Is there anything more american the embarassingly losing an unneccesary war with a much smaller opponent?

Imagine losing access to another strait that’s critical to world Trade in the same year you lost the first one.

I wouldn’t totally count out the recognized government of Yemen. Not on their own merits, they long ago lost the majority of Yemen’s population to Ansar Allah’s control and almost got wiped out by the STC (UAE-backed South Yemen separatists) earlier this year before Saudi Arabia intervened…

But, to have Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of their world diplomatically in their corner is a really great benefit that can hardly be overstated. In the aforementioned case when the STC almost destroyed the recognized government in a rapid offensive, the Saudi intervention resulted in not only the gains being reversed but the STC itself being formally dissolved all of one month later. They have quite a lot of weight to swing around.

Now, that’s NOT to say Saudi Arabia can just push Ansar Allah around like that, they’re on a completely different level than the STC. Ansar Allah, despite the small appearance on the map, is basically a state level entity with like three quarters of Yemen’s population under its control (the number they control is not terribly far behind Saudi Arabia’s own population!) and much of that population are in rugged mountains. Not easy to dislodge fighters from highly populated mountainous terrain where the population sees you as an intruder! That became abundantly clear in the last conflict where the last real coalition momentum was instead put to taking the coasts and the siege of Hudaydah. The idea being, if you can’t directly challenge Ansar Allah in their mountain fortresses as they are, instead cut off the supplies they need to wage war so their logistics fall to pieces as without access to the sea they are totally surrounded.

The problem with that however is that with the tens of millions of people densely packed in north Yemen who now require a huge amount of foreign aid, disruptions to that flow of aid like say from putting the giant port it mostly flows through under siege risks massive famine. With the intervention attracting tons of controversy due to terrible airstrikes in civilian areas on like hospitals and schools and increasing notoriety of Saudi Arabia also from things like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, there was tremendous international pressure being placed on Saudi Arabia to back off or be made a pariah.

However… it is not certain that Saudi Arabia would face similar pressures if they undertook similar efforts to choke off Ansar Allah these days. This is not really as humanitarian minded a world as it was even eight years ago, for one. For two, Ansar Allah has through the attacks on Red Sea shipping against many different countries burned up a lot of the patience it may otherwise have been afforded by countries that previously objected to the Saudi intervention. Now, they must balance how strongly they would want to object against such measures morally vs. the damage that halts on Red Sea shipping or explosions on Saudi oil infrastructure do to their own economies.

Also, now Saudi Arabia may have some more allies up its sleeve in such an endeavor depending on how the fighting goes and if Ansar Allah continues to attack outside of Yemen’s boundaries.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said any attack on Saudi Arabia could activate the recently signed Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, days after Yemen’s Houthis launched a barrage of missiles at the kingdom.

“If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” he told Pakistani media outlet Geo News on Tuesday night.

“There should be no doubt about that. We are bound by the terms and conditions of this pact, and … we will honour them in case there is a need.”

Previously Pakistan outright proclaimed no interest in the matter and stayed back. Them and Turkey could add quite a great deal of diplomatic or military weight and limit escalation with Iran (Iran is fine at yeeting missiles across the waves to whoever but is not really interested in antagonizing countries with powerful ground forces directly bordering it). Plus the US itself though with zero interest in providing ground forces may well be willing to actually supply other forms of help given that Ansar Allah is aligned with Iran and the present situation with Iran is deeply embarassing to the US and they would really rather not having more of Saudi oil and refined products getting knocked out or made inaccessible to the global market.

The attacks are too big for Saudi Arabia not to do something to not look like a punk that will take anything on the international stage… competing with that though, Saudi Arabia does not want to give the appearance of local instability to investors, and getting directly involved in a war doesn’t help that sentiment. And getting too involved also makes the recognized government of Yemen look like total puppets which is not very helpful for Saudi Arabia’s interests.

We’ll see probably quite a lot of updates in the time to come but anyway my prediction is that the recognized government of Yemen does not entirely crumple quite so easily (at least, not without a strong intervention shortly thereafter putting it back on life support again).