslong war between the United States and Iran came to yet another halt last week, but now a flurry of hostile drones and missiles on another front poses a new challenge for the U.S. in an increasingly fraught Middle East.
On Saturday, the Houthis, the Iranian-backed rebel group that seized Yemen’s capital in 2014 and has fought a Saudi-led coalition ever since, launched missiles and drones at two Saudi Aramco oil facilities, retaliating for a Saudi airstrike on the Houthi-held port of Hodeidah the day before.
The Houthis’ action came in defiance of a threat two days earlier from U.S. President Donald Trump, who vowed that the Houthis would face “major military punishment” if their attacks on Saudi vessels continue. His administration has made preserving freedom of navigation at sea one of its top priorities.
The Aramco attack builds on the Houthi’s renewed firing on Saudi merchant vessels in the Red Sea last week. With shipping on the Strait of Hormuz at all but a total standstill, the Houthis’ actions threaten the only maritime route remaining for the Saudis to export their oil. Their attacks at the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow point at the south end of the Red Sea, are further rattling global energy markets and sending gas prices up again at the pumps in the U.S.
“The terrorist Houthi militia has undertaken a reckless and cowardly act by targeting commercial vessels in the Red Sea,” Major General Turki Al-Malki, the spokesperson for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, wrote in a Friday statement. “Should the terrorist Houthi militia continue in this course of hostilities, an unrelenting, resolute response will be mounted accordingly.”
The Houthis have long been an enemy of Saudi Arabia. After the Shiite movement seized the Yemen capital of Sanaa in 2014, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention the following year, leading a coalition of Arab states to restore the internationally recognized government and curtail Iranian influence in the peninsula. The fighting that ensued cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions before a truce came into effect in 2022.
Trump also took on the Houthis, redesignating them as a foreign terrorist organization in his first month back in office. Then, in March 2025, the U.S. led a bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Rough Rider,” to punish the group for targeting international shipping in solidarity with the Hamas terror group after it invaded Israel on October 7, 2023.
The operation, touted by Trump as a major success, ended with an agreement that neither party would target the other. “They said please don’t bomb us any more and we’re not going to attack your ships,” Trump told visiting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in May 2025.
The Houthis’ breach of that covenant in recent days points to how much risk Iran and its proxies have dealt to the sea routes crucial to the Middle East’s oil exports.
The prospect of a renewed threat to the Bab al-Mandab Strait has been broadly discussed since the U.S. initiated its attacks on Iran in February. Virginia Democratic Congressman Suhas Subramanyam warned in March that the Houthis could “close off the Red Sea and raise costs even more” if the war against Iran continued.
It’s not clear what U.S. punishment of the Houthis would look like. Operation Rough Rider, which analysts described as having little impact on the terror group’s capabilities, cost the U.S. more than $1 billion, including in downed MQ-9 reaper drones and depleted munitions supplies.
The war against Iran has further depleted U.S. stockpiles, and top U.S. officials have warned Trump that further escalation would “dangerously drain” them even more, according to the New York Times. Trump, who has famously cast himself as against foreign wars, could also face a political cost if he widens American action in a conflict that Americans increasingly do not support.
When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the Senate last week, that tension over the war’s continuation was on full display. Democratic senators chided the Trump administration for the ballooning cost of the war, which the Defense Department now estimates at $37.5 billion, and for the deaths of 18 service members. And some congressional Republicans are getting cold feet about the war for those same reasons, especially with the 2026 midterm elections less than 100 days away.
“American soldiers are dying, billions of our taxpayer dollars are being set on fire, and prices at home are skyrocketing,” Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray posted on X.
The price of oil reached $100 a barrel last week as the Houthis threatened shipping in the Red Sea.
