The 19th-century Prussian strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder is credited with a battery of sage military advice, but his best-known maxim is usually paraphrased like this: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. If Iran had not already taught President Donald Trump that lesson, Yemen’s Houthis are now making sure he understands it. By almost every conventional measure of power, Ansar Allah is the flyweight among the behemoths shaping the expanding conflict in the Middle East—a non-state movement from one of the world’s poorest countries, facing powers with vast defense budgets, gigantic economies and nuclear weapons.
Yet the Houthis have acquired an extraordinary ability to make an already difficult conflict even more complicated for the White House. Their lightning offensive this week—striking Saudi cities and energy infrastructure while seizing strategic territory on the Red Sea—has added another unwanted equation to Washington’s calculations. For six months, the world has worried about the Strait of Hormuz.
Now another strategic waterway is coming into play. The Houthis seized the Red Sea port of Mokha on Thursday before taking Mayun Island on Friday. This volcanic speck of land sits inside the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow gateway linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden through which around 12 percent of global trade normally passes.
Bab el-Mandeb was hardly safe before Operation Epic Fury began. From November 2023 to October 2025, the U.S. Maritime Administration recorded more than 100 separate Houthi attacks on commercial vessels affecting more than 60 countries.
With the Strait of Hormuz open, the threat could be tolerated. That is no longer the case, because capturing Mokha port and Mayun Island gives the Houthis a physical foothold inside what is now another vital chokepoint. Energy Information Administration data shows oil and petroleum-liquid flows through Hormuz collapsed from 21.6 million barrels a day in Q4 2025 to 4.9 million in Q2 2026.
Over the same period, flows through Bab el-Mandeb rose from 5.4 million to 8.1 million barrels a day, as Saudi Arabia diverted crude to the Red Sea. The Houthi foothold inside Bab el-Mandeb also gives Tehran another potential source of leverage over Washington. Last month, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council made ending attacks on its allies in Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq one of six conditions for fully reopening Hormuz.
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