Trump Attacked Biden's 'Crazy' Yemen War. Now He's Reopening It.
The U.S. is back to bombing the Houthi movement.
Candidate Donald Trump thought that bombing Yemen was "just a failed mentality" when then-President Joe Biden did it. "It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you," Trump said in a May 2024 interview with podcaster Tim Pool.
Trump is now dropping bombs all over Yemen. Over the weekend, the U.S. military launched its first air raids on Yemen in months, hitting targets around the country and killing at least 53 people. Sources in the administration have told The New York Times that the attacks will continue for weeks—and that advisers are pushing for "an even more aggressive campaign" to roll back Houthi control on land, an idea Trump has so far shied away from.
"Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen," Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Saturday. And he threatened a wider war on Monday: "Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible."
Instead of calling Biden a warmonger, as he had a year ago, Trump claimed on Sunday that Biden's "pathetically weak" policy had allowed "unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism" against American shipping.
In fact, those attacks had already stopped earlier this year—thanks to Trump picking up the phone. The Houthi movement, one of two rival governments in Yemen, had tried to blockade the Red Sea in support of the Palestinian cause. After Trump brokered an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire, the Houthis declared an end to their attacks on foreign shipping; American ships then returned to the Red Sea.
But when Israel began blocking all foreign aid into Gaza earlier this month, Houthi spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree announced that the movement would resume its blockade on Israeli ships. After Trump ordered the airstrikes over the weekend, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi declared that his forces would attack American ships too.
Biden's earlier campaign in Yemen had been an expensive failure. After playing whack-a-mole with alleged Houthi bases—and blowing through a year's worth of Tomahawk missile production in one night—Biden admitted that the campaign was not achieving its goals. "Are [the airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes," the then-president told reporters in January 2024. By the end of the year, Houthi missile attacks were regularly hitting Israeli cities.
The U.S. intervention came on the tail end of an even larger war. When Houthi rebels stormed Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, neighboring Saudi Arabia intervened to stop them. Both the Obama administration and the first Trump administration supported the Saudi campaign, which involved a ground invasion and a crushing starvation siege. In 2022, both sides agreed to a ceasefire that has held until today.
Trump's notoriously hawkish national security adviser, Mike Waltz, thinks this campaign will be different. "These were not kind of pinprick, back and forth—what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks. This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out. And the difference here is, one, going after the Houthi leadership, and two, holding Iran responsible," he told ABC on Sunday.
Specifically, Waltz threatened to target "Iranian trainers" in Yemen or "other things that they have put in to help the Houthis attack the global economy," alluding to alleged Iranian spy ships in the Red Sea. Iran has both smuggled weapons to the Houthis and trained Yemeni engineers to produce weapons locally. So far, Iran's government has been trying to wash its hands of the latest Yemeni war. "The Islamic Republic of Iran plays no role in shaping the national or operational policies of any resistance front group," Iranian Maj. General Hossein Salami told reporters over the weekend.
The Trump administration has made it clear that war might come to Iran anyways. Asked by ABC about the possibility that Iran could build a nuclear weapon—Trump is currently trying to open talks with the Iranian government about that issue—Waltz said that Iran would have to give up "everything," including both its uranium enrichment and its missiles, or "face a whole series of other consequences." Iran has negotiated on its nuclear program before, but it considers missiles to be a vital part of its national defense.
In another part of that ABC interview, Waltz offered a criticism of past U.S. policy on Russia and Ukraine that could easily be applied to the Middle East right now. "The strategy of the Biden administration was, was, as long as it takes, as much as it takes, no matter what the timeline is, which is essentially endless warfare, in an environment that…could escalate into World War III," he said. "We can talk about what's right and wrong. And we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground."
