At a May 6 press conference with the Canadian prime minister, US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis (Ansar Allah). Trump said the group had agreed to end attacks on the US Navy and maritime shipping transiting the Red Sea in exchange for an immediate halt to US airstrikes in Yemen. Each side claimed the other had backed down. The Houthis quickly reserved the right to continue attacks on Israel, whose ongoing destruction of Gaza was the purported impetus for their attacks in the Red Sea.
April was the deadliest month of airstrikes in Yemen since 2017 – the US has conducted over a thousand since mid-March – but Houthi power remains entrenched, its drone and missile capabilities weakened, but intact. The suspension of the troubled US operation dampens expectations of a ground offensive by anti-Houthi forces and augurs the resumption of a Saudi plan to end the country’s civil war – or even a renewed effort by the Houthis to seize lucrative oilfields in Marib and Shabwa.
The timing of the ceasefire announcement was particularly surprising in light of the escalation of violence in recent weeks. On May 4, a Houthi ballistic missile eluded Israeli air defenses and crashed into a parking lot near Ben Gurion Airport. Retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on May 5 and 6 caused massive damage at the Houthi-held port of Hudaydah and Sana’a Airport, putting both out of commission. The US had bombed Yemen nearly continuously, with more than thirty raids in the week leading up to the announcement.
The sudden pause comes amid a flurry of significant diplomatic activity, including US-Iran nuclear talks, and just a week before Trump is scheduled to visit Riyadh. The agreement was facilitated by Omani mediators, with significant pressure from Saudi Arabia to conclude a deal ahead of Trump’s visit. Saudi officials reportedly warned the administration that visiting Riyadh while bombing the Houthis was “playing with fire,” in what seems a stunning admission of the kingdom’s continued vulnerability to Houthi attack. The Houthis later said they had made threats regarding Trump’s visit. The threat carries some weight in light of the group’s appetite for political violence and history of attacking airports. Ben Gurion Airport has been targeted multiple times in the past year. In 2022, the Houthis targeted airports in Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the UAE. Most famously, the group killed 28 people in a 2020 attack on the airport in Aden, timed to coincide with the arrival of cabinet members from the newly formed Yemeni government. The group also has a history of blackmailing Riyadh, leveraging the kingdom’s desire to extricate itself from the Yemeni conflict and focus on economic development. If that is what happened in this instance, the group’s apparent coercive power does not bode well for a balanced negotiated settlement.
President Trump and his family have a long-standing and highly profitable relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has yielded millions of dollars in personal windfalls and lucrative contracts for US defense contractors. Trump has suggested that he could secure up to US$1 trillion for US companies on his upcoming visit to the kingdom. Riyadh, for its part, has long been seeking a more formal defense commitment and greater cooperation on nuclear issues with the US, a prospect that Washington had previously tied to normalization of relations with Israel. This may no longer be the case. Riyadh has reportedly been assured that normalization with Israel will not be on the agenda during the meetings.
The Houthis were reportedly pushed to negotiate by Iran, which has sought to distance itself from the group’s military adventurism and progress nuclear talks with the US and the associated promise of sanctions relief. The US has made clear in public statements that it saw Tehran’s hand in the Houthi Red Sea attacks, and may have been seeking to pressure a weakened Iran into negotiations by attacking the group’s only intact regional ally. They likely had this the wrong way round. Iran has long sought to avoid direct confrontation with the US, and has a far lower threshold for risk-taking than the Houthis, who have been emboldened by a decade of successful military conflict. The group has benefited enormously from Iranian military support and expertise, but their value to Tehran has primarily been as a thorn in the side of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iran has surely noticed that over the past eighteen months that its “Axis of Resistance” can function as a liability as well as an asset. Further, it has recently had a warming of relations with Saudi Arabia following a 2023 detente. In short, the deterrent value of openly backing the Houthis may be less attractive for Tehran at present, given both the risks of association and the potential economic benefits of sanctions relief and foreign investment.
The US had its own reasons for wanting a ceasefire. From the outset, Operation Rough Rider has been a public relations disaster. On the face of it, attacking the Houthis furthered US regional objectives, including, notably, defending Israel, pressuring Iran, and combating terrorism. The initiation of US airstrikes against the group under the Biden administration offered both political cover and an opportunity for partisan one-upmanship. They were also internationally defensible, given the attacks on merchant shipping –Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was “doing the entire world a favor.” But the first strikes were accompanied by an embarrassing disclosure of operational plans, which hinted at official ineptitude. The US recently lost two F/A 18 fighter planes, one in a botched carrier landing and one that fell overboard as the ship took evasive action; a third was lost in December to friendly fire. The Houthis have shot down seven US drones worth some US$200 million since March, and the costs of the operation have exceeded US$ 1 billion. In short, the military campaign proved neither as safe nor as easy as the administration imagined. Even members of Trump’s own party have begun to question the point of it all.
Perhaps more importantly, informed observers repeatedly pointed out that absent sustained air support and a coordinated ground operation, the airstrikes stood little chance of dislodging the Houthis or curtailing their ability to project power into the Red Sea. The group endured nearly a decade of airstrikes from a Saudi-led coalition, is at home in the rugged terrain of northern Yemen, and is highly ideologically motivated. There has been much hope and speculation that an offensive against the group would occur, aiming to retake the strategic port of Hudaydah or even the capital, Sana’a, and setting the stage for a negotiated peace and an end to the group’s brutal grip on the country. The US reportedly encouraged local armed groups to fight, and the UAE even reportedly approached Washington with a plan for a coordinated offensive, though this was denied by Abu Dhabi. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia sent arms and paid for reinforcements for their respective proxy forces in the country, and local commanders vied for support and waited for word.
But typically for Yemen, the chance of a coordinated attack was probably undone by competition and disagreement between its Gulf backers, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia reportedly disagreeing over the course of action and roles of various forces. The extent of this division cannot be overstated – it is directly responsible for the fractured and dysfunctional Yemeni government, and underwrites similar dynamics in Sudan. Perhaps the US realized that there was not a suitable partner for a broader anti-Houthi operation; it may even have been concerned by the prominent role of Salafi fighters in any proposed offensive. With little hope of broader success, and negotiations with Iran underway, the ceasefire provided an opportunity for disengagement and the pronouncement of victory. Trump’s penchant for transactional relationships, and the opportunity to secure a concession that eluded his predecessor, must have made a deal even more attractive.
The US may have secured a promise that the attacks in the Red Sea will end, but these were never successful as a blockade of Israeli ports, nor were Houthi missile and drone attacks on Israel proper ever particularly effective. Neither has changed Israel’s destructive course in Gaza, if that was ever the intention. But the direct military confrontation with Israel and the US has been a coup for the group’s regional standing and domestic legitimacy, filling the silence from Western capitals with a highly public campaign of Palestinian solidarity. This had real effects, but they were mostly domestic, as the Houthis leveraged their newfound fame to quash domestic dissent, bolster recruitment, and legitimize their authoritarian rule.
The ceasefire leaves the military position in Yemen little different than it was when the US resumed bombing in mid-March. While the Houthis have certainly been hurt by the US airstrikes, the damage has not been sufficient to reorient their activity beyond the Red Sea, and they have conceded little in the deal. Agreeing to suspend attacks on shipping does nothing to curtail their power in Yemen, their hold on Saudi Arabia, or their ability to strike Israel. The group announced the suspension of its attacks on January 16 in response to the Gaza ceasefire, and has not targeted a commercial ship since last November. The group has now demonstrated that it is capable of striking Israel directly, which is more than sufficient for its propaganda. It can now boast of having defied US military might, and seems to have preempted coordination of a broader joint offensive in Yemen.
The future is unclear. Ceasefires are nothing other than a temporary convergence of interest in the suspension of active military operations. On May 9, the Houthis fired another ballistic missile toward Ben Gurion Airport, following news of a new offensive in Gaza. If the Houthis continue to strike Israel, the US could just as easily rejoin the fray, but at present, the threshold for reengagement is the targeting of US citizens.
The stated aims of US intervention in Yemen were simple, restore freedom of navigation and US deterrence, with the accomplishment of the first presumably all that was necessary to demonstrate the second. With a promise that the Houthis will stop shooting and the Iran talks entering a fourth round in Muscat, Trump can claim to have succeeded. But the prospect of further Israeli-Houthi confrontation undermines the agreement, and any assessment of a potential US-Iran deal is impossible until its terms are public and can be compared with the accord Trump walked away from in 2017. Some things are already clear, however. The destruction of Yemeni port facilities and infrastructure, the pernicious impact of sanctions, and the concurrent cuts to aid all threaten the provision of humanitarian relief and promise to intensify suffering among Yemen’s war-weary population.