🎥 The
#Houthis, still in flip-flops, have made a
#global_naval_blockade possible;
#Saudi_Arabia cannot win by military means; the
#United_States and
#Israel killed the diplomatic track; the
#Iranian_Yemeni_axis_of_resistance now holds the chokepoints of
#Bab_el_Mandeb and the
#Strait_of_Hormuz, while the
#Israeli_Emirati_axis is putting the
#partition_of_Yemen into practice 👇👇
👈 Double Down News interview with Andreas Krieg
@andreas_krieg, Associate Professor of Defence Studies at King’s College London, member of the directing staff at the Royal College of Defence Studies, fellow of the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies; interviewer Richard Sanders
@PulaRJS,
@DoubleDownNews
✅ 1 — Claims
🔺1.1 A mountain militia in Yemen — many of them still in flip-flops — can impose a naval blockade not only on Saudi Arabia but on the world; the strait is so narrow that even an anti-tank missile is enough.
🔺1.2 That is a strategic disaster for regional stability, national security and the prosperity of the Saudi kingdom; Riyadh has no military way out.
🔺1.3 An Israel–Houthi war is also under way, and the Houthis have seized the resistance narrative; Israel is pressing London, the EU and Washington to sanction them and re-designate them as terrorists.
🔺1.4 Trump does not even know where Yemen is; there is no strategy; everything is ad hoc. Houthi power comes more from the weakness of their antagonists than from any absolute tactical genius of their own.
🔺1.5 Some 377,000 people have died in the civil war, most of them children; for sixty years almost no one has cared about Yemenis — only about supply chains and maritime traffic.
🔺1.6 The Houthis receive Iranian support, but there is no Tehran hotline that can simply tell them to stop; running Yemen is dancing on the head of a snake; no one is truly in charge.
🔺1.7 The UAE branded the Yemen war a “Saudi-led war” while remaining a partner in the fighting and in the atrocities.
🔺1.8 Global trade is being hit by two Middle Eastern wars: Iran constrains Hormuz, the Houthis hold Bab el-Mandeb; the West and its proxies cannot break that grip.
🔺1.9 Yemen is geographically unconquerable; Rome, Britain, 1960s Egypt and 2015 Saudi Arabia all failed in the hinterland; it is an empire’s graveyard in the Afghan sense.
🔺1.10 Saudi Arabia’s “one-month” operation lasted years and made the Houthis stronger; Gaza then emboldened them in the resistance narrative.
✅ 2 — Arguments
🔺2.1 If mountainous terrain, a thin coastal strip and tribal society have blocked every external force, repeating the air campaign is a known error.
🔺2.2 If the Houthis fight with a small, decentralised footprint and know how to buy and co-opt locally, the collapse of the anti-Houthi coalition — ghost soldiers, paper units, no will to fight — explains the advance better than Houthi brilliance alone.
🔺2.3 If the colonial map of highland north versus Aden south is still the main fault line, an artificial “united Yemen” is not a durable war-fighting basis.
🔺2.4 If the Iran–Houthi tie is at arm’s length, and Hezbollah was a direct Iranian creation, reducing the Houthis to Tehran’s puppets is a false explanation.
🔺2.5 If Saleh’s state was built on paper units and layered extortion, the fall of Sanaa was the antagonist’s collapse, not a classic conquest.
🔺2.6 If for Riyadh Yemen is a domestic soft underbelly rather than an external file, 2015 was a security reflex, not imperial expansion — but the tool (remote war) did not match the aim.
🔺2.7 If the UAE landed by sea at Aden, built a southern proxy and stayed out of the mountains, two parallel wars followed: Saudi versus Houthi, and Abu Dhabi consolidating the south.
🔺2.8 If the Houthis have a single anti-imperial narrative while others fight for local interest, their combat force stays more cohesive than the anti-Houthi coalition even when their governance is weak.
🔺2.9 If the blockade of ports and airspace produced a humanitarian catastrophe and pinned the image of starvation on Riyadh, the reputational cost of the war is not separable from the military cost.
🔺2.10 If in 2025 Israel and the United States put sanctions and fifty days of bombing in place of the Omani table, the political track was killed by design, not spoiled by accident.
✅ 3 — Evidence
🔺3.1 Krieg: Rome and Britain never reached the hinterland; Britain stayed around Aden; Egypt and Saudi Arabia failed.
🔺3.2 In 2014 the Houthis took Sanaa because the army and ministries were staffed with ghost soldiers and ghost clerks.
🔺3.3 In 2015 King Salman gave the order; Mohammed bin Salman became defence minister and the GCC entered with an air campaign; the UAE carried out its first major amphibious operation at Aden.
🔺3.4 From 2015 the blockade of the north produced the worst humanitarian crisis of the moment; by 2021 the UN recorded about 377,000 deaths, the indirect share mostly children.
🔺3.5 The UAE built the Southern Transitional Council as an umbrella; its ideological priority was fighting Islah/the Brotherhood, not necessarily the Houthis.
🔺3.6 First Saudi–UAE splits in 2017 and 2019; the 2022 UN ceasefire locked in Houthi control of the highlands and the other side’s hold on the southern plains and coast, and it held on the ground even while missiles were being fired at Israel.
🔺3.7 The UAE pushed proxy influence into Aden, logistics, Socotra and Hadramawt — oil country that Riyadh treats as “its own province”; Krieg’s formula is “two and a half Yemens.”
🔺3.8 The Emirati secessionist axis: Yemen’s STC, Puntland/Jubaland/Somaliland, Sudan’s RSF through to Libya’s LNA; Israel plugged into that axis; Israeli operatives have been reported on Socotra.
🔺3.9 In late 2025 Saudi Arabia struck a UAE weapons shipment to Mukalla/the east; Abu Dhabi said it was pulling back but the proxies stayed; southern protests over rights and pay then targeted Saudi financial weakness.
🔺3.10 Tareq Saleh’s “National Resistance” — 20–25,000 men on paper — dissolved on the west coast in hours; videos that morning and noon showed weapons being sold and pledges of allegiance to the Houthis.
🔺3.11 Riyadh asked Trump to bomb; Washington said no. The Mecca pact with Turkey and Pakistan is signed but not yet ratified or implemented.
🔺3.12 The Houthis hit Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline to the Red Sea; repair will take at least three months; Bab el-Mandeb is closed to Saudi shipping; Hormuz is also a chokepoint.
🔺3.13 In May 2025 in Muscat, a US–Houthi deal: do not hit American ships, and America will not hit the Houthis; Israel was not in the deal and felt stabbed in the back.
🔺3.14 Shipping insurance has risen; even without a shot fired, the choice is a costly Suez transit or a long Cape route; the European consumer pays more and waits longer.
✅ 4 — Conclusions
🔺4.1 The Houthis stand on a narrow chokepoint with cheap technology; “flip-flops on the throat of world trade” is a description of the situation, not a joke.
🔺4.2 Saudi Arabia could manage 2015; it cannot manage 2026: two straits, a wrecked pipeline, a budget deficit, a population of some 35 million, paper proxies and no UAE.
🔺4.3 The UAE as “Little Sparta” has no grand strategy; its skill is managing, dividing and governing below the boiling point; it does not want a stronger Houthi, but it does want Saudi Arabia stuck in an unwinnable war.
🔺4.4 Israel profits from the breakup of states and has entered southern Yemen through the Emirati channel; it is the hidden variable in the equation.
🔺4.5 America leaves its allies without cover in turn: one day fifty days of bombing, one day a Muscat deal, one day a no to Riyadh; the local message is that Washington does not have their back.
🔺4.6 The Houthis say they will hit only Saudi shipping; the market still prices insurance and uncertainty, not verbal promises.
🔺4.7 Houthi governance is not institutional or efficient either; their craft is dancing on the head of a snake and buying silence, not state-building.
🔺4.8 The air-war military solution has failed repeatedly; paid proxies do not fight. The remaining path was an inclusive political process with every faction — and that path was killed in 2025.
🔺4.9 No one is fighting for Yemenis; they are fighting for the strait. So long as Bab el-Mandeb is in Houthi coastal range, every actor has to put that card into the calculation.
🔺4.10 Practical conclusion: two models stand against each other; the Houthis hold Bab el-Mandeb and Iran constrains Hormuz; the Israeli–Emirati secessionist axis breaks the state; and Riyadh is left between them without America.
