Sometimes, disasters can be clarifying. Not so long ago, the Houthi warriors who have ruled northern Yemen for the past decade seemed more like a nuisance to Saudi Arabia than a threat. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was busy glad-handing with tech bros and AI executives, talking up the kingdom’s future as a tourism destination. Then, on Saturday, a Houthi missile struck two terminals in the Saudi capital’s main airport, sending fire and smoke through the halls and causing ceiling tiles to collapse on terrified passengers. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca rolled their suitcases through trails of blood.
Although Houthi strikes are not new in the kingdom, Saturday’s attack on the Riyadh airport, which killed 13 people and wounded hundreds, signaled something different. The Houthis apparently have the ability to evade the kingdom’s dwindling supply of missile interceptors by launching coordinated waves of drone swarms, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia is now a country where the ruler must shuttle among palaces equipped with underground bunkers.
“Total disbelief,” a friend in Riyadh told me. “I don’t think people thought this could happen to them.”
Saudi Arabia cannot realize the crown prince’s dreams of economic and social transformation—or even continue luring foreign investors—if this kind of mayhem becomes routine. But the Houthis have become ever more intransigent, and the limits of Saudi Arabia’s ability to contain them ever more apparent.
[Read: The Houthis have a rich sense of irony and timing]
“It is starting to look as if there is no diplomatic third way,” Adam Baron, a fellow at the New America Foundation, in Washington, who specializes in Yemen and the Gulf, told me. “The Saudis will have to try to push the Houthis back militarily or accept a settlement that essentially leaves the Houthis in control of Yemen.”
Both of those possibilities are risky. Experience has taught the Saudis that only a sustained ground offensive will make real headway against the Houthis, who have survived multiple bombing campaigns over the past decade, including last year’s seven-week air war by the United States. But the Saudis don’t have a ground force equal to the task. They depend on the perennially divided armed forces commanded by Yemen’s weak, internationally recognized government, based in the country’s south.
Last month, the Houthis captured the area around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a crucial conduit for global oil supplies, and the Saudis responded by coordinating a new offensive to recapture the lost terrain. That effort has had mixed results; the Saudi-backed forces retook some ground, but the Houthis have unleashed a new level of firepower at the kingdom, including the strikes on the Riyadh airport.
The Saudis hope to build a larger military coalition against the Houthis and have held talks with the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. But those countries have made clear that their support goes only so far. They might be willing to help defend the kingdom’s borders in the event of a major ground incursion (one of the nightmare scenarios being discussed in Riyadh), but they will not become involved in a war to recapture northern Yemen.
This reluctance is rooted in history: The Turks suffered legendary defeats in Yemen in the 17th and 19th centuries. Egypt got drawn into a civil war in Yemen in the 1960s—a draining conflict that has been called Egypt’s Vietnam.
The Saudis could instead seek some kind of settlement with the Houthis in exchange for peace, but this seems equally elusive. The United Nations has been mediating talks in Yemen since 2012. It helped negotiate a 2022 truce that ended a seven-year war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition. But the Houthis, who adhere to a revolutionary ideology rooted in an offshoot of Shiite Islam, have grown steadily more aggressive in their demands.
Although the Houthis are fiercely independent and have their own ideas about ruling Yemen, their strategy appears to be carefully coordinated with Iran, which is still locked in its own struggle against Israel and the United States. Tehran has helped train and arm the Houthis over the years, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers are widely said to be taking part in the current fighting. The Houthis appear to be using fiber optics supplied by China to build a far more sophisticated drone force. All of this makes any kind of reliable settlement with the Houthis more difficult to achieve.
[Graeme Wood: The only thing the Houthis have done successfully]
“If you listen to the speeches by Houthi leaders, they basically say there is no such thing as Saudi Arabia—they see the kingdom as totally illegitimate and want to see it fall,” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “And unfortunately, they are able to draw on a deep well of resentment against the role that Saudi Arabia has historically played in Yemen.”
In recent months, the Houthis have stepped up their demands, insisting that the Saudis withdraw all support from the internationally recognized government in the south, lift all sanctions, and pay reparations. But they have a long-standing habit of moving the goalposts in negotiations.
“What would it take to placate the Houthis?” Haykel asked. “Can you live with them?”
Many Saudis fear the answer is no. But the alternative is a war that could turn the whole country into a battleground.