Yemen, Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea: Recovering the Strategic Initiative and Curtailing Iran’s Regional Hegemony

Two Analyses, One Unanswered Question

Two recent analyses — by Elise Labott in The Washington Post and Andrew England in the Financial Times — identify the same emerging reality from different directions: the Houthis increasingly believe they hold the strategic initiative in Yemen and the Red Sea.

Labott examines how a non-state movement without a conventional navy can disrupt international shipping and impose costs far beyond Yemen. England approaches the problem from inside Yemen, focusing on renewed Houthi pressure, Saudi Arabia’s difficult choices and signs that the military balance, largely frozen since the 2022 truce, may again be shifting.

Together, their analyses raise the more difficult question: how can that strategic initiative be reversed?

The answer may lie not in another open-ended regional war, but in restoring Yemeni government control of the western coastline — changing the balance inside Yemen while curtailing Iran’s ability to exploit the interconnected vulnerabilities of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb.

From Maritime Disruption to Strategic Initiative

Among Iran’s remaining regional partners, the Houthis possess a distinctive strategic value: geography. Their control of much of Yemen’s western coastline enables military capabilities developed with Iranian support to project coercive power towards Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea. Combined with Iran’s own position at Hormuz, this gives Tehran leverage across both maritime gateways surrounding the Arabian Peninsula that none of its other regional partners can replicate.

The Houthis do not need conventional command of the sea to exercise that power. Missiles, drones and the credible threat of attack can divert shipping, raise insurance costs and compel multinational naval deployments. Naval forces can intercept weapons and air strikes can degrade launchers, radars and storage facilities, but neither changes the territorial conditions sustaining the threat.

If those conditions remain intact, maritime security risks becoming an indefinite exercise in containment. If maritime coercion is generated from territory ashore, maritime security cannot ultimately be secured at sea alone.

The strategic objective should therefore be to deprive the Houthis of the geography that converts territorial control into maritime coercion.

Tihama and the Western Coastline: Geography as Negotiating Leverage

Yemen’s history demonstrates the strategic importance of this geography. On more than one occasion, Ottoman campaigns against rulers entrenched in the north-western highlands depended upon control of Tihama and the western coastline. A similar relationship between coastal control and pressure upon the highlands emerged during the Saudi-Yemeni war of 1934.

The same logic resurfaced in 2018. Forces aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognised government advanced towards Hodeidah before international intervention halted the offensive and the Stockholm Agreement froze the military endgame. The importance attached to Hodeidah was unmistakable: UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it the “make it or break it” issue at Stockholm, while Special Envoy Martin Griffiths described it as the “center of gravity of the war.”

Stockholm envisaged mutual redeployment from Hodeidah and its ports and restoration of security under Yemeni law. Yet the underlying territorial equation remained unresolved. Former British ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown has since put the counterfactual starkly: “Imagine if the international community had held its nerve and backed the IRG’s retaking of the whole Red Sea coast of Yemen. We would not be in the dilemma we face today.” He also argued that Stockholm “handed the Houthis the foothold they needed to launch their campaign of international blackmail.”

The UN Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement ended its mandate on 31 March 2026. The UN did not formally repudiate Stockholm, but the mission’s termination closed more than seven years of implementation efforts without resolving the territorial equation the agreement had frozen. Meanwhile, Houthi-held territory along the western flank became a platform for projecting coercive power into the Red Sea and towards Bab el-Mandeb.

What was frozen as a Yemeni military problem has since evolved into an international maritime-security problem.

The lesson is not that the 2018 campaign should simply be replayed. The historical circumstances differed, but the geographical logic endured: forces entrenched in the north-western highlands are difficult to defeat by direct assault, while control of Tihama can alter their access, resources and leverage. The objective should be to change the balance sufficiently to make serious negotiation more attractive than continued escalation.

The purpose of deterrence is not to replace diplomacy with force, but to create the conditions in which diplomacy becomes consequential.

That requires three concentric circles of deterrence: a Yemeni core providing territorial agency, unity of command and intelligence coordination; a regional circle supplying capabilities such as logistics, training, air and missile defence and maritime support; and an international circle protecting navigation, supporting surveillance and interdiction, and ensuring that attacks on international shipping carry consequences. The hierarchy matters: the outer circles should strengthen, not substitute for, the Yemeni core. Regionalising responsibility for Yemen’s security should restore Yemeni sovereignty, not replace it.

Breaking Iran’s Double-Chokepoint Leverage

The implications extend far beyond Yemen. Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are geographically separate, but strategically they form one interconnected risk system. Iran possesses direct geographical leverage at Hormuz; Houthi control of Yemen’s western coastline gives it indirect leverage around Bab el-Mandeb.

Saudi Arabia’s East–West Petroline carries crude from the Kingdom’s eastern producing regions to Yanbu on the Red Sea, providing an existing means of bypassing Hormuz. Its strategic value would increase further as capacity expands and if plans to connect other Gulf producers advance. But oil reaching Yanbu still enters a maritime system exposed to Red Sea disruption: vulnerability reduced at one gateway can reappear at the other.

That relationship can also be reversed. If restoring Yemeni control of Tihama substantially reduces Houthi capacity to threaten Bab el-Mandeb while the Petroline and other routes increase the ability of Gulf producers to bypass Hormuz, the two developments reinforce one another. Iran’s indirect leverage at the western gateway diminishes while its direct leverage at the eastern gateway becomes less effective against neighbours possessing viable alternatives.

The strategic asymmetry could begin to invert. The more Gulf exports can bypass Hormuz through secure Red Sea routes, the more an Iranian closure of Hormuz risks imposing severe costs upon Iran itself while losing effectiveness as an instrument of coercion against its Gulf neighbours.

This elevates Tihama from a Yemeni battlefield to a regional strategic hinge. Liberating the western coastline could help dismantle the double-chokepoint leverage through which Iran projects disproportionate coercive power across the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf.

For Washington, the implication is equally important. If Iran remains a central strategic challenge, the Red Sea cannot be treated as peripheral. Yemen is one arena in which Iranian leverage can be curtailed without direct military confrontation with Tehran. Restoring Yemeni sovereignty would simultaneously deny an external power the ability to exploit Yemen’s geography for regional coercion.

It could also alter Tehran’s diplomatic calculus. Negotiations reflect the balance of leverage behind them. Reducing the strategic utility of one of Iran’s most consequential regional allies would not guarantee accommodation, but it could change the balance with which Tehran approaches future negotiations.

Recovering the Initiative

The strategic objective can therefore be stated simply: restore Yemeni government control of Tihama and the western coastline, supported through concentric regional and international circles of deterrence, and use that geographical shift to change the balance of leverage.

The effects would operate at three interconnected levels: inside Yemen, it could bring the Houthis towards serious negotiations; in the Red Sea, it could reduce the land-based threat to Bab el-Mandeb; and regionally, combined with expanding alternatives to Hormuz, it could curtail Iran’s ability to exploit the two maritime gateways as a single system of coercive leverage.

The western coastline is more than another front in Yemen’s war. It is the geographical hinge connecting Yemen’s internal balance of power, Red Sea security, Gulf energy resilience and Iran’s wider regional leverage.

Recovering the initiative there does not require conquest of Yemen’s northern highlands or unconditional Houthi surrender. It requires changing the balance sufficiently that negotiation becomes more attractive than escalation — first for the Houthis, and potentially for Tehran as well.

Ultimately, deterrence will not be restored when another agreement is signed or another naval deployment announced. It will be restored when the Houthis test the emerging architecture and discover that escalation no longer expands their strategic options, but narrows them.