After a four year truce, Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have returned to open conflict in Yemen.
Last month, the Saudis conducted over 250 air raids that killed over 150 civilians according to the Yemen Data Project, while the Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, relied on drone and missile attacks targeting Saudi oil infrastructure and more recently civilian airports, in attacks that killed 14 people.
A growing Saudi-led coalition to defeat the Houthis is coalescing, but at this point President Donald Trump has resisted requests from Saudi Arabia to resume airstrikes on Yemen, following the truce he concluded with the Houthis in May 2025. That’s not to say the U.S. is staying on the sidelines, of course; Washington has already sent 200 military and intelligence advisors to assist the Saudis.
Mainstream coverage of further U.S. intervention largely misses the critical and concerning context of America joining yet another war against the Houthis: the last Saudi-led coalition war led to one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history, aggravated by numerous alleged Saudi war crimes. And neither that campaign nor Washington’s recent standoff with the Houthis did much of anything to slow the group’s advances in Yemen.
So why would we join Saudi Arabia in this war — and why do we treat them as a valued ally in the first place?
These are the questions we posed to Quincy Institute Middle East research fellow Annelle Sheline in the latest episode of Always at War.
Sheline has worked closely on Yemen and is intimately familiar with America's human rights record, having worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor before resigning in March 2024 over America’s blind support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
We asked her about her time at the State Department and why the human rights reports, meant to help enforce rules like the Leahy Law, are so often ignored. What we learned is just how easy it is for these reports to be used to start wars but almost never to end them.
As Sheline put it, human rights reports may be cited as an excuse to hammer U.S. adversaries but are often overlooked or conveniently forgotten when it comes to imposing consequences on U.S. allies, like withholding military support following alleged war crimes. At the same time Annelle’s bureau awarded small pockets of money to journalists or civil society groups working on human rights, the U.S. was sending massive amounts of security assistance to authoritarian governments that kill journalists, like Saudi Arabia.
For Sheline, the math is simple: the U.S. should stay out of Saudi Arabia’s war. The Houthis have repeatedly thwarted U.S. efforts to destroy them, so why try again and risk another disastrous humanitarian crisis? If anything, Sheline believes we ought to push the Saudis toward a negotiated truce, because history has already shown that there is no military solution to Yemen’s profound political crisis.
After all, if America is ever going to end its cycle of permanent war, it’s going to require breaking from the dismal logic of U.S. interventionism that underscored the last decade of Yemen policy — a failing approach that a doddering Joe Biden summarized succinctly late in his term: “Are [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”