Twice last month, President Donald Trump had turned down his Saudi friend and ally Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pleas to bomb Yemen’s Houthis; they were attacking oil fields and had seized control of key areas along the Red Sea shipping route. Then, on Saturday, a Houthi missile struck a passenger terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. It killed 13 people, an American among them, and wounded more than 300, in a dramatic escalation of the Iranian-backed militants’ conflict with Saudi Arabia.
Asked whether the U.S. would now join the Saudi strikes, Trump left the door wide open: "We may. We’re going to look at it." Another deadly strike hit the airport Sunday, leaving Saudis scrambling for answers on how and why their air defenses failed. The question looks like one on Yemen, but the answer will be about Iran: what happens to a stalled war after the November 3 midterms, and who pays to defend the Gulf.
This is a path Trump has already walked. In September, when MBS came calling, Trump gave Riyadh intelligence and targeting data instead of bombs. Officials told the Saudis his directive was to keep U.S. forces focused on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz.
The Houthis then assured American diplomats in Muscat that Bab el-Mandeb, a vital alternative route to Hormuz, would stay open to all but Saudi vessels. Restraint would also spare Trump a new front three weeks before the midterms, with 65 percent of Americans disapproving of his handling of the Iran war, per Pew this month. Washington would instead rush interceptors to a kingdom whose officials say it is running low, after the Iranian attacks at the height of the present war, though the Pentagon’s Patriot stocks are already stretched.
The cost in this scenario is that Riyadh keeps bearing the brunt of the Houthi barrages, and the Houthis learn they can do so—including killing an American—without drawing U.S. fire. Trump has run this particular play before. In 2025, he bombed the Houthis for several weeks, declared they had "capitulated," and accepted an Oman-brokered truce sparing U.S. ships.
A sequel to that would pair limited but punitive strikes on missile sites behind the Riyadh attacks with a corresponding diplomatic push, via Oman, to pause Houthi fire on the kingdom. Then might follow the handoff. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey signed a mutual defense pact in Mecca in August and agreed last week to the "rapid deployment" of forces to the kingdom, though Turkey rules out an offensive role.
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