Saudi Arabia Faces the Houthis Almost Alone. Arab States Must Stand With It Now

The Houthi strategy is attrition. By mixing ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, the group forces Saudi Arabia to spend expensive interceptors on every salvo. American media have reported that Saudi interceptor stocks are running short after months of fighting in the wider war with Iran, and the Houthis are acting on that assessment.

The damage is also harder to hide than some social media accounts suggest. Many circulating clips are misleading, and some are recycled from Qatar or Israel. But when agencies such as Reuters and broadcasters such as Al Jazeera confirm footage, the claim that nothing happened no longer holds.

The timing of the latest barrage matters. Reports on September 25 said a Saudi strike had hit a Houthi strategic command centre in Yemen and killed several Houthi commanders. Saudi Arabia rarely locates Houthi command centres, and this was a command post rather than one or two individuals. The furious volleys that followed look like an attempt to bury that news by hitting the most valuable targets the Houthis can reach.

This is a war the Houthis did not wind down. A truce that had largely held since 2022 collapsed in July, when Houthi missiles began targeting Saudi Arabia again and the group announced a naval blockade of the kingdom. On September 16 Saudi Arabia said it had shot down a Houthi drone near Mecca, which it called a red line; the Houthis denied targeting the holy city. For the background to the oil and truce questions, see our earlier analysis of Saudi Arabia’s Houthi dilemma.

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on August 7, under which an attack on one is treated as an attack on all three. On September 25 their military chiefs met in Riyadh. They condemned the attacks on Mecca and on Saudi civilian and economic infrastructure, discussed intelligence sharing, military coordination and integrated capabilities, and declared their resolve to begin implementing the pact’s commitments immediately.

The statement is welcome, but it comes late: Riyadh is under fire while the pact’s members are still discussing how to turn it into a working defensive alliance. Türkiye has said it will move air defences; no Turkish air-defence batteries have been seen defending Saudi cities. Pakistan has said its air force is ready; its aircraft are not in the fight. Every commitment Saudi Arabia has received so far is far smaller than the danger it faces.

Anger at that gap comes from concern for Riyadh. Silent Dossier has criticised the performance of Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman because a kingdom with one of the world’s largest defence budgets should not be this exposed. That criticism does not change the priority now.

The thin pledges reflect more than the state of Saudi Arabia’s friendships. The Houthis are playing a calculated and cynical game to keep those friends out.

On September 10, the day they seized the Red Sea port of Mokha, the Houthis sent a letter to the European Union’s diplomatic service promising that their operations would not target European vessels or close the Bab al-Mandab Strait to international shipping, as the Financial Times first reported. They gave Washington the same assurance. At a meeting arranged by Oman at the US Embassy in Muscat, the Houthis told American officials that they had no intention of attacking US or Israeli ships and remained committed to their 2025 ceasefire with the United States.

In effect, the Houthis have taken the Bab al-Mandab hostage and are bargaining with the world: stay out of this war, and your ships pass safely; it is cheaper than spending your warships on a conflict that is not yours. Europe appears to be listening. Out of the whole continent, only a handful of governments, notably France, Italy and Britain, have stepped forward. The rest have taken the Houthi letter as a reason to stay home.

Saudi Arabia does not want to repeat 2015, when it relied on an air campaign in Yemen that did not end the war. That is understandable. The question is what happens on the ground. A land operation requires time to organise forces, and the kingdom has been built in the last decade as a kingdom of investment rather than a military state.

That shapes every decision. If the Defence Ministry announced a general mobilisation, it would also be announcing, indirectly, that Vision 2030 has become Vision 2035. Some will argue that the kingdom is already paying the price and should mobilise and go in. The religious establishment is moving in that direction. On September 24 Grand Mufti Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan urged troops on the border to be ready to sacrifice their lives against what he called a misguided and deviant faction. A national consensus of that kind should be built on.

No partner’s help can make up for what the United States is withholding. Michael Ratney, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, argued at CSIS on September 23 that Washington is abandoning Saudi Arabia at its moment of need, and gave three reasons.

The first is capacity. The US military is short of some advanced interceptors and cannot easily open a second front while it is still struggling with Iran. The second is domestic politics. President Donald Trump wants to present the war as nearly over before the November midterms, and a Wall Street Journal poll conducted September 16 to 21 put his approval at 37 percent, the lowest for any president heading into a midterm since the Journal’s polling began. The third is the Omani channel: Trump holds a Houthi promise not to hit American and Israeli ships and has no wish to break it.

The result is an ally left to its fate. As Ratney puts it, rather than defending that ally, the president is talking to the ally’s enemy, mostly to persuade it not to attack the United States.

Two further developments could shift the balance. The first concerns the US-Saudi civil nuclear agreement signed in July and sent to Congress on August 25, which lawmakers have 90 days to review. Under the deal, US-linked foreign companies would build facilities in Saudi Arabia and enrichment would take place on Saudi soil, starting below 5 percent with a path to 20 percent after a further study and written agreement. That is new. The United Arab Emirates, by contrast, accepted a programme with no domestic enrichment and imports its reactor fuel.

Now Congress has received a classified intelligence assessment, reported by The Washington Post, concluding that Saudi Arabia has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons. Riyadh has also announced new uranium discoveries. Critics will put it simply: handing 20 percent enrichment to a state that intelligence says has kept the weapons option open is putting petrol next to the fire. Enrichment to 20 percent is still below weapons grade, but it covers most of the technical work needed to get there.

Who pushed this document to Congress, and why now, is not known. Its timing, as Saudi Arabia stands exposed, is hard to ignore.

The second development comes from Israel. On September 26 the Jerusalem Post published an analysis asking why a country like Saudi Arabia finds itself in this position. The kingdom’s main enemy, Iran, is isolated. Saudi Arabia is rich, respected, a leading Muslim state, able to afford a long war and in possession of a strong army. Yet, as the paper put it, Riyadh has no shortage of friends willing to stand beside it, and far fewer willing to enter a war themselves.

The Israeli conclusion is blunt. The battlefield is one, the argument goes: a Houthi movement that consolidates Yemen will fire at Israel next, as it did in support of Hamas. Israel has reportedly already given Saudi Arabia intelligence. It should now go further, offering detection, tracking and interception cooperation without committing troops, because help given at this moment will be remembered when Israel comes to make its own requests. In other words, Saudi Arabia’s isolation is an opportunity to be used.