“Wait until you see what we do to Iran,” Trump told his supporters at a Tuesday night rally in Alaska. “We’re going to do a number.” But Trump isn’t singling out the Islamic Republic alone. Yemen’s Ansar Allah militia — the so-called Houthis — have become another increasingly intolerable pain in the president’s side. “They’ve been silent for a long time, but now they’ve emerged again,” Trump wrote of the Houthis in a recent social media post, “purposefully trying to drive up Oil Prices, probably prior to the U.S. Elections.” And, so far, they’ve succeeded.
After largely sitting out the war that began on February 28, the Houthis launched an offensive in early September that culminated in the seizure of key cities and islands along the Red Sea coast — positions that threaten traffic flowing through the Gulf of Aden toward the Suez Canal. A Saudi-supported counteroffensive led by Yemen’s government forces has, over the last few weeks, succeeded in blunting that offensive. But the battle lines are fluid, and the Houthis are by no means defanged:
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