What Washington’s Refusal to Saudi Arabia Over Yemen Means for Israel

When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called President Trump last Thursday, September 10, to ask for American air strikes on the rampaging Houthis, he was turned down. The administration offered intelligence, targeting data, and the roughly 200 American personnel already in the kingdom providing what officials describe as non-kinetic support. A senior administration official explained that the United States is “focused on protecting our core national security interests, such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, while empowering our regional partners to take the lead.”

Israel should pay careful attention to those words as they are likely to drive U.S. policy in the next decade.

Indeed, this was not a speculative request the Saudis made of the United States. On September 8, Houthi missiles and drones struck Abha, Jazan, Najran, and Khamis Mushait in southern Saudi Arabia, setting fires at Aramco facilities and at the Jazan refinery, which processes some 400,000 barrels a day, and wounding 73 people. Two days later, Houthi forces took the Red Sea port of Mocha, put men on the Hanish Islands, and seized Perim, the island sitting in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a major global checkpoint between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. The United Nations counted at least 46,000 people displaced.

With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed since the war with Iran began at the end of February, Tehran and its proxies now hold a hand on both of the region’s maritime throats. That is not a Yemeni civil war. That is Iranian grand strategy executed while the world’s strongest navy watches.

The Houthis have now learned that firing on ships, on Saudi oil, and on Israeli cities produces negotiations rather than consequences. Deterrence is not something that is stored; it is a memory, and the memory now being written in Sanaa in Yemen is that the Americans can be waited out.

Saudi Arabia has already begun to draw the obvious conclusion. The crown prince signed a joint defense agreement with Turkey and Pakistan precisely because Riyadh wants leverage and alternatives as trust in Washington is eroding.

For Israel, that is the real damage. Every step the kingdom takes toward Ankara and Islamabad, whose governments are openly hostile to the Jewish state, is a step away from the normalization that American policy has spent years pursuing. A Saudi Arabia that feels defended by the United States can afford to make peace with Israel. A Saudi Arabia that feels abandoned will buy its security from whoever is selling, and the sellers may well not be friends with either the U.S. or Israel.

So, President Trump has some historic decisions to make. There is a serious case for restraint. American forces are committed against Iran, oil prices are punishing and no administration wants a second front. But the Bab el-Mandeb problem is not just a regional inconvenience. It is the route by which Gulf energy reaches Europe, and it has just been handed to a militia that chants for the destruction of Israel and America. And the cost of restoring freedom of navigation will never again be as low as it is today.

What is required is not an occupation of Yemen. It is sustained strikes on Houthi launch sites, naval assets, command structure, and interdiction of the Iranian resupply that makes all of it possible. In fact, Washington did precisely that in 2024 and 2025 and the maritime traffic moved.