After the Trump administration inadvertently texted its war plans to this magazine’s editor in chief last month, people all over the world—including spies, fighter pilots, and foreign leaders—had to wonder if their secrets were safe with the United States government.
But the humiliating gaffes of Signalgate are only one measure of the Donald Trump team’s recklessness. The air war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels—the subject of the texts—could end up becoming a scandal in its own right, and for similar reasons. It is a war with no apparent strategy apart from Trump’s hunger for what he calls “swift and unrelenting action” on almost every front. And it is likely to backfire badly if the administration doesn’t change course.
Since mid-March, the U.S. military has hurled more than $200 million worth of missiles, bombs, and rockets into the remote deserts and mountains of Yemen, in what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dubbed, with sublime ahistorical clumsiness, Operation Rough Rider. The name is meant to evoke Theodore Roosevelt’s vainglorious 1898 cavalry charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. Hegseth may not know that the U.S. suffered twice as many casualties as the Spanish in that long-ago battle, the prelude to a needless and costly war of aggression.
Trump has said that he aims to “completely annihilate” the Houthis, who, ostensibly in defense of Palestinians, have been attacking ships in the Red Sea for the past 18 months. The new air strikes are much more intensive than those the Biden administration carried out last year and include efforts to assassinate Houthi commanders (one of these commanders was mentioned in the Signal text chain, though not by name).
The strikes have done some damage to the Houthi war machine, killing some officers and fighters and driving the rest underground. But air power alone rarely wins wars, and the Houthis have the advantage of a remote, mountainous hinterland where much of their arsenal is probably safe from harm. If they withstand the current stepped-up campaign, “they could come out of it politically stronger and with a more solidified support base,” Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen analyst and the founder of the Basha Report, a risk-advisory firm, told me.
[Read: The Houthis are very, very pleased]
To take territory from the Houthis would require a ground offensive. Operation Rough Rider does not include one. Nor has there been any diplomatic engagement with the Houthis’ divided but numerous domestic rivals in the south and west of the country. What is known, politely, as Yemen’s “internationally recognized” government is based in the south and dependent on foreign support. “The Americans are not even answering our questions,” an official there told me. “There’s no diplomatic presence at all.”
In fact, the Trump administration has accidentally damaged its Yemeni allies: The south-based government depends on aid programs from USAID that Elon Musk and his minions have axed, a Yemeni official told me. Last year, USAID sponsored a new effort to unify and strengthen the Houthis’ domestic rivals, but DOGE pulled the plug on that too.
Trump may intend to kill the Houthis’ supreme leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi. That would certainly knock the Houthis back a bit, and it would give Trump a TV-friendly moment of triumph like the one he scored five years ago with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian spy chief who masterminded many attacks on Americans over the years.
But if Trump and his team think they can decapitate the Houthis and then ignore them, they need to pay more attention to history. The Houthi movement has been repeatedly decimated in war over the past two decades, and each time it has emerged stronger. The group’s first leader, Abdul-Malik’s older brother Hussein al-Houthi, was killed in 2004 during a brutal offensive by the Yemeni military. The movement replaced him very quickly and would no doubt do the same for the current leader.
Finding a real solution to the Houthi problem would not be easy. It would require a sustained effort to organize the Yemeni opposition, now split into eight armed factions backed by rival foreign patrons, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Those divisions undermined the Saudi-led effort to topple the Houthis that began in 2015, left much of Yemen in ruins, and helped push many people into starvation. But the Pentagon could succeed where Riyadh failed if it were to guarantee air support for the Yemeni ground forces and shield the Gulf from Houthi retaliation, according to Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
This may seem like a heavy lift, even for an administration less mercurial than Trump’s. Joe Biden didn’t really try to tackle the Houthis, preferring to support a long-standing United Nations–backed effort to reach a peace deal between the group and its Yemeni rivals.
But the United States may well have to fight the Houthis eventually. They have grown steadily more dangerous, as they continue to obstruct a vital waterway that carries about 15 percent of the world’s trade via the Suez Canal. And other potential targets abound in the Red Sea, including at least 14 underwater data cables (almost as many as run across the northern Atlantic). The Houthis claim to have destroyed 17 Reaper drones since the Red Sea conflict began, worth about $30 million each. The Pentagon’s supply of missiles and shells was running very short even last year, as Mark Bowden wrote in this magazine in December. And the cost of Operation Rough Rider could have already topped $1 billion, by one estimate.
[Read: The crumbling foundation of America’s military]
Recently, the Houthis appear to have gained hydrogen-fuel-cell technologies that would make their drones, which have already struck Israel, more difficult to detect and capable of flying much farther. The Houthis now manufacture their own weapons, in an amazing turnaround for a group that once depended on stolen Yemeni army stocks and Iranian donations. They even export small arms to the Horn of Africa, another region burdened by war and terrorism.
The Houthis’ ability to hamper global commerce has made them more and more useful to nations aligned against the United States and Europe. Foremost among these is Iran, whose other allies in the “Axis of Resistance” have been damaged or destroyed recently. Russia has supplied some weapons to the Houthis and last year came close to providing them with advanced anti-ship weapons in retaliation for American assistance to Ukraine. Russian ultranationalist figures such as Aleksandr Dugin have praised the Houthis for their bravery and held them up as resistance fighters against the West. China has sold the Houthis weapons components that are useful for their arsenal.
The Houthis are thrilled with their new relevance, as their leader has made clear in his frequent unhinged speeches. They have redoubled their efforts to indoctrinate young people into their revolutionary ethos, which is rooted in Zaydism, an offshoot of Shia Islam. They gained a global following last year because of their defiant stance on Gaza, which set them apart from most of the Arab world’s leaders. And they have tried to capitalize on that popularity, even though their ideology of religious dictatorship and anti-Semitism isn’t always an easy sell.
Last month, as American bombs were falling, the Houthis hosted their third Palestine conference in Yemen’s capital, a four-day event that drew guests and speakers from around the world. (Among the oddballs who showed up was Jackson Hinkle, a 25-year-old Moscow-based influencer from Southern California who calls himself a “MAGA Communist” and has somehow drawn almost 3 million followers on X.)
Perhaps the Houthis’ most important asset is asabiyya, a quality that was identified centuries ago by the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun as the binding force of empires. It means “group cohesion,” or “solidarity.” The Houthis may be a band of fanatics in the wilds of Yemen, but they are more unified than their enemies, and that has allowed them to grow and thrive.
[Content truncated due to length...]
Your "friend", huh
Stop acting in ways that violate the social contract and stuff like this will stop happening to you. I have no idea, but I strongly suspect that it's exactly what it looks like: You're blocked wholesale from the instances in question in some way which doesn't show in the modlog.
I don't even really know how to trace back through all the hall-of-mirrors of what original behavior led to what drama led to what sanctions led to what further drama. Regardless, step 1 is to just openly ask, hey what behavior should I be doing, what should I not be doing. And then just go from there and cooperate with the other people on the network to do the first and not the second. Lemmy is pretty frickin lenient with anyone who is willing on some level to engage with that whole process openly.