On October 10, a Houthi missile hit King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. Thirteen people were killed and more than 300 wounded. Two terminals were hit. It was the deadliest single attack on any of America’s Gulf allies in the Iran war. It was also the fourth attack on that airport in five days. The Houthis hit it again the next day.
Asked whether the U.S. would join Saudi strikes on the Houthis, President Trump said, “We may.”
We shouldn’t.
Most Americans have no idea what this war is about. The reporting is thin, and the conflict is now tied into the Iran war. So start with what it is.
What this piece is not claiming
The Houthis are not the good guys. They fire missiles at airports. They run a theocratic police state in northern Yemen. Their slogan is “Death to America, death to Israel.”
This piece is also not claiming the U.S. should never act. If the Houthis attack American ships, the U.S. answers. It has done exactly that.
The claim is narrower. A fight between the Saudi monarchy and a Yemeni militia, over a war the monarchy started, is not a fight Americans should join.
They never got along
There was a quiet period, so people remember the Saudis and the Houthis getting along. They didn’t.
The Houthis are a Zaydi Shia movement from Saada, in Yemen’s far north, on the Saudi border. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Saudi money backed Salafi religious schools in the Zaydi heartland. Locals saw it as an attempt to erase them. That was one of the grievances that built the movement.
The Houthis’ first war wasn’t with the Saudis. From 2004 to 2010, Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, fought six wars against them. He killed their founder, Hussein al-Houthi, in the first one. The Saudis were drawn in briefly in 2009 after Houthi fighters crossed the border.
In 2014 the Houthis took Sanaa. In March 2015, Mohammed bin Salman, then the new defense minister, launched the Saudi-led intervention. It was supposed to take weeks. It took seven years, with airstrikes, a blockade, and a humanitarian catastrophe. Houthi missiles hit Saudi cities and oil facilities. It ended in a 2022 truce and a stalemate.
The “getting along” came after that: a 2023 Saudi–Iran deal brokered by China, Saudi delegations in Sanaa, and talk of salaries and reconstruction money for the Houthis. That wasn’t friendship. The Saudis were paying for quiet.
The Saudis can argue they were answering a coup. The Houthis can argue they were answering decades of Saudi interference. Either way, the full-scale war was MBS’s decision.
Iran’s cheapest investment
Before 2015, the Houthis’ ties to Iran were modest. Seven years of Saudi bombing changed that. Iran supplied the missile and drone technology. The Houthis supplied the motive and the location.
The Saudis knew this. In November 2017, a Houthi missile was fired at the same Riyadh airport, and MBS called it direct military aggression by Iran. Abqaiq was hit in 2019.
So the Saudis didn’t miss the threat. What they misjudged this year was narrower. Saudi intelligence saw Iran pushing the Houthis to enter the war. Some Saudi officials bet the Houthis would act in their own interest and stay out.
They lost that bet.
Then geography did the rest. With Hormuz blocked, Saudi oil leaves by pipeline to the Red Sea. The exit from the Red Sea is Bab al-Mandeb, and the Houthis sit on it. In July they declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia. In August they launched an offensive down the coast. In September they took Mokha and hit the East-West pipeline. In October they hit Riyadh’s airport.
Iran controls one Saudi export route. Its ally sits on the other.
Where the money goes
Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $83.2 billion on its military in 2025, according to SIPRI. That is about a fifth of government spending and the largest military budget in the Middle East.
Israel spent $48.3 billion.
One of those countries struck Iran’s nuclear program. The other couldn’t hold Mokha.
The Saudi government doesn’t publish how its military budget breaks down. Its structure is no secret, though. The regular army and the National Guard run on separate chains of command. The Guard is tribally recruited and exists to protect the royal family. Promotion follows loyalty. A force built that way can’t overthrow the regime, and it can’t win a war either.
The 2015 war proved it. The Saudis fought from the air. Yemeni militias, Sudanese troops, and the UAE did the ground fighting. Houthi raiders crossed into Saudi territory and embarrassed Saudi border units.
The current war shows the same pattern. The Saudis declined to send air support to defend Mokha. Saudi officials say they are running low on interceptors. The kingdom is asking Pakistan for help and recruiting foreign fighters for its Yemeni allies.
A country with a real army doesn’t shop for one abroad.
These are autocracies. Calling the rulers princes and sultans makes them sound more legitimate than they are. It doesn’t change what they are. A military built to keep a family in power is doing its job when it keeps the family in power. Defending the border was never its main job.
Washington already decided
The U.S. has drawn this line before.
In March 2025, after the Houthis threatened to resume shipping attacks, the U.S. launched Operation Rough Rider and bombed them for about two months. In May 2025, the two sides agreed to stop targeting each other. The deal covered American ships and nothing else.
It held. When the Houthis joined the Iran war in late March this year, they fired at Israel, not at Americans. In July, Trump said they had acted “very responsibly” toward the U.S. during the conflict.
On September 10, the day Mokha fell, MBS called Trump twice and asked for U.S. strikes. Trump said no. The U.S. sent more than 100 military advisers to provide intelligence and targeting help. It sent no strike aircraft and no tankers, and it took no direct role. American officials told the Saudis the priority was Iran and Hormuz. Two days later, Trump said, “The Houthis called us and they don’t want to fight with us.”
About ten days after the calls, according to the New York Times, Trump ordered strikes, then reversed himself while the warplanes were being prepared.
Then came the airport attack, and “We may.”
Then nothing. Three days later, Trump still wouldn’t commit, and floated asking Turkey’s Erdoğan to help the Saudis instead. The Houthis promised a “swift and painful” response against the U.S. if it joined in. On October 21, the U.S. ordered non-emergency diplomats out of Saudi Arabia. On October 24, the State Department told Americans to reconsider travel there.
Two weeks later, “We may” had become an evacuation order.
The trillion-dollar policy
MBS pledged to invest around $1 trillion in the United States. He got a White House welcome.
He didn’t get American bombers, and he shouldn’t. If the pledge was meant to buy protection, it didn’t cover this.
Honest caveats
Oil. If the Houthis choke the Red Sea route, world oil prices rise, and Americans pay world prices. That’s a real cost. But the U.S. bombed the Houthis for two months in 2025, and today they hold more of the Red Sea coast than they did then. The Saudis bombed them for seven years. Airstrikes haven’t solved the Houthi problem for anyone.
The dead American. Secretary of State Rubio confirmed a U.S. citizen was killed at the Riyadh airport. That is a tragedy. It doesn’t change the analysis. The Houthis were targeting the Saudis, not Americans. Americans who live and work in a war zone are exposed to that war.
Bases. The U.S. relies on Saudi basing and overflight rights. If American forces there are attacked, that changes things, and the 2025 deal already marks that line.
Israel. Israel handles the Houthis on its own and has done so repeatedly.
Where this leaves the Saudis
The Saudis have three options. They can make a deal with the Houthis, at a price that has gone up. They can build an army that can fight, which takes a decade they don’t have, against an enemy in mountains that broke Egypt’s army in the 1960s. Or they can keep renting one.
None of those options needs American bombs.
A Houthi missile hit an airport in Riyadh, and the American president said “We may.” Then he started pulling diplomats out. The answer should be no. The U.S. made that call in May 2025, and it has been right since.
MBS started a war with an asymmetric enemy he cannot defeat with an army built for regime survival; Washington owes him neither bombers nor an exit strategy.