Study

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.

The year 2025 was a pivotal year in the Middle East, as it shattered a project that had been in gestation since the early 1980s - including the al-Daawa party in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria - Michel Seurat had been one of the first to discuss it in his articles. Later, in the 2000s, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen joined this dynamic, which also attempted to establish itself in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011. It was, incidentally, in 2005-2006, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the assassination of Rafic Hariri, the July 2006 war, and the gradual subjugation of Fatah by Hamas in Gaza, that the Iranian “Shiite crescent” project truly took shape… before receiving de facto legitimacy in 2015 through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iranian nuclear, a golden “gift” from Barack Obama that benefited the imperialist ambitions of the mullahs.