Why Haven't the Houthis Closed the Red Sea?
Notes on the Middle East, No. 6
In the previous piece, I wrote about the Strait of Hormuz and the gap between the war’s military objectives and its economic consequences. I want to stay with that question but shift the focus to the other chokepoint, the one that is, for the moment, still functioning: the Red Sea.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Over 150 ships are anchored outside it. Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply is stuck. The primary alternative route for Gulf energy exports now runs through Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, and from there through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, past Yemen, and up toward the Suez Canal. If that route closes too, the world goes from a severe energy disruption to something analysts have compared to three times the severity of the 1970s oil embargo.
The reason the Red Sea is still open, as of this writing, is a ceasefire agreement between the United States and the Houthis that was brokered by Oman last May, that almost nobody outside the shipping industry thinks about, and that is currently under more pressure than at any point since it was signed. The anatomy of that deal, and the question of whether it holds, is the subject I want to think through here, because I think it reveals something important about how power operates in this region that connects to everything I’ve been writing about in this series.
The deal itself is remarkably simple in its stated terms and remarkably complicated in what it actually involves.
On May 6, 2025, Trump announced in the Oval Office that the Houthis had agreed to stop attacking American vessels in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb strait, and that the United States would stop bombing Yemen, ending Operation Rough Rider. Oman’s Foreign Minister confirmed the mediation, stating that “in the future, neither side will target the other, including American vessels, ensuring freedom of navigation and the smooth flow of international commercial shipping.”
The framing from each side tells you everything about the deal’s fragility. Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated” and “don’t want to fight anymore.” The Houthis’ chief negotiator, Mohammed Abdel Salam, said it was the United States that “backed down.” Administration officials acknowledged privately that Trump agreed to the ceasefire in part because the airstrikes were not achieving their objectives and the United States had failed to establish air superiority over the Houthis. According to Reuters’ detailed reconstruction of the deal, a turning point came with the April 17 strike on the Ras Isa fuel terminal that killed 74 people and damaged Houthi revenue capacity. Each side needed an off-ramp. Oman provided one.
What the deal does not cover is almost more important than what it does. It says nothing about Israel. The Houthis stated explicitly that the ceasefire “has nothing to do with the Israeli enemy or with supporting Gaza.” They continued to launch missiles at Israel after the deal was signed, including strikes that reached the perimeter of Ben Gurion International Airport. Israel was not given advance notice of the agreement, and Israeli officials told media they were “shocked.” The deal also does not formally commit the Houthis to stop attacking non-US commercial shipping, which is why, as the Soufan Center noted, major shipping companies including Maersk said they were not ready to resume Red Sea transits even after the ceasefire was announced.
This is, in other words, a deal between two parties that both claim the other surrendered, that excludes the United States’ closest regional ally, that does not protect most of the world’s commercial shipping by its terms, and that held together for ten months primarily because the Houthis decided, for their own reasons, to mostly honor its spirit rather than just its letter. When the Gaza ceasefire collapsed in March 2025 they resumed attacks on non-US vessels briefly, then paused again after the October 2025 ceasefire. Since November 2025, there have been no sustained attacks on merchant vessels. Suez Canal containership traffic had begun to recover, still far below its pre-crisis average but enough to keep the route functional.
This fragile, ambiguous, structurally incomplete arrangement is what currently stands between the global economy and a simultaneous closure of both its major Middle Eastern chokepoints.
When the US-Israeli strikes hit Iran on February 28, the Houthis announced they would resume Red Sea attacks. Senior officials told the Associated Press that the group had decided to restart missile and drone operations against maritime traffic. Houthi leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi delivered a speech condemning the strikes and declaring “full solidarity” with Iran, saying the Houthis were “fully prepared for any necessary developments.”
Two weeks later, the attacks have not materialized.
The Houthis have issued only three formal declarations since the war began, and their tone has been characterized by analysts as “more disciplined and subdued” than in previous crises, reading as political and emotional statements of solidarity rather than operational announcements. Abdulmalik has called for media activity, public demonstrations, and “million-man marches” in support of Iran. He has not announced military operations. The FDD’s Long War Journal observed that the Houthis have “not officially announced military action,” instead “primarily mobilizing demonstrations and media support.”
This gap between rhetoric and action is the thing I find most revealing, because it tells you that the Houthis are making a calculation, and the calculation is not primarily about Iran.
To understand what the Houthis are weighing, you have to understand what they have to lose.
The ceasefire with Trump is the most significant diplomatic achievement the Houthi movement has ever secured. It represents, implicitly, American recognition of the Houthis as a legitimate interlocutor, a party capable of making and keeping agreements, something the internationally recognized Yemeni government and its backers have spent years trying to prevent. The deal stopped a bombing campaign that was costing the US over $750 million in munitions alone, that had destroyed seven American Reaper drones and lost an F/A-18 fighter jet, and that was failing to achieve its stated objectives. It gave the Houthis breathing room to consolidate domestically, rebuild capabilities, and pursue internal governance without daily American airstrikes.
Breaking the deal to join Iran’s war would sacrifice all of that. It would invite a resumption of US strikes at a moment when American military assets are already deployed across the region in unprecedented concentration. It would risk the Houthis’ relationship with Oman, which brokered the ceasefire and whose mediating role gives the Houthis access to diplomatic channels they would otherwise lack. And it would do all of this in service of a patron, Iran, whose ability to reciprocate is severely diminished: Tehran’s own command structure is fractured, its corridor to the region is severed, and its financial capacity to support the Houthis is competing with the demands of regime survival.
The Stimson Center’s analysis of the Houthis’ decision calculus captures this precisely: the group initially “showed restraint, announced political solidarity with Iran while signaling a posture of deliberate, conditional restraint.” Their Red Sea infrastructure remains intact, their weapons development has continued (they have begun manufacturing domestically, reducing their dependence on Iranian supply chains), and their operational readiness can be activated rapidly if conditions change. The restraint is strategic, a decision to preserve optionality rather than spend it.
There is something in this situation that I think connects to the larger argument of this series in a way I didn’t anticipate when I started writing it.
In the first piece, I wrote about the shadow org chart inside Iran. In the second, I described the proxy network as a franchise system in which each node makes independent survival calculations. In piece after piece, the pattern has been the same: the official map says one thing, the operative reality says another, and the distance between the two is where the interesting analysis lives.
The Houthis are the most extreme case of this pattern. The official map says they are an Iranian proxy, a node in the axis of resistance, ideologically bound to fight alongside Tehran. The operative reality is that they are a sovereign-in-all-but-name controlling most of Yemen’s population, running their own state, manufacturing their own weapons, negotiating their own deals with the world’s most powerful country, and currently choosing not to join a war that their patron is losing because their local interests demand restraint. They are, in franchise terms, the franchisee that has outgrown the brand.
The global economy is, at this moment, relying on the Houthis’ self-interest to keep the Red Sea open. That is a sentence I would not have believed six months ago, and it captures something important about how power actually works in this region: the most consequential decisions are being made by the actors with the least formal authority, in places that receive the least analytical attention, for reasons that have very little to do with the narratives that dominate Western coverage.
Whether the Red Sea stays open depends on a set of calculations being made in Sana’a by people whose names most of the world has never heard, weighing a ceasefire that most of the world doesn’t know exists, against ideological obligations that pull in one direction and strategic self-interest that pulls in another. That is the kind of problem that has no clean resolution, no single negotiation that settles it, no reassuring signal that tells the shipping companies and the insurers and the sovereign wealth funds that it’s safe to plan as if the route will hold.
The Houthis are, for now, choosing restraint. The reasons for that choice are local, contingent, and reversible. The consequences, if the choice changes, are global.
Notes on the Middle East is written by Karlo Dizon. He works in global capital and geopolitical strategy. These are his personal views.