“The Iranian Empire”: In Yemen, the Houthi gamble (2/5)

Tehran's regional policy over the past twenty-five years has obeyed a clear logic: to establish itself on the bottlenecks and corridors of the Middle East, transform straits, land routes, and enclaves into instruments of strategic blackmail, and build a defensive depth around Iran made up of militias and subservient regimes. Within the framework of this policy, Yemen and the Houthis have played a central role.

Yemen, fragmented and failed, constituted the ideal terrain for the Islamic Republic of Iran to install this 'western twin'. The Houthi movement, backed by a Zaydi matrix and a malleable anti-imperialist grammar, offered Tehran a proxy capable of: holding the capital Sanaa; controlling a large portion of the Red Sea coast; and threatening Bab el-Mandeb with missiles, drones, and booby-trapped boats.

Bab el-Mandeb thus becomes a strategic lever, a variable that Iran can activate according to the pressures it faces: sanctions, Israeli escalation, tensions with Riyadh, confrontation with Washington. Tehran's message is as follows, invariable: if you touch Iran, you will suffer the consequences for your global trade. In this sense, the Houthi attacks of 2023-2024, reactivated in 2025 under the pretext of Gaza, were far from isolated acts: they reflected the Iranian doctrine according to which Bab el-Mandeb is the maritime extension of its deterrence system.

The turning point in Tehran's favor was undoubtedly the assassination of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2017, when the Houthis coldly eliminated the former president who was preparing to reconcile with Riyadh. His death closed the door to a national political solution. It largely benefited the Houthis — and therefore Iran — in the short term, much like the assassinations of Rafic Hariri, the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the disappearance of Yasser Arafat. Saleh's death ruined the possibility of a unified Yemen and trapped Tehran in an alliance with a radical and chaotic — almost caricatural — movement impossible to integrate into a regional compromise.

However, the anti-Houthi front fragmented with: the rise of the Southern Transitional Council, supported by Abu Dhabi; the Saudi military withdrawal after its disastrous 2015 offensive and the beginning of a dialogue with Tehran; the collapse of the fiction of a unified state; and increased international pressure on the Houthis, particularly through Israeli and American strikes and international sanctions.

No matter... Although shaken, Tehran's proxies are still standing: the north of the country remains under their control, their security apparatus functions, their capacity for disruption remains intact, and rhetorically, they remain a link between Iran and the Red Sea. The internationally recognized government, meanwhile, is reduced to a fiction.

The Iran-Saudi agreement of 2023, negotiated under Chinese auspices, ended seven years of rupture. It aimed not so much to reconcile two existentially rival powers, but to freeze a front that neither was able to win. Riyadh wanted to exit the Yemeni quagmire, reduce drone strikes on its infrastructure, and protect Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030. Tehran wanted to gain implicit recognition of its gains in Yemen and Iraq, reduce its isolation, and avoid an American escalation.

But the truce has resolved nothing. It frames Houthi nuisance without ending it, limits Iranian ambitions without disarming them, and creates an unstable balance. Above all, it protects Saudi Arabia from Iranian retaliations on its territory in the context of an Israeli-Iranian conflict. Moreover, Riyadh has no interest in reopening a war in Yemen from which it emerged exhausted, and Iran, weakened by Israeli strikes, does not have the means to broaden the conflagration. Yemen thus becomes a controlled, useful but contained, tension zone that both capitals prefer to maintain at low intensity.

Next article: The land corridor and the ambition of the Levantine Empire

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