Houthis' escalating attacks challenge Saudi Arabia's economic ambitions

A week before the end of September, students across Saudi Arabia received an unsettling message: stay home, take your classes online, the Houthi threat is too immediate. The next day, the all-clear came. Schools reopened. Life resumed its ordinary rhythm. But the oscillation itself—the whiplash between caution and normalcy—tells the real story: the Houthis have made themselves a permanent fixture in Saudi Arabia's daily calculations.

Since July, the Iranian-backed militia operating from Yemen has escalated a campaign of missile and drone strikes across the border. The attacks are not random. They are methodical, targeting infrastructure that matters. The Houthis have also seized territory along Yemen's coast and taken control of several Red Sea islands, positioning themselves to monitor the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—the narrow waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and through which a significant portion of global maritime commerce flows. The strait's Arabic name means "gate of tears," and for Saudi Arabia's economic planners, the metaphor has become literal.

At stake is Vision 2030, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's sweeping blueprint to wean Saudi Arabia off its addiction to oil revenues and build a diversified economy. The plan requires one thing above all: stability. What the Houthis are delivering is the opposite. Their attacks have already damaged the East-West pipeline, a 1,200-kilometer artery that was supposed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz—itself a chokepoint made treacherous by broader regional tensions involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. Though reports suggest the pipeline has resumed operation, the vulnerability remains exposed. Andrew Leber, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes the Houthi strategy as a "one-two punch"—pipeline attacks combined with control of the Red Sea passages. The effect is to squeeze Saudi Arabia's oil export options from multiple directions at once.

The kingdom's search for allies has yielded little comfort. The United States, Saudi Arabia's traditional security partner, has offered intelligence and reconnaissance support but nothing more. President Trump appears unwilling to commit to direct military action against the Houthis. The reasoning is partly practical: the U.S. military is already stretched thin by its campaign against Iran, with reported shortages of sophisticated interceptors, Patriot missiles, and cruise missiles. Opening a new front in Yemen, where the Houthis operate, would mean confronting Iranian interests directly—a prospect Washington is not eager to embrace. The Council on Foreign Relations has noted that airstrikes alone cannot solve the Houthi problem; what would be needed is a large, coordinated ground operation to push the militia out of the territories they have recently claimed. Saudi Arabia itself learned this lesson the hard way. Between 2015 and 2022, a Saudi-led coalition, backed by the United States and the United Arab Emirates, fought the Houthis without achieving decisive victory. The campaign exposed the limits of Saudi military power when facing an adversary that does not need to win a conventional war—only to survive and inflict enough damage to disrupt the other side's plans.

Europe has made some gestures. Since early 2024, Operation Aspides has involved European naval forces protecting international shipping in the Red Sea. France has announced it will deploy soldiers, radar systems, and air defense capabilities to protect the Saudi port of Yanbu, the terminus of the East-West pipeline. Italy has said it will secure passage for its own merchant vessels. These moves have been welcomed in Riyadh, but experts are skeptical they represent a fundamental shift. Europe, analysts argue, lacks the appetite for the political and military costs of a prolonged conflict in Yemen. The Mecca alliance—a mutual defense pact among Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia formed recently—has consulted on the Houthi threat, but both Pakistan and Turkey are reluctant to be drawn into a direct confrontation with Iran.

Marcus Schneider, who directs the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Regional Peace and Security Project in the Middle East, frames the dilemma starkly: "The escalation in Yemen is drawing the Saudis deeper into the regional war, a war that Saudi Arabia actually wanted to prevent." The kingdom needs stability for Vision 2030 to succeed. Instead, the outlook is moving in the opposite direction. Military solutions have proven insufficient or unattainable. This leaves diplomacy as perhaps the only remaining avenue. Abdulghani al-Iryani of the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies has noted that the Houthis themselves have an interest in maintaining relations with Saudi Arabia—Yemen is economically dependent on the kingdom for humanitarian aid and as a labor market for migrant workers. Yet Saudi Arabia's recent attempts to curb Houthi influence through diplomatic channels and by unifying fractured Yemeni government forces have shown their limits. The militia's current territorial advances suggest that the old playbook no longer works. What comes next remains unclear, but the window for military solutions appears to be closing.