For much of the summer, the Trump administration has sought to keep its war with Iran from activating the Middle East’s other fault lines.
The Saudi-Houthi front in Yemen, largely quiet since a 2022 truce, stayed mostly contained. In Lebanon, Washington brokered a deal in June intended to move Israel and Hezbollah — a designated terrorist organization by the United States — away from renewed war. And after weeks of direct U.S.-Iran fighting around the Strait of Hormuz, hostilities eased during August.
Over the past two weeks, each of those restraints has started to give way.
U.S. and Iranian forces are again trading attacks around Hormuz. The Iran-backed Houthis have resumed large-scale strikes on Saudi Arabia and seized key positions around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, in the most serious escalation with Riyadh in years. And in Lebanon, Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah are exchanging attacks around territory that was meant to be addressed under the U.S.-led deal.
The result is a growing problem for Washington: how to ramp up pressure on Iran without causing conflicts involving Iran’s regional allies to heat up as well.
The Trump administration insists that key parts of its strategy are holding.
“Both sides remain in constructive dialogue, and the next round of talks will happen in Rome soon,” a State Department spokesperson told MBN, referring to U.S.-mediated talks between Israel and Lebanon that began in mid-April.
A senior U.S. official offered an even more confident assessment of the Gulf.
Hormuz is now “completely open and controlled by the United States Navy,” the official told MBN, saying millions of barrels of oil were passing through it each day, even as public ship-tracking data shows sharply reduced traffic.
The official added that the U.S. blockade of Iranian shipping was preventing goods from reaching Iran while allowing traffic to non-Iranian ports, and predicted that transit would continue to increase after the Navy de-mined the strait.
But that confidence sits alongside a second assessment: that Tehran is again leaning on its regional network of proxies to fight back against U.S. allies.
“The Houthis, in many ways, are agents and proxies of the Iranians,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Florida on Tuesday after the first Houthi attacks. “I think behind some of this is clearly the Iranian hand.”
Rubio said the United States was watching the conflict “very, very closely” and emphasized its “very strong defensive military relationship” with the Saudis.
Pakistan this week also conveyed a Saudi warning to Tehran to rein in the Houthis, according to Reuters, which cited Iranian sources as saying Tehran had encouraged the attacks on Saudi Arabia, promised additional arms and funding and sent key Iranian commanders to Yemen as advisers.
Iran, for its part, publicly maintains that it does not control the Houthis, a designated terrorist organization by the United States. But it is now also explicitly linking the region’s other conflicts to its broader war with the United States. A spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a designated terrorist organization by the United States — said on Wednesday any settlement with Washington will require, among other things, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and an end to the Saudi blockade of Yemen.
The Saudi-Houthi front is now in its sharpest escalation in years.
Houthi missiles and drones struck southern Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, wounding 73 people and hitting energy infrastructure, with further attacks Wednesday and Thursday. The strikes were condemned by the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, which said that the Houthis would have to “bear the consequences of their aggression.”
The escalation has also prompted Riyadh to seek direct U.S. help. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called President Donald Trump twice Thursday and urged him to order strikes on the Houthis, Axios reported, citing American officials. Trump declined, with the administration instead stepping up intelligence and targeting support while seeking to avoid opening another direct front.
The fighting reverses years of relative quiet following a 2022 U.N.-brokered truce, which largely halted sustained Houthi cross-border attacks and Saudi airstrikes.
The conflict is also shifting toward a strategically vital area.
After seizing the Red Sea port of Mocha, the Houthis took Dhubab and reached Perim Island in the strait on Friday, giving them control of positions overlooking one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. With disruption around Hormuz already forcing Saudi Arabia to route more oil west through the Red Sea, the advance threatens one of the kingdom’s key alternative export corridors.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said this week that the Houthis had “opened a Pandora’s box” by reigniting the long-simmering conflict, even as he stressed that Riyadh remained open to diplomatic alternatives to war.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, a separate U.S.-backed effort is also under strain.
The June 26 U.S.-led deal between Israel and Lebanon prescribed gradual Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon while the Lebanese army expands its control and disarms Hezbollah. Instead, the highly strategic Ali al-Taher ridge, seized by Israel on Friday, has become a new focal point of confrontation.
Renewed Israeli strikes on the nearby Lebanese town of Kfar Rumman killed 12 people on Monday, including two children, according to the Lebanese government. The Israeli military said it targeted Hezbollah members after the group launched explosive drones against Israeli troops around the ridge.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun accuses Israel of undermining the U.S.-brokered security framework and negotiations, as well as America’s efforts to stop escalation “in the south [of Lebanon] and the region as a whole.”
But Israel says the fighting is a consequence of Hezbollah’s failure to disarm.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said last week that Israeli forces would not leave the “security zone” they established in southern Lebanon in early March until Hezbollah was disarmed and threats to northern Israel were removed.
Asked by MBN whether either side was violating the June deal or whether the renewed fighting could complicate the wider Iran conflict, the State Department spokesperson did not directly answer, saying only that talks were ongoing.
U.S. officials are far more emphatic about the fight against Iran itself.
“Iran was completely decimated militarily by Operation Epic Fury,” the senior U.S. official told MBN, adding that Tehran was now being “strangled economically” by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Operation Economic Outcast and what the official described as “one of the most successful blockades in history.”
But that assessment comes even as U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange attacks at sea. American forces destroyed five Iranian oil tankers Tuesday, including vessels near Kharg Island and in the Gulf of Oman, after Iran twice fired ballistic missiles at a U.S. Navy warship, the U.S. military said.
The continued fighting points to a broader dilemma for Washington.
U.S. officials say they have secured Hormuz and are ramping up pressure on Tehran. But renewed Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, their advances toward Bab el-Mandeb and the escalation in southern Lebanon show how much less control Washington has over the conflicts reemerging on the periphery of the Iran war.
