Trump Has Left Saudi Arabia Alone, and Riyadh Must Avenge Its Airport

The first reason is the missile. The Telegraph, drawing on an Israeli intelligence specialist, argued that the strikes on Riyadh’s airport do not show a failure of Saudi air defences or an empty Patriot magazine. Any Saudi battery would spend whatever it had to stop a missile aimed at the capital’s airport. The problem is the weapon. Since the Houthis entered the war on Israel in 2023 they have kept improving their missiles, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has passed on what it learned firing at American bases during its own war with the United States. The Houthis are now modifying their missiles to get past American-made defences, and Saudi Arabia’s top tier, Patriot and THAAD, is American. Yemen’s government has made a similar charge: it says the Houthis converted Iranian air-defence weapons into faster, heat-seeking cruise missiles with Revolutionary Guard help. The airport was not hit once. Missiles struck it on 8 October, killing three Saudis including a Saudia captain, again on 10 October and again on 11 October, and the kingdom was still fending off drones and missiles on the 12th.

That matters to Trump because of his bases. During the Iran war, Iranian fire reached American bases across the Middle East, from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. A Houthi arsenal that can beat Patriot over Riyadh can do the same over an American base.

The second reason is the mission. Before the Iran war, the United States and Israel spent years fighting Iran’s militias. The one real achievement of Trump’s war was that it went after the head, Iran itself. Going back to fight a proxy in Yemen would be a step backwards. It would also hand Tehran the war it prefers: a proxy war in which Iran only has to keep shipping weapons to the Houthis so they can hold out.

The third reason is the ground. There is no force in Yemen today that could encircle the Houthis in 48 hours and pull Abdul-Malik al-Houthi out of Sanaa. Without one, an American air campaign would repeat the same failed policy Trump used against Iran, this time against Iran’s arm instead of Iran. That would be a double failure.

The fourth reason is the arsenal. In August, Reuters reported that the US Army had used virtually all of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles in the Iran war, and one source put Tomahawk use at a little under half of the global supply. A force in that state is in no position to fight on two fronts.

The last reason is the exit. When the United States fought the Houthis before, it decided on its own when to stop. This time Iran would not let it walk away. Even an American withdrawal would carry consequences, with bases still in range.

Each of these reasons is real. Together they still add up to a failure. Washington’s hesitation tells every ally in the Gulf that American protection now comes after a long calculation, and Saudi Arabia is learning that in its own capital. That is why Trump’s caution reads in Riyadh as Trump letting the crown prince down.

CNN’s analysis of the kingdom’s choices reaches the right starting point: there are few of them, and none is good. Saudi Arabia is already at war. It is the Houthis who keep escalating. Before announcing their return to war, they launched a ground offensive, seizing territory around Mokha, the Bab al-Mandeb islands and Taiz, because land taken in a ground offensive is the hardest thing to win back. Saudi-backed government forces began a counteroffensive on 4 October. The airport strikes came after it.

The first option is Washington. The crown prince has already asked Trump for American strikes, and the United States has so far sent more than 100 military advisers to a new joint command instead of aircraft. Even the request carries a cost. The Washington Examiner argued that turning to America amounts to an admission that Saudi Arabia’s alliances have failed. Its partners include France, Turkey and Pakistan, and the Houthis kept advancing anyway.

The second option is a Saudi ground war. The signs of one are there. In September the kingdom’s Grand Mufti, Saleh al-Fawzan, told troops on the border to be ready to give their lives fighting the Houthis, and reports point to new call-ups. Saudi forces could move in alongside the Yemeni government’s troops and the Giants Brigades and close in on the Houthis. That would give Riyadh a force on the ground able to carry out its plans. It is also exactly what the Houthis and Iran want. The Houthis do not take the Yemeni forces they now face seriously; they know who pays them. They want to fight Saudi Arabia itself, and a Saudi army in Yemen’s mountains would give them a war of attrition against the enemy they prefer. Iran would cheer and send more weapons. If the Houthis began to collapse quickly, Iran might strike Saudi Arabia directly. Riyadh would know when it went in and would have no answer to when it could leave.

The third option is Syria. Reuters reported on 7 October that Damascus is weighing military help, from air defence to troops deployed offensively, and a US official said Riyadh had asked for forces; President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s media adviser denied that. This option is the most doubtful. Nothing guarantees that fighters sent from Syria would do better than Yemen’s own government troops. It would also make the war religious: Sunni fighters, some of them veterans of extremist groups once tied to al-Qaeda, sent against the Zaydi Shia Houthis. Their loyalty would be uncertain, and if they failed to win quickly, Saudi Arabia would have started a sectarian war for nothing. We set out that risk in our earlier analysis of Syrian troops in Yemen.

The fourth option is Pakistan, through the Mecca defence pact with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Pakistan has troops in the kingdom, as many as 40,000 by some reports. But watch what happened after The New York Times reported that Pakistani jets were striking the Houthis, a report Islamabad called fabricated. Protests followed. Imran Khan’s party took to the streets, and on 11 October President Asif Ali Zardari approved emergency rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province Khan’s party governs. The timing is a warning against Pakistan going deeper into Yemen. Iran will not strike Pakistan militarily. It does not need to: roughly a fifth of Pakistanis are Shia, and the street is a weapon too.

The last option is to carry on as now: an intense air campaign, reliance on Yemen’s government forces, and hope. That repeats the American mistake in Iran, because in this war the Houthis are Iran.

Saudi Arabia went to war in Yemen in March 2015 to restore the government the Houthis had driven from Sanaa. Seven years of air strikes did not dislodge them. A UN-brokered truce in April 2022 largely held until July 2026, when fighting resumed and the Houthis declared a maritime embargo on the kingdom. In September they took Mokha and the islands of the Bab al-Mandeb strait, and in early October they pushed south of Taiz.

Three things have kept them standing. The first is ground: the Houthis hold Yemen’s northern highlands and the capital, and air power alone has never removed a force dug into terrain like that. The second is Iran, which supplies the designs behind their missiles; analysts say their Toufan missile is a rebranded Iranian Ghadr with a range beyond 1,300 kilometres. The third is time. The Houthis spent the truce years preparing for this fight, and they now choose targets on the basis of intelligence, as Saudi Arabia does. A southern Yemeni official who has fought them for years told CNN they have become more sophisticated, more persistent and better informed. The group Riyadh faces in 2026 is not the one it fought in 2015.