THE HOUTHIS AND THE POWER VACUUM IN THE ARAB WORLD / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

The Houthis and the Power Vacuum in the Arab World

The Yemeni group's emergence exposes the Arab world’s failure to build a regional balance of power, leaving Iran to exploit the vacuum as Washington increasingly turns to non-Arab powers like Turkey and Pakistan to help fill it.

By: Kamran Bokhari

The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi rebels exposes a strategic weakness of the Arab world. 

Iran is using the conflict to disrupt Red Sea traffic and thus gain leverage in its war with the United States, while the Houthis are using the war to consolidate their power at home. 

The region’s three principal powers – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – will eventually have to reach an understanding with the Houthis that limits their ambitions and weakens their ties to Tehran. 

This plays into Washington’s broader strategy to focus on the Western Hemisphere while enabling regional actors to assume greater responsibility in the Eastern.

Speaking to reporters in Dublin on Sept. 12, President Donald Trump drew a distinction between Iran’s role in the Saudi pipeline attack and the Houthis’ own interests in Yemen. 

Asked whether Iran was behind the attack, Trump said, “I think they are. 

Probably they are,” but added that “the Houthis called us, and they don’t want to fight with us” and that the Saudi-Houthi dispute could be “straightened out.” 

He also said that the Houthis are allowing most ships through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, saying they have “one country that they’re not too happy with” – a clear reference to Saudi Arabia. 

Trump’s remarks suggest that Washington (correctly) sees the Houthis less as an Iranian proxy than as an autonomous actor whose conflict with Riyadh can be mitigated with regional partners playing the lead role.

The Houthis’ goal is to consolidate power in Yemen by eliminating the Saudi-backed government. 

Over the past week, Houthi forces seized the cities of Mocha and Dhubab, as well as Perim Island, effectively securing the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea approaches to Yemen. 

Meanwhile, they have intensified attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure in Abha, Najran, Jazan and along the Riyadh-Medina region of the East-West pipeline, all of which constitutes a viable land-based alternative for oil transport outside the Strait of Hormuz. 

By controlling the Bab el-Mandeb and threatening Saudi energy flows, the Houthis are using the regional crisis to force Riyadh to accept them as Yemen’s rulers.

Before the latest offensive, the Houthis controlled Yemen’s most geopolitically significant territory: the northwestern Red Sea coast, the capital Sanaa and the major port of Hodeida. 

Their opponents were divided between the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government and the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council. 

The rivalry between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi turned violent when the STC launched an offensive into Hadhramaut and al-Mahra in December 2025, prompting a Saudi counteroffensive in January 2026 that ended with the STC losing Aden and most of its territory and ultimately dissolving. 

The result was not a stronger Saudi-backed government but a weakened anti-Houthi camp.

The Houthis have been a problem for Saudi Arabia for nearly two decades. 

Riyadh launched its intervention against them in 2015 after they seized Sanaa during Yemen’s civil war, but roughly seven years of fighting failed to dislodge them from their northern stronghold. 

A U.N.-brokered truce froze the conflict in April 2022, and though there have been minor skirmishes, it has largely held up until the latest flare-up, which has reopened a conflict Riyadh never resolved and exposed the limits of its ability to contain Houthi power.

To be sure, the Houthis have acted opportunistically. 

The Oct. 7 attacks on Israel gave them a chance to confront Israel and disrupt Red Sea shipping in the name of solidarity with the Palestinians, which in turn bolstered their nationalist and regional credentials, weakened their rivals and demonstrated their power beyond Yemen. 

Washington responded to their campaign with Operation Rough Rider, a 52-day air attack in March 2025 that struck more than 1,000 Houthi targets. 

They regrouped after the May 2025 ceasefire and resumed their campaign. 

But when the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran in 2026, the Houthis largely stayed out of the fight. 

This brought home the fact that they cooperate with Tehran when it serves their interests. 

They have no desire to be a traditional Iranian proxy.

For Saudi Arabia, the fight against the Houthis was supposed to help Riyadh develop the military capacity to defend its own neighborhood without the United States. 

Its failure proved it couldn’t. 

Later, in 2019, when Iranian attacks brought roughly half of Saudi oil production to a halt, Washington's response was fairly limited. 

These developments convinced Riyadh that it needed a more formal security agreement with the United States. 

Thus, it began talks with Israel as per the Abraham Accords framework, whereby it would normalize ties with Israel in exchange for a U.S. defense pact and other strategic concessions. 

The Oct. 7 attacks ultimately killed the Saudi-Israeli diplomatic process, and Riyadh has since tried to revive its efforts to secure a U.S. security umbrella.

As Saudi Arabia sought greater American security guarantees, the Trump administration rolled out a new geostrategy that sought to shift greater responsibility for regional security to U.S. allies and partners. 

Under this burden-sharing approach, Washington would help end the war in Gaza and confront the threat posed by Iran, but it expected regional powers to assume greater responsibility for managing security. 

Riyadh clearly didn’t have the capacity to go it alone, so it turned to Pakistan, its long-standing security partner, and signed the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement in September 2025, committing each country to treat aggression against one as aggression against both.

But the agreement with Pakistan alone could not solve Saudi Arabia’s strategic problems because Pakistan is far away and has its own political, economic and security challenges to deal with. 

Turkey, by contrast, is a rising regional power, particularly as Iran has been weakened, a NATO member and a major U.S. partner with advanced military capabilities and an advantageous geographic position. 

This helps explain why Riyadh expanded the arrangement with Pakistan in August, forging a trilateral framework called the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement in which an Arab heavyweight, a South Asian player and a rising West Asian power could pool their capabilities.

Operationalizing the agreement into an integrated force structure will be a longer-term endeavor. 

It offers little immediate relief to the current Houthi problem in Yemen; neither Turkey nor Pakistan has an interest in fighting the Houthis on their own turf. 

Turkey’s priorities lie in stabilizing Syria and exploiting Iran’s weakness in Iraq, and while Pakistan will commit additional troops in defense of Saudi territory, it is unlikely to send soldiers into Yemen itself. 

The accord, then, is the foundation for a future regional balance of power, but it does not solve Riyadh’s immediate problem of containing and ultimately reversing Houthi ascendancy in Yemen.

If the Houthis cannot be dislodged militarily, negotiation may become the most practical alternative. 

This would require treating the Houthis as the de facto power in Yemen and creating a power-sharing agreement that reflects as much. 

It would be a long-term project, but Turkey’s recent outreach to a rival camp in Libya shows that adversaries can become allies when the situation so dictates. 

The Houthis’ relationship with Tehran also makes such an outcome plausible.

Zaydism, the branch of Shiite Islam practiced by the Houthis, is generally considered theologically and historically closer to Sunni Islam than Twelver Shiism, whose stronger sectarian ties can reinforce Tehran’s appeal. 

This leaves Arab and Yemeni identities with greater potential to counterbalance Iranian influence among the Houthis than among some other Shiite movements in the region, which have shown greater willingness to subordinate Arab identity to sectarian affinity and accept Persian leadership despite the ethnic divide. 

At the same time, the Houthis have used Iran’s "axis of resistance" to advance their own interests rather than simply serving as an Iranian proxy. 

Taken together, these factors suggest that a negotiated settlement could loosen the Houthis’ ties to Tehran and draw them toward a more autonomous role within Yemen’s political system and the region’s emerging security architecture.

The Saudi-Houthi conflict ultimately exposes the deeper problem facing the Arab world. 

Without a credible regional balance of power, neither Saudi Arabia nor its partners can prevent actors from exploiting the region’s strategic vacuums. 

The Houthis have shown that an indigenous movement can leverage Tehran’s support without becoming an Iranian proxy. 

The trilateral defense pact offers the beginnings of a regional mechanism for addressing this imbalance, but turning it into a functioning security architecture will require sustained regional diplomacy.