Two Weeks in Brief

Although Trump declared the April 5 operation to rescue a downed F-15 pilot near Isfahan a success, Iran pointed to a different outcome. The IRGC’s joint operational command Khatam al-Anbiya, Iran’s wartime military headquarters, said the rescue attempt had cost Washington multiple aircraft, and warned that any targeting of Iranian civilian infrastructure “will open the gates of hell on you,” naming U.S. and Israeli sites “used militarily” anywhere in the region as fair game for retaliation. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called U.S. threats against Iranian energy facilities a war crime.

Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis pushed the “all fronts are one” claim across the period. The slogan was “وحدة الساحات” unity of arenas, and it appeared across every outlet. The IRGC named Yemen in strike communiqués covering operations the Houthis did not conduct. On April 9, the 40th day of mourning for Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media aired a written statement attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, whom regime-aligned outlets have been presenting as the new Supreme Leader. Allegedly, Mojtaba Khamenei declared that Iran considers “all resistance fronts as a unified entity.” See the April 1–7 and April 8–14 Houthis’ Lane briefs for a fuller picture on how Axis Media manufactured this framing while the Houthis themselves did not fire on Israel during the ceasefire week.

The ceasefire Trump announced on April 7 and the ceasefire Iran said it had accepted were not the same deal. Washington said Lebanon was outside the scope while Iran said it was inside. Iran’s preconditions ran across Lebanon, the release of frozen assets, and a reparations track. Vice President JD Vance told Russian outlets Israel was ready to limit Lebanon strikes for the sake of a deal, while warning Washington would not uphold the ceasefire unless Iran opened Hormuz. Islamabad talks broke down within a day of starting on April 11, oil crossed $140, and by April 14 the United States had announced a maritime blockade Iran was already working to delegitimize.

Russia stepped in as the ceasefire’s narrative amplifier. The Russian MFA said “some forces are slowing the movement toward peace” and called publicly for Israel to stop the Lebanon strikes. A TASS explainer positioned Pakistan as the key mediator. China stepped back. On April 7, Beijing vetoed a UN Security Council resolution from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE calling for a forced reopening of Hormuz. On April 11, Guancha published a long commentary explicitly rejecting the Western narrative that “China forced Iran” into the ceasefire. The Chinese MFA told Xinhua it was engaging all parties.

The Deep Dives below cover the rescue episode, the “unity of arenas” doctrine, Iran’s staged succession of Mojtaba Khamenei, the Islamabad breakdown, Lebanon during the ceasefire, Russia and China on mediation, and Iran’s reparations campaign against the Gulf.

Deep Dive

1. Rescue Mission and “Gates of Hell.”

On April 5, Trump announced on social media that a U.S. attempt to rescue a downed F-15 pilot near Isfahan had succeeded. The IRGC’s joint operational command Khatam al-Anbiya, Iran’s wartime military headquarters, said that Washington had in fact lost multiple aircraft during the attempt, claiming two C-130 transports and two Black Hawk helicopters had been destroyed. Within hours, Tasnim was publishing photos of what it called U.S. aircraft wreckage as proof, while Russian coverage ran the Iranian version with the headline “The enemy’s efforts failed.”

The IRGC paired the rescue claim with an explicit warning. In the same statement, Khatam al-Anbiya told Trump directly that targeting Iranian civilian infrastructure “will open the gates of hell on you,” naming U.S. and Israeli sites “used militarily” anywhere in the region as legitimate targets for retaliation. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called U.S. threats against Iranian energy facilities a war crime.

Hezbollah-aligned outlets carried opinion coverage that worked the rescue episode hard. Al-Manar ran a column by Alloush titled “Trump: victories narrated… defeats lived,” arguing U.S. messaging was storytelling while real costs were borne on the battlefield. Al-Akhbar’s April 1 analysis framed Israeli losses in the Iran war as a turning point in the regional deterrence equation. Al-Ahed published a piece arguing Netanyahu was “fabricating” his victory and that regime overthrow rhetoric had collapsed.

Iranian outlets published a sustained Tasnim column titled “The ghost of Vietnam in the Middle East; Iran becomes the graveyard of American aggressors,” arguing Washington was repeating the hubris of earlier wars and that geography, the Strait of Hormuz, and the resistance network made Iran a far more lethal theater than Vietnam had been.

Houthi outlets worked the rescue episode as outright deception. Al-Thawrah published an opinion piece titled “The failure of the deceptive American rescue operation,” arguing the U.S. operation was not a genuine rescue at all but a cover story, and that its actual purpose was testing Iranian ground defenses in southwest Iran. 26 September ran a companion column titled “Suicide of Grandeur: Trump trapped in psychological defeat and the end of the unipolar era,” which folded the rescue episode into a civilizational-decline narrative about the end of a unipolar era.

Chinese outlets published a Guancha commentary titled “A scam from start to finish: how the U.S. and Israel ‘negotiated’ with Iran,” arguing that diplomatic overtures had functioned as cover for initiating the strikes and assassinations that opened the war, and framing the entire negotiation track as premeditated deception rather than failed diplomacy.

2. How Iran Turned “Unity of Arenas” Into a Ceasefire Veto

Throughout April, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis framed strikes on Israel from Lebanese, Yemeni, and Iranian territory as a single coordinated campaign. The slogan was “وحدة الساحات” — unity of arenas — and it ran across every outlet. Coverage of the April 3 “One Axis, One Rank” rallies treated Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq as a single theater.

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Houthi social media, opinion writers, the parliament, and the foreign ministry had all issued statements. The political council floated Yemeni sovereignty over Bab al-Mandeb, which is the usual bluster we have come to expect from the Houthis. The foreign ministry framed the ceasefire as an opportunity for Gulf states to rethink their alliances with Washington, while Houthi outlets examined and gleefully amplified US and Israeli self-criticism, from the New York Times to Ma’ariv. Throughout all of it, Houthi officials and Iranian state media in Arabic reinforced each other in a closed loop designed to look like a consensus.

Naturally, the Houthis need this to be their victory because, without Iran’s war, they are a movement governing one-third of a country that has slipped from the center of regional priorities. The ceasefire gave them twenty-four hours of relevance, and they used every minute of it. Here is what we found.

The first theme we observed was straightforward triumphalism, as expected, and this was emphasized by many senior leaders in the Houthi establishment. Their Shura Council member (Abdulsalam Jahaf) mocked both Trump and Netanyahu for finding themselves a way out and called Trump “the liar of the age.” A member of the Political Bureau (Salim Al-Moghales) stated that Trump spoke about Iran’s conditions with deference, which is bizarre given the apocalyptic framing Trump had adopted barely a day before. Naturally, their framing was unambiguous. The ceasefire was not a negotiated outcome but a capitulation of the United States, extracted by force.

The second was the insistence that no ceasefire is legitimate unless it includes Lebanon, a threat that gained urgency following Israel’s unexpected strikes after the announcement, roughly a hundred missiles in ten minutes. Jahaf warned that Iran would withdraw from the agreement if strikes on Lebanon continued, which is interesting because he was speaking on behalf of Tehran. The head of the Houthis’ Media Authority amplified Araghchi’s statement that America must choose between a full ceasefire and war through Israel. This is worth noting because last year, the Houthis had their very own ceasefire with the United States but continued to attack Israel without a problem. In any case, the purpose here is for the Houthis to keep the conflict frame alive and position themselves as stakeholders in theaters well beyond Yemen, which is what they have been doing recently.

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Iranian officials will never admit defeat, and some conversations have made it conventional wisdom, repeated with increasing confidence as the war intensifies, that the Islamic Republic will never capitulate. And it is clear why this is the case. Iran’s ideological architecture is too deep, its revolutionary identity too fused with the state apparatus, and its commitment to resisting the United States too structurally embedded to permit surrender under any conditions. So what follows is an understanding that pressure may degrade the regime’s capability but cannot alter its intent, and that the Islamic Republic can absorb punishment indefinitely because it understands itself to be engaged in a civilizational struggle in which compromise is indistinguishable from extinction.

I’ll admit there is something seductive about this line of thinking. But if we accept that no other outcome exists, we stop looking for one, and we start treating the regime’s own narrative about itself as an analytical conclusion rather than as a political performance, and in doing so, we foreclose the very possibilities that might otherwise be available to us. The word “ideological” does a lot of work in the current discourse, and it does so poorly. It functions less as a description of how the Islamic Republic operates and more as a shorthand for “irrational” or “impervious to incentives.” That conflation does not clarify the problem but rather obscures it.

The Theocratic Problem

To understand why this feels so intuitive, it may help to distinguish between political ideology and religious ideology, because they make fundamentally different kinds of claims.

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If you listen to Abd al-Malik al-Houthi’s speeches every week, as I do, you would think the group is about to open a second front against America and Israel. The language is apocalyptic. The promises are absolute. Rallies fill al-Sabeen Square in Sanaa. Fighters parade through every governorate. The movement that spent two years disrupting global shipping and launching ballistic missiles at Israel has told its followers, repeatedly and without qualification, that it stands ready to act “at any moment.”

But suppose they act. What does that war actually look like, and what would it take to sustain it?

Take the Red Sea campaign, which the Houthis said they launched in support of Gaza. Since November 2023, the group has carried out more than 100 attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, but that campaign consumed their weapons at a fairly high rate, exposed critical infrastructure, and invited sustained American and Israeli strikes on launch sites, storage facilities, and fuel tanks at Ras al-Issa. By 2025, the numbers had begun to decline and came to a momentary halt. Whether the Houthis stopped firing due to ceasefires, truces, or depleted stocks is debatable, but what is clear is that the tempo never returned to its 2024 levels and the arsenal that sustained it struggled to be replenished.

If we examine their attacks against Israel, the Houthis had launched approximately 40 ballistic missiles and more than 320 drones according to the IDF, but roughly a fifth to a quarter of the ballistic missiles failed en route, more than 100 drones were intercepted, and only two struck populated areas. By early September, Israeli media reported 80 ballistic missiles and at least 31 drones launched since the resumption. Despite these failures, the movement publicly treated the campaign as a success because it forced nationwide alarms and disrupted Israeli air traffic. But in doing so, they were also making a bet that a few Israeli lives and fear are worth more than Yemeni security or Israeli retaliation.

The cost of that campaign was not only material. Israeli airstrikes in 2025 killed the Houthi prime minister, about a dozen cabinet members, and Chief of the General Staff Muhammad al-Ghamari. The political leadership was easily replaced, but Ghamari was important because of the role he played in establishing the Houthis’ missile systems and weapons-production infrastructure. He was trained by Hezbollah and the IRGC, and his expertise could not be replaced by appointing a brother-in-law.

Sustained pressure on the movement and naval interdictions choked whatever remained of the resupply line. The July 2025 seizure of over 750 tons of Iranian-origin materiel showed how much the group relied on imports to sustain its production capacity. So while the Houthis can still launch, every launch depletes their limited reserves and reveals positions that have already been mapped, and the surviving commanders saw what happened to the last ones who generated those signatures. The critical bottleneck is not finished weapons but the components needed to build them: seekers, guidance electronics, and engines. Each requires an import, and every import requires smuggling. The scale of that smuggling is visible in what has been caught. The U.S. Treasury has designated Chinese firms for supplying machining tools and manufacturing equipment to the Houthis, and an Oman-based logistics company was sanctioned for transferring cruise missile components into Yemen.

The Houthis’ supply chain has also been interrupted repeatedly. In October 2025, Yemeni authorities seized 58 containers at the Port of Aden with about 2,500 tons of drone manufacturing equipment. For every shipment intercepted, others have gotten through, but the current environment is more vigilant than before, the seas around Yemen are more surveilled than ever, and Iran’s own situation does not allow it to sustain smuggling or production capacity for all of its proxies at once. The Houthis are trying to build domestic production capacity because they know smuggling cannot be relied on forever, but that is a project measured in years, and a war tomorrow requires components not in the warehouse today. With Iran under sustained bombardment, the pipeline that built the Houthis’ arsenal is not functioning.

But none of this matters as much as the fuel, because fuel is what keeps the Houthi state alive. Iranian oil enters Yemen through a network of front companies with direct ties to the IRGC, arriving at Houthi-controlled ports at Hodeidah and Ras Isa and sold domestically at inflated prices. The UN Panel of Experts estimated the Houthis collected approximately $4 billion from customs duties on fuel imports alone between 2022 and 2024, with total income from the fuel sector reaching roughly $5.5 billion. Houthi leaders have also been negotiating future oil deals with Russian government representatives.

That fuel supply has been under pressure well before the current war with Iran. Israeli strikes have hit those ports and their fuel infrastructure, the Trump administration ended the general license allowing petroleum offloading at Houthi ports in April 2025, and Treasury has sanctioned the terminals, port managers, and vessels still making deliveries. The war on Iran now threatens the source itself, and any Houthi escalation from here does not just risk airstrikes on missile sites but invites a scenario in which fuel restrictions tighten further, deliveries stop entirely, and the one thing keeping the Houthi state functional disappears. Without fuel, there are no salaries, no revenue, and no state to administer, which is what running on fumes actually means.

Along with fuel, the Houthis are sustained by broader networks, having spent years building smuggling and logistics channels into the Horn of Africa that have become central to their survival. The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen in its October 2025 final report found that cooperation with al-Shabaab now involves weapons smuggling, technical training, and logistical support as part of a deliberate strategy to expand regional influence. In recent years, Somalia has been “increasingly” used as a transit hub for weapons destined for the Houthis, with multiple routes running through Somali ports, and a captured Houthi operative confessed in February 2025 to five arms smuggling runs between Yemen and Somalia in late 2024.

Adding to this is a cooperation with al-Qaeda that has gone largely undetected for years. The same UN report confirmed that the ceasefire between the Houthis and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains in effect, with both parties exchanging prisoners as recently as March 2025, and that collaboration includes the training of AQAP operatives and intelligence coordination. These networks move components, money, and fighters, and act as the connective tissue between the Houthi state and the outside world.

So suppose they launch, and they fire what they have, and they hit a ship, or a base, or a city. What happens on day two? Can the Houthis either defend their position or sustain an attack? What happens to their plans of taking over the rest of Yemen, a plan in which they have mobilized manpower and built an army from a collection of tribes, loyalists, and through coercion of the rest who live under their control? Can they sustain the retaliation that follows, and the bitter reality that such retaliation cannot escape collateral damage, a brutality that Yemenis never asked for?

While the world waits for a Houthi missile aimed outward, the weapons the Houthis are actually using are pointed at Yemenis. Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city, has been under Houthi siege for over nine years, and Houthi forces attacked army positions west of the city this week. In Hajjah, an artillery attack on a village killed at least ten people, including six children, as they gathered for iftar. Houthi landmines continue to kill civilians across the country. The ground force the movement has been assembling through mass conscription is not designed to fight America or Israel but to hold territory and subjugate the population living on it. The movement that told the Arab world it was fighting for Palestine is spending its remaining capacity on controlling Yemenis and serving a patron that is itself on fire.

But the Houthis may still fire, not to enter a war but to exit one with their reputation intact. If negotiations involving Iran begin to advance, the Houthis will feel pressure to launch something, because sitting it out entirely is not an option for a movement that told its fighters this was a divine cause, and not an option in front of an Iranian network watching to see which of its proxies still function. A strike timed to that moment would not mean they have rebuilt anything. It would mean they are spending what little they have left to avoid looking already finished.

The Houthis appear to be gambling that the war on Iran will be short, that the regime will survive under Mojtaba Khamenei, that the IRGC will rebuild, and that the smuggling networks and fuel pipelines will eventually resume. Their entire posture is built on holding on rather than fighting, and waiting for the supply lines to come back. But there is one resource the Houthis are not running low on, and that is ideology. The speeches will continue, and the apocalyptic framing will intensify. The media apparatus will keep producing images of strength, unity, and divine purpose. When the missiles are depleted and the fuel stops flowing, ideology is what fills the gap, and it is the last thing a movement like this runs out of, and the most dangerous, because it can sustain a war against a population long after it has lost the capacity to fight anyone else.

I published this article today for the Stimson Center to explain the Houthis’ month-long delay and how to read their launch from an operational standpoint.

The evidence shows that the interdiction campaign launched last year has effectively degraded the Houthis’ supply chain. Bandar Abbas is under bombardment. Shipments are being intercepted at sea. The fuel infrastructure has been hit by Israeli strikes and U.S. Treasury sanctions. The last seized cargo heading to Hodeidah was copper wire and medicines. Their ability to launch is constrained and reliant on smuggling routes being squeezed from all sides.

That said, the risk cannot be eliminated. Reports from Yemen’s internationally recognized government indicate that IRGC personnel entered Hodeidah by dhow from the Horn of Africa in the days before the March 28 launch. If personnel can still get in, so can components, and the threat can escalate.

For the full breakdown, read the piece here at the Stimson Center

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There are moments in life where some scenes stay with you as a whole, preserved in the exact light of the room where it found you. I remember when I was in Massachusetts, when a friend from the Kuwaiti embassy called to wish me well and to break the rather sudden news that Saudi Arabia had launched airstrikes on Yemen. Naturally, I slightly panicked, but he told me not to worry, that it would be over in about three months. He said that the coalition needed to teach the Houthis a lesson. I truly hoped he was right. Diplomats have their own way of making certainty feel contagious. But having covered the Houthis’ armed rise in Yemen for about a decade, I knew his math did not add up.

It is hard to imagine that eleven years have passed since the Saudi-led intervention, Operation Decisive Storm, and that the Houthis have not really been dislodged. It is even harder once you understand that the Houthis’ entrenchment is a product of accumulated mistakes and not their resilience. The coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE certainly had the firepower, but they did not have a plan for the kind of mistakes and challenges of this conflict. They could not see anything besides military success, and when that was not achieved, they had no plan for what comes afterwards. And without a strategy that recalibrated, every military failure became a political gift to the Houthis. To their credit, the Houthis learned to circumvent the system, gain sympathy, and win the court of public opinion in the first years of the war, in the same way that a defendant keeps getting acquitted, not because of his innocence, but because the prosecution keeps mishandling the evidence and trying the wrong case in the wrong court. The Saudi conventional power in fighting the militia was overestimated precisely because of the mismatch in capabilities, and the war did not defeat the Houthis' ideological project. It completed it.

The Threat Was Real

Most people who followed Yemen from the outside never really understood the calamity of what happened there, and many who were inside during the takeover decided to live with the cards that they were dealt. But what made the Houthis’ power grab so difficult to grasp, even for those living through it, was that it didn’t announce itself as a rupture. It didn’t arrive with tanks and bombs. It didn’t require a revolution per se. There was no single morning when Yemenis woke up and understood that the country they had known was effectively under Iran-backed occupation. Instead, it was a slow erosion of whatever predictability they were used to, a normalization of things that were never supposed to be normal. Political opponents were plucked one by one.

A quiet internal migration took place as senior members of the government and their families were placed under house arrest or harassed. A reverse migration from Sada to Sanaa brought people from the highlands into urban areas with tribal practices that the capital had left behind for decades. The city’s features changed, though the buildings remained the same. The abnormal became the texture of daily life, and the effort of noticing it felt like more than anyone could afford. A power grab like this would have met more resistance in a functioning system, but in Yemen, much of that capacity was already spent. After years of crisis, especially after the Arab Spring, many were politically exhausted. Moving on became the only viable option. Resistance itself no longer promised the rescue that people had sacrificed so much for.

The Houthi takeover of Sanaa in September 2014, followed by their consolidation of power into early 2015, was a real political crisis. The Houthis threatened their opponents, took over state institutions, used Yemen’s government weapons to block a fragile transition, and openly built ties with Tehran, even announcing direct flights between Sanaa and Tehran. They put President Hadi under house arrest and then forced him into exile. They broke every political agreement they had made, and when Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president who helped them take Sanaa, became inconvenient, they killed him too.

From the outside, the conflict was flattened into a Sunni-Shia framing that was convenient for a Western audience and bore almost no relationship to what was actually happening on the ground. The Saudi-Iran rivalry became the only lens through which Yemen made sense to outsiders, when the more accurate framing was that an Iranian-backed movement had seized a country from the inside and a Saudi-led coalition was destroying it from the outside, and Yemenis were caught between the two. Yemenis, who had never been fanatical about religion, were suddenly asked to practice and perform a faith that bore little resemblance to their own Zaydi traditions and far more resemblance to Khomeinism. The framing made the conflict legible as great power competition, but it erased the Yemenis who were living inside it.

Not a Proxy, an Axis Member

It was genuinely frustrating to see a Sunni-Shia framing imposed on Yemen’s conflict because that was not the story inside Yemen. It is true that for roughly a millennium, northern Yemen was governed by an imamate system in which political authority belonged exclusively to people who claimed genealogical lineage with the Prophet Muhammad, ruling by a bloodline called sayyid, or Hashemite. The 1962 revolution overthrew that order and established a republic. But the Houthi movement resurrected the logic of the imamate and placed lineage above citizenship and enforced it through coercion, indoctrination, and institutional capture. For millions of Yemenis, this was a lived regression, the return of a supremacist order that their forefathers fought to dismantle. For a small minority who felt privileged, this was the way Yemen should have always been run. That some people were comfortable within the Houthi order wasn’t a surprise, but the bigger surprise was that they were able to capture the imagination of the West and convince it of their independence. Everyone else who did not exist in the Houthi system was a mercenary, a Saudi-UAE-Zionist-American agent.

The Houthi narrative about their own independence traveled at the speed of light. They convinced their domestic audience, international agencies, and media organizations that they were independent and homegrown, which was partly true, but not the whole truth. They were an armed dynasty that had learned to dress power in the language of God and to treat the state not as a public trust but as a protection racket, extracting wealth, loyalty, and silence from the population in exchange for the privilege of not being destroyed.

Houthis cultivated a clandestine relationship with a Shia transnational network that went completely undetected. Iran denied arming them, and the denial held weight because the evidence was always dismissed as scant rather than treated as cumulative. Every weapons interdiction was met with analysts arguing about whether the volume constituted a real pipeline, as though a movement manufacturing ballistic missiles in one of the poorest countries on earth was doing it with ingenuity. The whole discourse got lost in a debate about whether they qualified as a “proxy,” and that word became a trap, because the moment you argued about the label, you stopped looking at what was actually moving between Tehran and Sanaa.

Selective Blindness

There were patterns that, in retrospect, should have drawn more scrutiny. The UN envoy Martin Griffiths addressed Abd al-Malik al-Houthi as “Sayyid,” a genealogical honorific, as though the man leading an armed takeover of a republic deserved the diplomatic courtesy of his caste title. The Stockholm Agreement handed the Houthis control of the Red Sea coast at the precise moment when Yemeni government forces were positioned to dislodge them. And yes, it would have been a humanitarian catastrophe, but there was not even the illusion of pressure exerted on the Houthis. They used the threat of a humanitarian catastrophe to their advantage, a tactic that we understand so well given the multiple conflicts that have erupted in the world, but at that time it was something very difficult to see. Western media outlets, including the Washington Post, published op-eds from one of the most violent members of the movement, Mohammed al-Houthi, giving him a platform in which he talked about peace unchecked. None of this was coordinated in any deliberate sense, but the cumulative effect was the same. The Houthis were treated as a legitimate negotiating partner while the people opposing them were treated as obstacles to peace.

It is also important to understand that the humanitarian crisis was front and center in discussions about Yemen, as though the suffering itself were the entire story and not the product of a political and military architecture that no one wanted to examine. Images of malnourished children were consumed as moral indictments of the West that supported the coalition, but almost never with any scrutiny of who controlled access, or diverted aid, or who benefited from the guilt those images produced. Organizations raised money, governments pledged funds, but the crisis never stopped. It is worth noting that Yemen is arguably at its worst right now, and the same voices have gone quiet. Why? Because the money has dried up and the political utility of caring has expired.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration reversed the Houthis’ terrorist designation, and whatever the merits of that debate, it became a win for the Houthis on the ground because the pressure had eased. It was not a coincidence that the Houthis chose that moment to march on Marib, one of the most important cities in Yemen, and attempt to take it over. Understandably, the broader policy conversation focused exclusively on the American relationship with Saudi Arabia, on arms sales and humanitarian law, but it also took a much more flexible view of the Houthis and Iran. Taken together, this was not a series of isolated misjudgments but a pattern that recast the Houthis from an armed takeover into a legitimate negotiating partner. Fast forward to October 7th, and the Houthis started a war in the Red Sea and fired at Israel. In that moment, the skeptics’ warnings came to pass, and it sparked a new understanding of the Houthis that was no longer confined to policy circles in Washington. All of a sudden, the risks became high and visible, and for the first time, the general public started asking who the Houthis were.

The Mutation

The disaster is that when Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm, the Iran-backed Houthis were a militia with a grievance, a government arsenal, and a political ideology that most people outside Yemen had never heard of. Eleven years later, they are a governing authority that administers territory, collects taxes, runs kangaroo courts, operates media and propaganda ecosystems, builds ballistic missiles, disrupts global shipping lanes, and maintains an ideological-political infrastructure that connects them to Iran’s revolutionary project. Is this entirely the fault of the intervention? Not necessarily, but it is not separate from it either. The coalition went in with conventional power and an assumption that force would be enough, and when it wasn’t, nobody recalibrated.

To be fair, the coalition did achieve real gains in the south, pushing the Houthis out of Aden and liberating southern territories, thereby stabilizing parts of the country and giving millions of Yemenis a measure of relief. But those victories were never matched by a political strategy capable of translating military progress into durable governance, and in the north, where the Houthis were entrenched, the war settled into a stalemate that favored the side with more patience.

Every airstrike handed the Houthis a narrative of self-defense and a reason to use weapons smuggled from Iran, China, and Russia. Yemen became a live testing ground for Iranian arms against regional adversaries. And when Iraqi militias hit Saudi Arabia, the Houthis claimed credit because they could afford to. The international community already saw them as victims, not instigators, and that perception gave them cover that no other member of Iran's axis enjoyed. And because the Houthis were seen as victims, the coalition couldn't recalibrate without looking like the aggressor.

The strategy didn’t adjust when military objectives stalled, or when Stockholm pulled government forces back from Hodeidah, or when the humanitarian narrative overtook the political one. What was clear is that throughout all of it, no one was prepared for how effectively the Houthis would run their information war. The Houthis controlled who was seen suffering and why, and that narrative shaped international policy in ways the coalition never anticipated and never figured out how to counter. The end result is what we are living with now. A movement that should have been dislodged was instead given the time and the political cover to entrench.

The final indignity was that the war’s authors ended up negotiating with the very movement they had set out to destroy, on terms that favored the Houthis. Saudi Arabia, battered by international criticism, arms sale suspensions, and a reputation crisis that turned it into a pariah over Yemen, was actively seeking an exit. The attack on its oil installations exposed the limits of its own defenses, and the antipathy from American audiences who saw the attack as Saudi Arabia’s problem, not theirs, made it clear that restoring Yemen’s government was more challenging than what was initially anticipated. What followed were backchannel dealings between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in which the coalition’s original objectives quietly gave way to short-term security arrangements, and Yemenis, as always, bore the cost of arrangements made above their heads.

The Lesson Washington Could Learn

It is hard to compress a decade of what happened in Yemen into a few thousand words. It deserves a better examination, not out of vague academic interest, but because Yemen is strategic in ways that great power competition demands and that analysts haven’t considered until recently. I cannot count the number of times that serious people in Washington have told me that no one cares about Yemen or what happens there. We even heard it from the Vice President’s own planning chat, where Vance wrote that “nobody knows who the Houthis are” while his team planned strikes against them.

These phrases of carelessness are repeated so often that they start to sound like wisdom rather than what they actually are: an admission of complete negligence. The irony is that the people who do care about Yemen are precisely the people Washington claims to be competing with. Russia, China, and Iran all care enormously. They looked at a country that the world’s most powerful nation had decided was not worth its attention, and they saw exactly what any strategic competitor would see, which is an opening in one of the world’s most important straits. It should be obvious by now that the Houthis did not become a threat to global shipping because Washington was paying too much attention. It is exactly because no one was. Yemen is the glitch in the matrix of American foreign policy, the place where every comfortable assumption about force, strategy, and the nature of the enemy broke down, and no one noticed until the ships stopped moving.

The United States is currently engaged in a military campaign against Iran under circumstances that carry an almost theatrical resemblance to the conditions that preceded Decisive Storm. There is a genuine threat. There is a coalition. There is an assumption of technological superiority so overwhelming that the duration of the conflict feels predetermined. Every one of these conditions was also present in March 2015, and every one of them proved irrelevant to the outcome.

Yemen showed that force, even when overwhelming, is not sufficient to defeat a movement that is being reshaped by the war itself. The Houthis of 2026 bear almost no resemblance to the Houthis of 2015, and the distance between those two versions of the movement is measured entirely in the consequences of a war that was supposed to last a few months.

After sustained Israeli strikes and American military pressure, the Houthis are arguably more degraded than at any point since 2015. But degraded is not defeated, and this is a movement that has always known how to survive with less. What dies in these systems are names, maybe titles, but not the machinery itself, and anyone who believes that killing Khamenei and Larijani and a generation of IRGC commanders means the system will follow them should look at what eleven years of strikes on Yemen actually produced. These systems are built for moments of crisis, Houthis and the IRGC in particular, because they built an ideological system and exercised absolute control over large numbers of people, are akin to a chess player down to a handful of pawns who only need one to reach the back rank and promote. The question is not whether they have the capacity to rebuild, because they have done it before under worse conditions, but whether anyone on the other side of the board is paying enough attention to stop them before they do.

Today, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi delivered an anniversary address demanding that Saudi Arabia cease its hostility, release Yemen's revenues, and leave the confrontation with Yemen to the Americans and Israelis directly. Eleven years in, degraded by sustained American and Israeli strikes, the Houthis are still making demands they may no longer have the capacity to enforce. It is the biggest game of poker anyone in the region is playing right now.

March 26, 2026 marks eleven years since Operation Decisive Storm, and it turned out that it was not the three-month affair that my friend had promised it would be. It was a generational tragedy whose consequences are still compounding. The thing that was supposed to be small did not stay small. It fed on the war that was meant to kill it. And now I am watching similar assumptions take hold with Iran. President Trump declared regime change because the leaders are dead, but a 40-year-old IRGC system is still standing in the ruins. Two days after that declaration, the IRGC was enforcing transit permits on the Strait of Hormuz and turning ships back while its proxy media network broadcast the enforcement in real time. The leaders changed. The machinery did not. Yemen should have taught us that. Yemen is a cautionary tale, proof that wars fought without recalibrating, without a strategy that could adapt, do not destroy ideology machines. They feed them.

The contradictions are not incidental, they are becoming the war’s defining feature. Every stated objective has been undercut by a subsequent action, and every action has produced consequences that contradict the objective it was meant to serve. So let us assume serious threats that require intervention, all of which have been discussed by the administration. Let us take them at face value.

Let us assume the most generous version, that this was a war for the liberation of the Iranian people. Millions took to the streets in January, and the regime killed at least six thousand of them, with credible estimates running far higher. That was real, and it was significant. But the United States has now killed thousands more, displaced three million, struck a girls’ school in Minab, bombed a sports hall during practice in Lamerd, and the IRGC claims it is still producing missiles even as its infrastructure burns. The people who were protesting for freedom are now sheltering from American bombs. Liberation does not usually arrive this way.

If the reason was nuclear, that would be serious. Iran had been enriching uranium for years, and by early 2026 it had stockpiled enough for as many as ten weapons if further processed. But on February 27, Oman’s foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to cap enrichment, accept full verification, and downgrade its stockpile. Talks were set to resume five days later. They never did.

And then there is the Gulf, which was never part of the calculation to begin with. The Gulf states did not ask for this to happen in their neighborhood. Qatar’s Ras Laffan, the largest LNG facility in the world, has been struck repeatedly. Saudi refineries in Riyadh have been hit. The UAE’s Shah gas field is on fire. Kuwait dismantled a Hezbollah cell targeting its critical infrastructure. These countries were not consulted before the strikes. They are living with the consequences of a decision they did not make.

And then, on Friday, March 20, President Trump posted that the United States was “getting very close to meeting our objectives” and considering “winding down” military operations. He listed five accomplishments: completely degrading Iran’s missile capability and launchers, destroying Iran’s defense industrial base, eliminating Iran’s navy and air force including its anti-aircraft weaponry, never allowing Iran to get close to nuclear capability, and protecting Middle Eastern allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. The same day, his administration deployed 2,500 additional Marines to the region and as I mentioned above lifted sanctions on Iranian oil. The next day, he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened within 48 hours. Winding down and escalating in the same breath. The Iranian people were not on the list of objectives, and that is not an oversight. It is consistent with a president whose foreign policy instincts have always been realist rather than ideological, concerned with capabilities and threats rather than governance and transitions. But it does clarify something that the millions who took to the streets in January deserve to hear stated plainly: this war was fought over what Iran could do, not over what Iran could become. The people who believed they were the purpose of it were not.

There is a pattern to wars launched without a theory of their own conclusion. They begin with clarity and end with improvisation. The Iran war has reached the improvisation phase in record time, and the distance between the stated objectives and the observable reality is now so wide that even the administration’s allies have stopped trying to bridge it. It is worth going back to the beginning, because each decision along the way narrowed what came next, and by February 28 there were no alternatives left.

A Decade of Narrowing Options

To understand what is happening now, you have to understand the sequence of decisions that made February 28 almost inevitable, because no single one of them was irrational, and yet taken together they produced an outcome that nobody planned and nobody can control. This is how great powers stumble into wars they cannot finish, not through a single catastrophic miscalculation but through the steady accumulation of individually defensible choices, each one foreclosing the options that might have prevented the next. And we would be remiss not to start a decade ago, because that is when the first and perhaps most consequential bet was placed.

In 2015, the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. It was the liberal institutionalist bet, the wager that you could bring a revolutionary state into the rules-based order through negotiated constraints. It had real limitations. It did not address Iran’s ballistic missiles. It did not address the proxy network. It did not address Iran’s regional behavior. The Gulf states and Israel hated it for precisely those reasons. But it was a mechanism. It capped enrichment. It established verification. And for the duration of its functioning, the nuclear clock was stopped.

Of course, none of us were under any illusions about this. The IAEA dutifully reported each quarter that Iran was meeting its enrichment limits, but it also reported, each quarter, that it could not determine whether Iran had undeclared nuclear facilities or materials. Iran’s cooperation on inspections was, in the Agency’s careful language, not always “timely”. German intelligence found over a hundred attempts by Iran to procure illicit nuclear and missile technology in the first two years of the deal. And Iran continued building ballistic missiles, which the JCPOA never touched. The opposition to the deal, in the Gulf, in Israel, and in parts of Washington, was screaming that we were being played, and their arguments were not without merit. But for the Obama administration, having a flawed mechanism was still better than having no mechanism at all, which is what came next.

In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew. Maximum pressure replaced the JCPOA, and the theory was that sanctions would either force a better deal or force the regime to collapse. Neither happened. What happened instead was that the constraint on enrichment disappeared. Iran began stockpiling sixty-percent-enriched uranium, enough, by early 2026, for as many as ten nuclear weapons if further processed. The mechanism was gone and the clock restarted, faster than before.

I want to be honest about something here, because the temptation with a timeline like this is to draw a straight line from A to Z and call it inevitable. It was not inevitable. None of this was neat. At every point along this chain, different decisions were possible. The JCPOA could have been renegotiated rather than abandoned. Maximum pressure could have been paired with a credible diplomatic track rather than deployed as a substitute for one. Reality is messier than any retrospective account can capture, and I do not want to flatten it. But what I do want to say is that the direction of travel was consistent even if the path was not. At every fork, the option that preserved a mechanism for managing the Iran problem was rejected in favor of the option that destroyed one. And eventually you run out of mechanisms. February 28 is what happens when you run out. But before we get there, the road passed through several moments that each narrowed the options further, and all of them unfolded against a backdrop that deserves to be named plainly.

For the better part of a decade, Iran’s proxies operated across the region like a neighborhood mafia. In Iraq, they ran militias that were stronger than the army and answered to Tehran, not Baghdad. In Syria, they propped up a regime that had gassed its own people and turned the reconstruction into a patronage network. In Lebanon, Hezbollah maintained a parallel state with its own army, its own foreign policy, and its own wars. In Yemen, the Houthis overthrew the government in the north, splintered the country, and brought on a Saudi and Emirati intervention that became a war of attrition that no one in the West truly understood or paid attention to. These were not resistance movements. They were competitors to sovereignty itself, organizations that collected taxes, recruited children, destroyed governance, and undermined every international effort to stabilize the countries they operated in. And the international community did not ignore it, that would almost be more forgivable. It tried. It tried earnestly. The United Nations sent envoys and negotiated frameworks and staffed offices across the region, and in Yemen it worked within the system until the system swallowed it whole, until a majority of its local staff ended up in Houthi detention with no resolution and no leverage and no way to even retrieve its own files, let alone negotiate for a country. When your mediating body cannot free its own employees, the word “diplomacy” starts to sound like a courtesy rather than a capability.

And I want to say something here that I think is important because in writing about the consequences of this war, I do not want to accidentally absolve the regime that made it inevitable. Iran is not the victim in this story. For a decade, Tehran armed, funded, and directed networks that hollowed out sovereign states from the inside, and it did so with a patience and discipline that nobody in Washington fully appreciated because Washington only ever looked at Iran through one lens, which was Israel. The impact on Yemen, on Iraq, on Lebanon, on Syria, the slow strangulation of countries that were trying to build something that was never urgent enough to drive American policy. It was background noise.

And behind all of it, there was a larger architecture that is only now becoming visible. Iran was not operating alone. It was operating within a set of relationships with Russia and China that were collectively working to undermine the American-led order, to weaken NATO, to demonstrate that sovereignty was negotiable and that the rules-based system was a fiction maintained by a power that no longer had the will to enforce it. The bitter irony is that the United States is now doing some of that work itself, fraying its own alliances, alienating its own partners, calling NATO allies cowards for refusing to join a war it started without consulting them. The order is being dismantled from both ends, and the people caught in the middle, the Gulf states, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, are left trying to navigate a world where neither the architects of destruction nor the supposed guarantors of stability can be relied upon.

Much of this could be traced to just a couple of years after the signing of the JCPOA, when the ink was barely dry on the nuclear deal, and Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones were already being tested in combat for the first time, fired from Yemen at Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It garnered a few headlines, maybe a concerned statement or two, and then everyone got distracted. But the missiles were penetrating defenses that were supposed to be impenetrable. The Houthis claimed the launches. The technology and the targeting told a different story. Tehran was using Yemen as a proving ground, demonstrating what its arsenal could do while maintaining just enough deniability to avoid consequences. That arrangement reached its peak in September 2019, when drones and cruise missiles struck Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq processing facility, the most important oil installation in the world. The Houthis claimed the attack. The evidence pointed to Iran. Production was cut in half overnight. And the United States did nothing. No military response. No enforcement of the security partnership that had underpinned Gulf stability for half a century. In strategic history, the most consequential moments are often non-events, the things that did not happen when they should have. Abqaiq was one of them. That non-response told every actor in the region that the American security umbrella had a hole in it large enough to fly a drone through. The Gulf heard it. Tehran heard it. And the Houthis heard it, which is why they spent the next several years building a military capability that could threaten one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

In January 2020, a US drone killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force and the architect of Iran’s entire proxy strategy across the region. There was momentary panic among the media and the analyst class, an over-calculation of what the consequences might be for the United States, and very little consideration of what Soleimani had meant for everyone else.

In Baghdad, people danced in the streets. In parts of Syria, in parts of Lebanon, in parts of Yemen, people who had lived under the boot of Iranian intervention, who had watched Soleimani’s Quds Force arm the militias that destroyed their neighborhoods and killed their families, were quietly and sometimes not so quietly relieved. The man who had built the machinery of proxy warfare across four countries was gone, and for millions of people in the region, that was not a crisis. It was a correction.

But in Washington, the conversation was not about any of that. There was a discomfort with the act itself, not with the man who was killed but with the fact that the United States had done the killing, and that Trump, in particular, had ordered it. The question was not what Soleimani had done to the region but whether his removal made America safe or unsafe, as if the safety of the United States was the only variable that mattered, as if the people living under the networks he built were not part of the calculus at all. Trump’s supporters saw it as something limited and contained, a strike that did not entangle the country in a wider war. His detractors saw recklessness and escalation. And what almost no one did was ask the Iraqis, or the Syrians, or the Yemenis, or even the Iranians, what they thought. But if you live long enough inside the American policy system, you come to understand something about how it works: the people in the region are the rationale, never the drivers. They are invoked to justify decisions and are absent from the making of them. That pattern did not start with Soleimani, and it did not end with him.

Meanwhile, Iran promised devastating retaliation, but what it delivered was a barrage of missiles at Al Asad airbase in Iraq, fired with advance warning, causing no American fatalities. And then, in the chaos of its own heightened alert, the IRGC shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board, most of them Iranian citizens. The regime ended up killing its own people. The retaliation intended to demonstrate Iranian strength instead revealed Iranian fragility.

And this is where the trajectory bends in a direction that I think has not been sufficiently examined. Deterrence is a psychological construct before it is a military one, and once the psychology shifts, the military balance becomes almost irrelevant. The lesson that Washington and Jerusalem drew from Soleimani was not just that you could strike Iran’s most important military figure and survive the retaliation. The lesson was that the retaliation itself was performative. That Iran would threaten the apocalypse and deliver theater. That the cost of striking Iran was, in practice, far lower than the cost that had been assumed for decades. That calculation, whether it was right or wrong, is the psychological foundation on which every subsequent escalation was built, the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, and ultimately the decision to launch nine hundred strikes on February 28, 2026. Soleimani’s killing did not just remove a general. It removed the fear of what Iran would do in response. And once that fear was gone, the constraint was gone with it. Each unanswered escalation had lowered the threshold for the next, until by February 2026 there were no thresholds left.

Then came October 7, 2023, and the crisis that followed it changed everything. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in the Red Sea, the entire Iranian proxy network activated in ways that demonstrated both its reach and its limits. And over the next two years, Israel systematically dismantled every node in that network. Hamas’s military infrastructure in Gaza was destroyed, at catastrophic civilian cost. Hezbollah’s senior leadership was decapitated, and its forces in southern Lebanon were degraded. The Houthis were hit with sustained American and coalition air campaigns until a ceasefire was signed in 2025. By the time we reached February 2026, the proxy shield that Iran had spent four decades building was in ruins.

In June 2025, the Twelve-Day War crossed the last threshold. Israel and the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities directly, damaging Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Iran struck back, a ceasefire was brokered, and the world moved on. But a precedent had been set. Direct military strikes on Iranian soil were no longer theoretical. The taboo was broken.

In January 2026, the largest anti-government protests since 1979 erupted across Iran. The regime responded with mass killings. Trump told the protesters that help was on the way. The US began its largest military buildup in the Middle East since 2003. And crucially, this was the moment when the objective shifted. Before January, the American frame was nuclear containment. After January, the frame became regime change. Nobody announced this shift explicitly. It happened in the space between Trump’s tweets and Netanyahu’s visits to Washington. But it happened, and it changed the nature of everything that followed. In the study of how wars begin, the most dangerous transition is the one from limited aims to unlimited ones, because limited aims can be satisfied and unlimited ones cannot.

In February, Oman mediated three rounds of indirect talks in Geneva. I followed them closely, not out of optimism but out of concern. Ali Larijani, Khamenei’s most trusted adviser, was involved in the process, which signaled that Tehran considered this serious enough to deploy its highest-level diplomatic operator. That mattered. I was monitoring how the axis media treated each round, and the signals were telling. Hardline Iranian outlets covered the talks as a show of diplomatic seriousness while keeping their editorial skepticism high, framing the negotiations as a test of American sincerity rather than a genuine opening. Russian state media carried the proceedings with a tone of cautious hopefulness, emphasizing Iran’s resolve and its refusal to capitulate. Chinese outlets treated it as evidence that diplomacy was the responsible path. Everyone was performing confidence in a process that none of them fully believed in. And the whole time, the same question kept circling: what are we negotiating? This regime has never negotiated in good faith. We should not be at a table with the mullahs.

On February 27, the Omani foreign minister told the world that peace was within reach. The next morning, nine hundred strikes hit Iran and the Supreme Leader was dead. Killing a supreme leader is the kind of thing that historically ends wars, or at minimum opens the space to end them. Instead, the administration said it would not negotiate with the regime, continued striking for three more weeks, and is now negotiating anyway.

Every one of these decisions, from the JCPOA to its withdrawal, from Abqaiq’s non-response to Soleimani’s killing, from October 7 to the Twelve-Day War, narrowed the range of outcomes. And at no point along this chain did anyone articulate what the end state looked like. The JCPOA was about constraining the nuclear program. Maximum pressure was about forcing behavior change. The strikes on the proxy network were about degrading threats. And then suddenly we were in a full-scale war with regime change as the stated objective and no theory of what comes after.

The IRGC Logic

The Islamic Republic found itself in this war in the worst strategic position of its existence. But the IRGC is not the Islamic Republic. It is something older, deeper, and harder to kill. Its proxy network was degraded. Its nuclear facilities were damaged. Its air defenses had been suppressed so thoroughly that the United States is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace. The Supreme Leader was killed on the first night. Forty officials were killed in the opening hours. The IRGC’s ballistic missile launch rate has dropped by ninety percent from its peak. By any conventional military measure, Iran is losing.

And yet the regime is still standing. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told senators this week that the Iranian government “appears to be intact,” although “largely degraded.” The IRGC spokesman told reporters that Iran was still producing missiles even under war conditions. Mojtaba Khamenei has assumed the role of Supreme Leader. The Assembly of Experts has convened. The state media apparatus, though damaged, continues to broadcast. The bureaucratic machinery of the Islamic Republic is battered but functioning.

The regime had forty years to entrench itself amid the population, to grow like a cancer that metastasized into every organ of the state. And to be fair to Washington, it is not as though they do not understand this. The approach that has been quietly discussed, and sometimes not so quietly, is what some analysts have already called the Venezuela model: decapitation followed by coercing what remains of the government into submission. In Venezuela, the United States captured Maduro and handed the country to his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez. The institutional skeleton stayed. The faces changed. Trump has signaled something similar for Iran, suggesting early in the conflict that he was open to working with elements within the establishment, with pragmatists inside the system rather than installing exiles from abroad. Some of those figures have since been killed. But the impulse reveals the recognition, even within an administration that declared regime change as its objective, that you cannot simply delete the IRGC and expect something functional to appear in its place. The question is whether that recognition survives contact with the war’s own momentum.

The assumption in Washington was that decapitation would trigger collapse, or at minimum that it would create an opening for the protest movement to fill. That assumption misunderstands how the Islamic Republic is structured. This is not a regime that depends on a single leader the way a personalist dictatorship does. It is an institutional system with redundancy built into its design. The Supreme Leader matters, but the IRGC, the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Basij, the judiciary, the Friday prayer network, these are independent power centers that can operate without central direction for extended periods. The system was designed, consciously and explicitly, to survive decapitation. It was born in a revolution that understood how its predecessor died, and it made sure it would not die the same way.

And here is where the conversation in the West goes wrong, and dangerously so. There is a narrative, amplified by parts of the Iranian diaspora and embraced by many in Washington, that the Islamic Republic is an alien imposition on a society that is fundamentally secular, Western-oriented, and waiting to be freed. I understand why that narrative is appealing. There are millions of Iranians who want the regime gone, and their courage, particularly in the January protests, was extraordinary. But that narrative flattens eighty-eight million people into a single story, and the parts it leaves out are the parts that will determine whether this war produces a transition or a catastrophe.

The IRGC is not a foreign army. It is a domestic institution that employs, directly and indirectly, millions of Iranians. It runs construction companies that build roads and housing. It operates telecommunications networks. It controls significant portions of Iran’s import-export trade. It manages pension funds and charitable foundations. For a large segment of the Iranian population, the IRGC is the employer, the landlord, the social safety net.

Meanwhile, people are celebrating the bombs, and I have watched them, in Los Angeles and in Tehran, cheering as buildings come down, and I do not think they have thought about the school in Minab or the sports hall in Lamerd where girls were practicing when the ceiling fell. There is a distance between a headline and a body, and most people live comfortably inside that distance.

The theory was that if you hit the regime hard enough, the people would do the rest, and the regime has been hit, and the Supreme Leader is dead, and the air defenses are gone, and the regime is still there, because it was never just a man or a building, it was a system, and systems do not fall the way buildings do.

I have no illusions about the IRGC, because I watch its smaller version in Yemen every day. The Houthis built theirs in ten years and it is already too deep to pull out by the roots, and the IRGC has had forty. If the system cannot be destroyed from the air, and it cannot, then the question of what comes after requires a coherent answer. It has been asked. It has been answered differently every week. The Venezuela model one day, regime change the next, winding down by Friday. The Twelve-Day War was limited. The Yemen campaign stopped short. Congress is debating the legal authority for this one while it is already underway. None of this inspires confidence that the day after has been thought through any more carefully than the night before.

The Proxies That Calculated

When the strikes hit on February 28, the Axis of Resistance split. Hezbollah activated within days, firing rockets at northern Israel in retaliation for Khamenei’s killing, and it brought ruin on Lebanon for it. Over a thousand killed, nearly a million displaced, the Lebanese government banning Hezbollah’s military activities and ordering arrests of anyone who launched rockets from its territory. Hezbollah entered a war that its own government begged it not to join, and Lebanon is paying the price.

It is worth understanding how diminished Hezbollah was before it made this decision. The assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in 2024 did not just remove a leader. It removed the only figure who had the personal authority to hold Hezbollah’s political, military, and social functions together as a coherent project. Nasrallah was Hezbollah’s public face, its strategic brain, and its bridge to the Lebanese political system for over three decades. Without him, the organization has fractured into competing internal factions that lack both his legitimacy and his discipline. More than a year of Israeli operations had already degraded Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in the south, killed senior commanders, and destroyed weapons depots. And the political ground beneath the organization has shifted in ways that would have been unthinkable even two years ago. Lebanon’s government, under Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, has not simply condemned Hezbollah’s entry into the war. It has demanded the group surrender its weapons to the state, ordered security forces to arrest those responsible for launching rockets, and announced it would arrest and repatriate anyone connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Lebanese state is, for the first time in decades, publicly and forcefully asserting that it does not need Hezbollah to defend its sovereignty, and that Hezbollah’s war is not Lebanon’s war. That is a structural shift, not a momentary reaction.

The Houthis made the opposite calculation. Three weeks into the most existential crisis the Islamic Republic has ever faced, they have issued three statements and done nothing operationally. And while analysts are asking a million question on why, speculation at this stage is counter productive. What we know is that their capacity is degraded, and the gap between their rhoteric and action is big.

The background matters here. The Red Sea campaign that preceded this war looked a lot like the one Saudi Arabia had been drowning in for years, only now it was America’s turn: expensive interceptors chasing cheap drones, billions spent to contain a militia operating on a fraction of the budget. The administration destroyed much of what needed to be destroyed, but the Houthis were disciplined enough about their losses that the public never registered the damage. What followed was a ceasefire, and what I can say, based on my own reporting, is that the Houthis capitulated because they were weakened, not because they chose peace. The Trump administration, which was under scrutiny for the spending, decided to stop there, believing it had largely met its objectives. The ceasefire gave the Houthis exactly what a weakened force needs most, which is time.

The reason is that the Houthis have undergone a strategic transformation that most analysts have not yet fully appreciated, and I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because describing their calculation is not the same as admiring it. The Houthis are a violent theocratic movement that holds UN staff hostage, runs a coercive conscription apparatus, has engineered a humanitarian catastrophe in the territories it controls, and has built its state institutions on a foundation of repression. None of that is incidental. It is the system. But brutal movements can also be strategically rational, and understanding their logic is not advocacy for their cause. The 2025 ceasefire with the United States changed their calculus fundamentally. They went from a movement with nothing to lose to a movement with everything to lose. They are consolidating control over their territory in Yemen. They are building state institutions on the bones of the ones they destroyed. They are running a conscription system that mirrors the Iranian Basij. They are developing a defense industrial base. They are expanding their influence into the Horn of Africa. In short, they are replicating the IRGC model from 1979, and they are doing it with brutal efficiency and coercive discipline. Entering this war would jeopardize all of tha t. Solidarity with a collapsing patron is not worth the coercive state they are building.

What this reveals is that the proxy model does not function as a mutual defense pact. It functions as a network of rational actors who calculate their own survival independently. The test of any alliance is not whether it holds when the patron is strong but whether it holds when the patron is weak. When the patron is collapsing, the proxies hedge.

And this is perhaps the biggest indicator that the IRGC itself has been weakened in ways that go beyond missile counts and launcher inventories. The Houthis were able to see it from day one. What could be more consequential than the death of the Supreme Leader himself? The IRGC was the Houthis’ backbone, their supplier, their model, their strategic depth. When that back broke, the Houthis were effectively on their own, and they knew it before anyone in Washington had finished writing the first press briefing. The only scenario I can see in which the Houthis reverse course is one in which the IRGC regains its health, and right now that is not the trajectory. Until then, the Houthis have no reason to risk what they have built, and every reason to keep building it. The proxies were not the objective of this war. They had already been degraded before it started. Hamas was dismantled, Hezbollah was decapitated, the Houthis were brought to a ceasefire. Every piece was taken off the board before the strike on the king. But nobody accounted for what happens to the pieces that survived once the king falls. A proxy without a patron is not a defeated force. It is an unrestrained one.

The Gulf Between the Hammer and the Anvil

As for the Gulf states, they have been the shock absorbers of this region for decades. They absorbed the Iran-Iraq war. They absorbed the Gulf War. They absorbed the JCPOA, which they did not want. They absorbed maximum pressure, which did not work. They absorbed Abqaiq, which went unanswered. And now they are absorbing Iranian missiles on their energy infrastructure, the direct retaliation for a military operation they were not consulted about and did not request.

The attacks are not symbolic. They are structural. Iran has hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility multiple times, causing extensive damage to the largest gas export complex in the world. Saudi refineries in Riyadh have been struck. The UAE’s Shah gas field and Fujairah oil zone have been hit. Kuwait’s Mina Al-Ahmadi, the country’s largest refinery, was targeted. A vessel was struck by a projectile four nautical miles off Qatar’s coast. These are not pinprick provocations. They are strikes on the economic foundations of Gulf society.

The Gulf’s response has been furious but constrained. Qatar expelled Iranian military and security attachés. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said the little trust that remained in Iran has been completely shattered, and warned that Gulf patience is not unlimited. Kuwait arrested a Hezbollah-linked cell. Bahrain announced it had intercepted over a hundred and thirty missiles and two hundred and thirty drones since the war began. Arab and Islamic foreign ministers convened in Riyadh to coordinate a response.

But notice what they have not done. They have not joined the war. They have not offered their bases for offensive operations. They have not sent ships to escort tankers through Hormuz. They are defending themselves, absorbing the hits, and holding back, because this is a war they did not start and do not want to fight.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan warned this week that Gulf patience is “not unlimited,” that the kingdom reserves the right to take military action, and that the Iranian targeting of Gulf energy infrastructure was “premeditated, preplanned, preorganised and well thought out.” He also said that trust with Iran has been completely shattered and that it will take far longer than the war itself to rebuild. Arab News editor Faisal J. Abbas wrote that many observers, himself included, had breathed a sigh of relief earlier in the war when Iran’s president apologized for the strikes on Gulf targets, but that the apology has been rendered meaningless by the continued attacks. The Gulf wants to see Iran change course, not offer words. And there is a painful irony that Gulf analysts are noting quietly: the Gulf states had spent years working toward de-escalation with Tehran, including the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by Beijing, and all of that diplomatic investment has been destroyed not by anything the Gulf did, but by a war launched by their own security partner without their consultation.

Every administration for over a decade has oscillated between two modes, both of which diminished the Gulf. Accommodation of Iran, which the Gulf experienced as abandonment, or confrontation with Iran, which the Gulf experienced as recklessness. At no point were they treated as partners with sovereign interests of their own. The most dangerous moment in any alliance is when the junior partner discovers that alignment has made it a target rather than a beneficiary. That discovery is happening now, across six capitals simultaneously.

And now Iran is offering them a choice that is designed to split the Gulf from Washington permanently. Araghchi’s formulation, that the Strait of Hormuz is “open, but closed to our enemies,” is not a casual statement. It is a strategic instrument. It tells the Gulf: your problem is not Iran. Your problem is your association with the United States. Distance yourself and the pain stops. That is the most dangerous proposition in this entire conflict, not because the Gulf will accept it, but because the logic behind it will become more attractive with every day that the American commitment looks fragile and the European commitment looks nonexistent. The Gulf was never the consideration in this war. It was the afterthought. The consideration was Israel, which has systematically dismantled the IRGC’s network, but for the US, everything else, the energy infrastructure, the shipping lanes, the alliances built over half a century, was treated as a cost that someone else would bear. Three weeks in, the someone is six countries that were not consulted, are not participating, and are running out of interceptors.

The Strait and the New Order

Everything I have described converges at the Strait of Hormuz, because the strait is where the military conflict, the energy crisis, and the political sustainability of this war all meet.

Before this war, twenty million barrels of oil passed through Hormuz every day. Twenty percent of global LNG. Six hundred billion dollars in annual energy trade. The strait was governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees the right of transit passage through international straits. That legal framework, and the American naval presence that enforced it, was the invisible foundation of the global energy market. It was so stable that the world stopped pricing the risk. The most load-bearing assumptions in any international order are the ones that nobody examines until they fail.

The IRGC repriced it on March 2. Traffic dropped by more than ninety-five percent. Over a hundred and fifty ships were stranded. Twenty-one attacks on vessels confirmed. Brent crude above a hundred and fifteen dollars. European gas prices up sixty percent. Iraq shutting down oil fields. Qatar halting LNG production. The largest energy supply disruption since the 1973 embargo.

But here is something that other analysts have noted and that is important because it could easily be missed in the coverage of daily strikes and price movements. The strait did not close because of a naval blockade. It closed because of insurance. When war-risk premiums spiked and major insurers canceled coverage, the commercial viability of transit collapsed overnight. Ships that could not be insured became ships that could not sail. The US Navy can escort a tanker through the strait. It cannot force an insurance company to underwrite the voyage. Insurance, a mechanism that exists entirely outside the traditional military balance, became the instrument that shut down twenty percent of global oil trade. That is a form of power that is new, and we do not yet have a framework for managing it.

According to Lloyd’s List and the Financial Times, the IRGC has established what it describes as a safe maritime corridor through Iranian territorial waters. Vessels that submit to IRGC vetting, registration, and approval can transit. The reported price is up to two million dollars per vessel, paid in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. Between March 1 and 15, roughly ninety ships cleared the strait under IRGC clearance. The payments are being made. The commercial precedent is established. The IRGC verifies clearances over VHF radio. Multiple governments, including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia, and China, are negotiating transit arrangements directly with Tehran.

I want to be precise about what this represents, because it is easy to dismiss as extortion and miss the logic behind it. This is a regime that is fighting for survival, and survival requires funding. Iran’s conventional revenue streams are collapsing under the weight of the war. Its oil infrastructure is being targeted. Its trade routes are disrupted. What the IRGC has built at Hormuz is not a grand strategic vision. It is a regime finding a way to monetize the one asset it still controls, its geography, in order to fund the war that is destroying everything else. Iran is simultaneously attacking ships that transit without permission and charging ships that ask for it. It has effectively turned a waterway governed by international law into a toll road. And the dilemma this creates is one that no capital has solved. Sanctioning the operators who pay the IRGC toll means shutting down the only active oil supply channel through the strait. The extortion is also the lifeline.

The War That Forgot Itself

So let me return to where I started. What is this war for? The administration asked Congress for two hundred billion dollars to fund a war that Congress never authorized. It lifted sanctions on Russian oil to stabilize a market destabilized by its own campaign. It lifted sanctions on Iranian oil in the middle of a war on Iran. That is not a strategy adjusting to circumstances. That is a war that has lost the thread of its own narrative.

And as this piece goes to publication, the contradictions have compounded again. On Saturday, the president gave Iran a 48-hour ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants. On Monday, he announced a five-day pause on those same strikes. Ultimatum to pause in forty-eight hours. This is the rhythm of a war that cannot find its own tempo.

And the fracture is not just in the numbers. Two days before the president posted about winding down, Joe Kent resigned. Kent was Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former Special Forces officer, former CIA paramilitary, as MAGA as it gets. He sat down with Tucker Carlson and said that Iran posed no imminent threat, that Israel drove the decision to strike, and that senior officials were not allowed to raise their concerns with the president. The White House called it insulting and laughable. The FBI is now investigating him.

For those willing to buy this narrative, this is the WMD moment of the Iran war. And I understand the appeal of that framing, but it is more complicated than Kent makes it sound. Iran may not have posed an imminent nuclear threat in the narrow sense that the intelligence community measures these things, but the longer arc tells a different story. A regime that controls proxy networks across four countries, that has demonstrated it can shut down a fifth of global oil trade overnight, that was testing ballistic missiles against Gulf states years before this war started, that has leverage over Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea through its most capable proxy, that regime is not harmless just because it was not building a warhead that week. The problem is that the American system evaluates threats on short timelines and authoritarians plan on long ones, and that mismatch is how you end up surprised by things that were visible for a decade.

But regardless of where you land on the threat question, what Kent’s resignation makes undeniable is that there is not enough buy-in. Not in the intelligence community, not in the media ecosystem that elected this president, and not among the allies who were supposed to share the burden. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans still support the strikes, but the people who built Trump’s media infrastructure, Carlson, Rogan, Megyn Kelly, are breaking with him. The base voted for no new wars and got the largest American military operation in the Middle East since Iraq. The Gulf states are watching, and they can read a calendar.

The means have overtaken the ends. The war is no longer being driven by its objectives. It is being driven by its consequences, and the consequences are generating their own logic, a logic that nobody in Washington is articulating and nobody in the Gulf can afford to ignore.

Iran’s theory of victory was never military. It was always political. Tehran cannot defeat the United States Air Force. It can make the war expensive enough, long enough, that American domestic politics does the work. Every day the strait stays closed, gas prices climb. Every day gas prices climb, the political coalition behind the war erodes. Every day the coalition erodes, the probability that Washington will seek an exit increases. And every day that passes without an exit, the IRGC’s toll regime on Hormuz becomes more entrenched, more normalized, and harder to reverse.

The question is not who has more firepower. It is whose political tolerance for pain runs out first. This is a contest of endurance disguised as a military conflict, and the outcome will be shaped less by what happens over Iranian airspace than by what happens in American living rooms, European energy markets, and Gulf foreign ministries.

As this piece goes to publication, the United States has requested a meeting with Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. Trump says the talks have been “very good and productive” and that they are close to a deal. Qalibaf denies any negotiations are taking place and calls the reports “fake news” designed to “manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.” Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan are passing messages between the two sides. Israel says it was surprised by the pace. Eighty-eight million Iranians are waiting for someone to decide their future, and nobody can confirm whether the conversation about it is even happening.

The trajectory of this war has a pattern: decapitation continues without stated strategy. When Ali Larijani was killed on March 17, the man who had been effectively running Iran since late December and who was responsible for the brutal killing of protesters in January, the system replaced him with Hossein Dehghan within 48 hours. We do not yet know how much authority or respect Dehghan commands, because Larijani was embedded deep in the network, a hardliner with nuclear negotiation credentials and the Khamenei family’s trust. His replacement is probably another hardliner, but not necessarily one with the same reach. I have seen this before. When Israel killed the Houthis’ prime minister and a dozen cabinet members last year, the movement kept functioning because the power was never in the titles. None of this means nothing is happening. The psychological damage accumulating inside Iran is enormous, and it would be wrong to dismiss it. But the people absorbing that damage are also the people who still control the guns, the institutions, and the economic networks that make the IRGC indispensable to millions of Iranians. They have everything to lose, and that makes them more dangerous, not less. The Iranian public has not been able to rise at this moment, and until they can, the IRGC will be left standing, weaker and more paranoid but standing. Each strike makes the adversary weaker and the off-ramp narrower. That is the paradox of successful decapitation in the absence of strategy, and we are not learning from it.

We have seen what happens when wars of this magnitude end without a political framework to receive them. Iraq after 2003. Libya after 2011. The word for what fills the space between the old order and the one that never arrives is always the same. It is a void.

The minimum condition for avoiding another void was always the same: you need a theory of the day after before you start the night before. That theory was never written, and this war was launched without it. But the absence of a theory is not an argument for continuing without one. A war conducted one day at a time, one ultimatum at a time, one five-day pause at a time, is not strategy. It is drift with a body count. The markets can feel it, the Gulf can feel it, people in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon who have suffered from the IRGC-backed proxies can feel it, the Iranians on every side of every line inside that country can feel it. The entire region needs something more serious than improvisation because the absence of a strategy has itself become the most destabilizing force in the theater. A void. Another void. In a region that has had enough of them.

Frankfurt’s book makes one point, and it makes it well. The liar knows the truth and works against it. The bullshitter does not care whether what he says is true or false. His only concern is producing an impression, and the impression he wants to produce is that he knows what he is talking about. This makes bullshit more corrosive than lying, because the liar at least respects the architecture of truth enough to build against it. The bullshitter just walks past it on the way to the podium.

I have never read a more precise description of the current discourse on Yemen. And if you think this describes DC in general, you are far more cynical than I am, and probably beyond help. We should grab a coffee.

The Original Bullshitters

The Houthis are, by Frankfurt’s measure, among the most prolific bullshitters operating in the Middle East today, which is saying something in a region where the competition is stiff.

Consider the record. In late 2023, Abdul Malik al-Houthi declared that the Red Sea would become a graveyard for any vessel associated with Israel or its allies. What followed was real enough, missiles, drones, seized ships, and genuine disruption to global shipping. But the rhetoric always outran the action by a wide margin. The Houthis promised a naval blockade they never imposed. They declared they would strike deep into Israel and then fired missiles that were intercepted or missed. When the U.S. launched Operation Rough Rider in 2025, the Houthis promised ferocious retaliation and then absorbed over a thousand strikes while doing relatively little in response. When the bombing stopped, they sank two ships, as if to remind everyone they still existed, and then went quiet again.

And now, with Iran under direct assault by the United States and Israel, the pattern has reached its most absurd iteration yet. Even before the strikes began, Houthi media had promised a “Red Death” in the Red Sea should Iran be attacked. Iran was attacked. Then al-Houthi declared that “our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it.” Mohammed al-Bukhiti promised “zero hour” was coming and floated the possibility of closing the Bab al-Mandab Strait. The media apparatus produced rallies, statements, posters of the late Khamenei, and declarations of eternal solidarity with the Islamic Republic. What it has not produced is a single missile, a single drone, or a single military action of any kind. The only trigger the Houthis pulled in the weeks since their patron was struck was an artillery strike on civilians during iftar in Hajjah that killed sixteen Yemenis. Three weeks of fingers on triggers and not one trigger pulled at the enemy. At a certain point you have to admire the finger discipline.

The Houthis are not lying about their intentions, because lying would require a commitment to a specific falsehood. They are doing something more slippery. They are producing the atmosphere of imminent action without any obligation to follow through, and they have been doing it long enough that it should be recognizable by now. We can call it deterrence, scrambling, and a bunch of other names, but the most obvious one is bullshit.

The Secondary Industry

Instead, the Houthis’ own bullshit has generated a secondary cottage industry of bullshit, this one produced not by militia leaders in Sanaa but by analysts, commentators, and think tank fellows in Washington, London, and places behind a laptop. Since the war in Iran erupted on February 28, a considerable volume of confident commentary has emerged in just three short weeks to explain Houthi inaction, and nearly all of it shares one quality with the Houthi statements it purports to analyze, which is that it is not grounded in evidence but in the desire to sound like it is grounded in evidence. Frankfurt would have recognized the family resemblance immediately. I recognized it from my couch, which is less impressive but still counts.

What follows is a taxonomy of that speculation. A sea of contradictory analysis has surfaced, and it goes something like this: the Houthis are definitely, probably, possibly, and absolutely not joining the war. They could but they can’t. They will but they won’t. I realize we are all working with incomplete information in a fast-moving situation, and the temptation to produce an explainer is genuinely difficult to resist, as I am demonstrating right now by writing one on top of three or four other explainers I have given before. The problem is not that people are trying to answer a hard question. The problem is that the answers I have seen were accompanied by a level of confidence the evidence cannot support.

The Command Theory

The first and most persistent claim is that the IRGC has ordered the Houthis to stay out of the fight. Sometimes this is framed as strategic choice, with Tehran supposedly holding the Houthis in reserve for a later phase of the war. In one particularly creative version, Iran has already begun activating its proxies, with Hezbollah first, then Iraqi militias, saving the Houthis for the endgame. This narrative requires you to believe that the IRGC, currently operating without its supreme leader and half its senior command, is playing four-dimensional chess. It also requires you not to ask who is on the other end of the phone. Some outlets call the Houthis a “reserve card to be played.” Others quote commentators saying Tehran “does not want to use all its cards at once.” Others say the Houthis are “keeping their cards close to their chest.” At this point, Tehran’s Yemen strategy is apparently a poker game, a chess match, and an insurance plan simultaneously.

The appeal of this theory is that it suggests somewhere, in a room none of us have been in, a decision was made, and the analyst has reverse-engineered it from the outcome. The problem is that nobody advancing it has produced a single piece of evidence. Not a leaked communication, not a sourced account, not even a credible anonymous briefing. Knowing that Iran and the Houthis are connected is not the same as knowing what was said on the phone last Tuesday.

The Independence Fantasy

The second theory is the mirror image of the first. In this version, Houthi inaction proves that the group is not really a proxy at all, that it operates autonomously, and that it has made a sovereign calculation to sit this one out. This reading has a certain elegance. It resolves the puzzle neatly and flatters the analyst’s preference for complexity over the crude “Iran controls everything” narrative.

But the logic is identical in reverse, which should be a warning sign. If you cannot prove the IRGC ordered the Houthis to stay quiet, you also cannot prove they chose to stay quiet on their own simply by pointing to the fact that they are quiet. Inaction is not evidence of motive. It is the absence of action, and the absence of action can be produced by a dozen different causes, from internal disagreement to calculated ambiguity to someone important not answering their phone. Extracting a grand theory of organizational autonomy from a single silence is like diagnosing a disease from one symptom. You can do it, but you should probably run some tests first.

The Crystal Ball

The third species of speculation is my personal favorite, because it requires the least effort and produces the most drama. This is the claim that the Houthis have “surprises up their sleeve” or are “waiting for the right moment” or will enter the war “when developments warrant it.” This last phrase, you may notice, is borrowed directly from Abdul Malik al-Houthi’s own televised address, which means that some analysts are now citing the Houthi leader’s talking points back to their readers as if they were analysis. There is a word for this, and it is not “insight.”

The crystal ball theorist does not claim to know what the Houthis will do. He claims to know that they will do something, and that the something will be significant, and that its timing will reveal strategic genius. This is not a prediction. It is a mood. It is the analytical equivalent of a movie trailer that shows explosions but will not tell you the plot. It creates the feeling of anticipation without any obligation to be right, which is a very comfortable place from which to operate.

The Alarm Factory

Adjacent to all of this, and feeding it, is a growing category of commentators who treat every Houthi statement as if it were an operational order. Al-Bukhiti mentions the Bab al-Mandab and within the hour it is a “breaking” development on six feeds. Al-Houthi says “our fingers are on the trigger” and the commentary class produces seventeen threads on what “the trigger” might refer to. A mid-ranking Houthi official gives a televised interview with the standard rhetorical flourishes and someone who has never read a Houthi communiqué in Arabic files it as “Houthis signal imminent escalation.”

The Houthis have spent years producing statements designed to generate exactly this kind of breathless coverage, and a surprising number of people have volunteered to distribute them. The result is a state of persistent alarm that serves the Houthis’ interests far more than it serves anyone else’s. Every “breaking” alert about a Houthi threat that does not materialize is a small deposit in the group’s credibility bank, because it keeps them relevant without requiring them to spend a single missile.

The question nobody in this category seems to ask is a simple one: when is a Houthi statement a signal and when is it just propaganda? The two look identical from the outside, and the only way to tell them apart is to track what happened after the last time they said the same thing. This requires memory, patience, and a willingness to go back and check, which is harder than retweeting a quote and adding a siren emoji.

The Scenario Machine

Finally, there is the framework that has come to dominate the think tank commentariat, in which the analyst presents three or four possible explanations for Houthi behavior, evaluates each with a paragraph of plausible-sounding reasoning, and then concludes by saying it is too early to tell. Unable, unwilling, or biding their time. Pick one, or better yet, don’t, because the analyst certainly won’t.

This format is actually desired, and I have in the past been called upon to generate scenarios. It is not my favorite form of writing or thinking, but it has become so common in the past four weeks that it now reads less like analysis and more like a genre, the war commentator’s version of a horoscope. It tells you several things that could be true, declines to commit to any of them, and leaves you feeling like you have learned something when, in fact, you have only been presented with options.

The deeper problem with the scenario machine is not that scenarios are inherently useless. It is that these particular scenarios are never anchored in primary evidence. They do not engage with what the Houthis have actually said in their own media, on their own channels, in their own language. They do not track the gap between Houthi rhetoric and Houthi action across previous cycles, which is the one thread of evidence that is actually available and actually illuminating. They reason from the outside in, applying generic armed-group decision theory to a specific movement with a specific history and specific patterns of communication. You could produce these pieces without knowing anything about Yemen at all, and in some cases, well.

What would help

There is a way to interpret what is happening with Iran’s favorite proxy right now, but it requires a willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than fill it with confidence. It requires less reliance on headlines and Houthi rhetoric, and a better understanding of patterns. The gap between what the Houthis say they will do and what they actually do is not a mystery but rather an open record. But reading it takes patience, and patience does not go viral.

And the question itself, why the Houthis have not fired is a very incomplete one. A movement that has spent months conscripting Yemenis in the North into a ground force was not building toward a missile campaign. The rhetoric points seaward but the mobilization points landward. Those two things are not in tension if you have been watching both.

Meanwhile, there is a boy in Rayma who graduated from an ideological course he never enrolled in, wearing a uniform he did not choose, for a cause his family does not share. There is a family in Hajjah that sat down for iftar last week and buried their children the next morning in a targeted Houthi shelling. There are entire governorates whose young men have been folded into a machinery of total mobilization, not because they believe in the axis of resistance but because there was no institution left in their lives that was not already part of it. The Houthis have already shown us what they are building. It is not a missile force but a ground war machine, assembled from the lives of people who were never asked.

That gap, between rhetoric and action, is the only starting point for answering the question everyone is asking. It will not give you a clean three-scenario framework. It will not produce the kind of confident, quotable conclusion that gets you on cable news. But it has the small advantage of being tethered to something real.

Everything else is bullshit.

I published a piece in Foreign Policy last week on a question that kept coming up in conversations with policymakers, editors, and colleagues: why haven’t the Houthis fired? And I’ll be honest, at first I thought the answer was obvious. But the more I talked to people, the more I realized that the gap between what the Houthis promise and what they can actually do wasn’t as visible from the outside. So, having watched them closely, I wrote this piece based on their existing political structure, governance, and capacity, not on guesswork about their intentions.

On paper, you’d expect the Houthis to deliver. This is a movement that spent two years as the most visible face of the Axis of Resistance. They disrupted global shipping. They launched ballistic missiles at Israel. They staked their entire brand on one promise: if Iran is hit, we strike. Iran has been under bombardment for over a week. The Houthis held rallies.

The full piece is here.

Much of the analysis I’ve seen treats this as a question of willingness, offering scenarios and hedging between them. Some of it gets into command-and-control speculation, mapping how the Houthis take orders from the IRGC with a confidence I don’t think anyone outside that chain can really claim. But I think what’s really important is to trace what we know and what we see. And this is what we have meticulously documented.

The Houthis have watched their leadership get decapitated by Israeli strikes. Their supply pipeline from Iran is choked. Through July 2025, 38 percent of their ballistic missiles failed outright. U.S. Central Command seized over 750 tons of Iranian-origin weapons in a single interdiction. Their most advanced systems require external components, and with Iran itself burning, there is no resupply coming.

So what are they doing instead? Building a ground army. Over the past several months, military training courses branded as “Al-Aqsa Flood” programs have been running across every governorate in northern Yemen. Ministries, universities, hospitals, telecom companies, etc. This is not a missile force. It is infantry. The rhetoric points seaward. The mobilization points landward. We covered this extensively in the Red Death article.

There’s another dimension that I think has been largely missed. During the Red

Read more

CBS puts the stockpile at somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 naval mines, and 90% of Tehran’s mine-laying capacity is reportedly still intact. The coverage describes “small boats,” a “gauntlet,” and a general capability to shut down the world’s most important energy chokepoint. It names no specific weapons systems despite the fact that Iran named them on state media a month ago.

What Iran Published

In early February, an IRGC-affiliated outlet published a clip from “Apocalypse War,” a high-production anime series set in “The Middle East 2026.” The animation is not vague. It shows what Iran calls Ghadir-class midget submarines and sea mines deployed to trap a U.S. carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf before a wave of Fattah hypersonic missiles and Shahed drone swarms hits the fleet. Real U.S. bases appear on screen as targets: Incirlik, Prince Sultan, Camp Arifjan, Al-Asad, Al-Dhafra, each labeled with the host country’s flag. The commander who gives the final launch order is modeled on Qassem Soleimani.

When we first reported this clip in February, what stood out was the manner in which it was published, because an anime is not a serious war plan. It’s a fantasy. But it was still concerning given that it was meant as a deterrence signal and a showcase of capacity, even if that capacity is exaggerated. Look at the target list. Incirlik is on there, which means Turkey is on there. Turkey spent the last year signaling diplomatic independence, hosting backchannels, positioning itself as a mediator, and none of that mattered because it hosts a U.S. air base. That’s what earned it a spot on Iran’s targeting map. The animation shows ballistic missiles hitting Turkish territory, and in March 2026, real ones flew.

How the Islamic Republic Infuses Ideology into Its Arsenal

The names of these systems deserve attention. The Ghadir-class submarines in the animation are named for Ghadir Khumm, the event where Shia believe the Prophet Muhammad designated Ali as his successor, and it is foundational to Shia identity. Iran’s three Kilo-class submarines are named Tariq, after a Quranic surah meaning “The Night Star”; Yunus, the Prophet Jonah; and Noah. The Zulfaqar torpedo boat is named for the legendary sword of Imam Ali. The Fattah hypersonic missile shown striking the U.S. fleet means “the opener” or “the conqueror,” one of the 99 names of God in Islam. When the IRGC attaches sacred theology to a weapons system, it is making its use not just strategically justified but spiritually ordained. This is not branding. This is ideological infrastructure built into the hardware, and none of it is accidental, because these groups have had years to think about this, to organize every layer of meaning, and to ensure that the faith narrative and the military doctrine are inseparable.

The IRGC’s “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz” Exercise, February 16-17

The anime was not an isolated media product. On February 16-17, the IRGC Navy ran a full-scale exercise called “Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz.” AP reported it. CNBC covered it. The National wrote it up. The War Zone analyzed it. Iran temporarily closed parts of the strait during the drill, fired live missiles from deep inside the country, and tested the new Sayyad-3G naval air defense missile for the first time. IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Tangsiri said Tehran exercises “complete command” over the strait “whether above the surface, sub-surface, or in the air.” He added that the IRGC was ready to close the strait if ordered by the leadership. The National quoted him saying “the weapon that reaches the battlefield on the day of war is different from what is shown in the exercise.”

The next day, Khamenei himself weighed in: “a warship is a dangerous apparatus, but more dangerous than the warship is the weapon that can sink the warship into the depths of the sea.”

Why Publish the Doctrine at All

There’s a question worth asking here: why publish any of this? Why would the IRGC put its operational concepts on Fars News for anyone to read? The answer is that deterrence only works if the adversary knows what you can do. A mine on the seafloor that nobody knows about sinks one ship. A mine-laying capability that your adversary knows about changes the behavior of every ship. Once the US Navy has to assume that Ghadir subs might be sitting on the bottom of the strait at any given moment, that assumption alone forces a different posture, different routing, different risk calculus, whether or not a single submarine is actually there. The deterrence begins the moment the article goes live, not when the mine enters the water.

The IRGC understood something that Western analysts still resist: in an ideological system, the media product and the military operation are not separate categories. The broadcast doesn’t describe the campaign. It is the campaign.

Why Sea Mines Matter More Than the Coverage Suggests

The broader historical record is not ambiguous. In 1988, a single Iranian mine nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf. Naval mines have caused 77% of all U.S. ship casualties since 1950. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20% of the world’s crude oil. And the U.S. Navy’s mine countermeasure fleet remains one of the smallest and oldest in its inventory. A few dozen mines in the water doesn’t sound like much until you consider that marine insurers suspend coverage the moment a strait is declared mined, which means tankers stop moving regardless of whether a single one is hit. That is how you shut down a fifth of the global energy supply without sinking a ship.

Trump has said the U.S. is considering escorting tankers through the strait. But escorting ships through a mined strait is a fundamentally different problem than escorting them past missiles and drones. You can shoot down a missile. You cannot shoot a mine already sitting on the seafloor. An escort means a warship is now also at risk. The Roberts that nearly sank in 1988 was itself a warship on escort duty. The USS Princeton, an Aegis cruiser, was severely damaged by Iraqi mines during the Gulf War while providing cover for minesweeping operations. During that same war, Iraq laid roughly 1,270 mines around the Kuwaiti coast, and a multinational coalition needed months to clear them. So when the administration says “we’ll escort ships,” the question nobody is asking publicly is: through what? An unswept minefield? The insurance companies won’t care about the escort. They care about the mines.

As of Wednesday, the administration’s public position was that it did not believe Iran had laid mines, even as CENTCOM was destroying mine-laying vessels.

How the IRGC Tested This Through Its Proxies

This is not new. In 2016, after Houthi forces attacked U.S. warships in the Red Sea, the Obama administration struck Houthi coastal radar installations. By 2017, the Houthis were scattering Iranian-made Sadaf mines along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, and the Saudi-led coalition eventually found and destroyed over 170 of them. What the Houthis demonstrated was that even a non-state actor with limited naval capacity could use mines to create sustained disruption in one of the world’s most critical waterways.

The willingness to impose environmental and economic catastrophe is part of the pattern. For years, the Houthis held hostage the FSO Safer, a decaying supertanker off Yemen’s coast carrying 1.14 million barrels of oil, four times the Exxon Valdez. They blocked salvage operations while the international community spent $144 million to prevent a spill that would have devastated Red Sea ecosystems and shut down ports that millions of Yemenis depend on for food. After the oil was finally transferred in 2023, the Houthis continued to escalate. In May 2025, the United States brokered a ceasefire with the Houthis specifically to protect Red Sea shipping. Two months later, the Houthis boarded the Magic Seas, planted explosives across the ship, and detonated it on camera. The next day, they attacked the Eternity C, killing four crew members. Human Rights Watch called both attacks war crimes. The Rubymar, sunk by Houthi missiles the year before, had already leaked oil across 18 miles of the Red Sea and sent 22,000 tons of fertilizer to the seafloor. None of this was met with lasting accountability, and the IRGC watched every step of it.

In our publication of that reporting period, it was clear that the clip wasn’t an isolated media product. That same week, Kayhan ran that one week of closing Hormuz would be enough for the world to recognize Iran’s power. Maj. Gen. Mousavi warned that any adventurism against Iran carries a heavy price. IRNA ran three new space-industry achievements in the same news cycle. And all of it landed during the window that Iran was negotiating with Washington through the Muscat channel. The deterrence messaging and the diplomacy were running simultaneously, in full view, on state outlets.

Read the full Axis Weekly issue here.

In most analytical frameworks, what Iran published would be called a threat. In Iran’s media system, it was Tuesday.

I don’t assume the administration was unaware of Iran’s mine-laying capability. I have to assume they were tracking it. But the question the public deserves an answer to is what was done with that awareness, because 90% of Iran’s capacity is reportedly still intact and the mines are now in the water. The signaling wasn’t directed only at Washington. It was directed at global audiences, at markets, at the countries whose bases appeared on that anime target list, and at the publics who would bear the economic costs of a Hormuz closure. Deterrence works on populations, not just governments.

We continue to treat these outputs as domestic propaganda, noise intended to pacify a local population. They are, in fact, signaling architectures. They publish capability and intent in real time, often with more transparency than official diplomatic channels. When a state broadcasts its war plan as an anime and captions it on social media, the instinct in Washington is to treat it as performance. But performance and planning are not opposites in these systems. They are the same act, aimed at different audiences simultaneously. The content is useful. The broadcast is the warning. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s a refusal to take it seriously.

The mines are in the water. The strait is effectively closed. Iran has expanded its campaign to Oman’s oil infrastructure, the country that mediated its nuclear talks with Washington. And if the Red Sea’s southern chokepoint were compromised at the same time by Houthi sea mines, there would be no alternative route for Gulf oil exports at all.

The signals were always there.

But this was exactly the posture of the weeks before the war, when Houthi leaders promised to turn the Red Sea into death for the enemies of God. Abd al-Malik al-Houthi had called them into the streets. He had mobilized them through the same channels that had been running for months: the mosques, the tribal networks, the mobilization offices embedded in every governorate. One week into a war that killed their patron’s supreme leader, the Houthis had not fired a single missile. They had organized a rally.

A war that has killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, devastated Iranian military infrastructure, and drawn Hezbollah and Iraqi militias into direct combat with Israel and the United States. The Houthis have responded with protests, speeches, and declarations of “complete solidarity.” Abd al-Malik al-Houthi says his forces have their “fingers on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment.” Today he went further, pledging to join the fight outright.

But whether and when the Houthis fire their next missile is not the point of this piece. The point is what they have been building on the ground, in the open, for months, while the world’s attention was fixed on missiles and shipping lanes.

A Nationwide Conscription Machine

A month before the Iran war began, uniformed fighters marched through Hodeidah governorate. Houthi media framed it as a "military parade of security formations in readiness and preparation like a solid structure in guarding the Red Sea." The event was branded around a single phrase: "the guardian of the Red Sea and the Red Death."

That phrase, “Red Death,” had been circulating in Houthi rhetoric since early 2026 as a promise of what would befall American and Israeli forces in the Red Sea. But the mobilization it was attached to tells a different story. This was not a missile unit. It was not a naval force. It was foot soldiers, marching through coastal districts, organized by local mobilization offices, framed around ground defense. The “Red Death” was being redefined in practice: not a strike capability but a ground force, designed to make any attempt to take the Yemeni coastline prohibitively costly.

The hashtag on the broadcast: “Ready for the next round.”

The scale of what preceded this moment is difficult to overstate. The Houthis have transformed their military recruitment from scattered district events into a nationwide apparatus. In Mawiyah district, Taiz, five hundred fighters graduated from a single ceremony, the “tenth phase” of what the Houthis call their “Al-Aqsa Flood” courses. Months earlier, these courses existed as unnamed “batches,” small-scale events framed around martyrdom commemorations. By January 2026, they were running simultaneously across every governorate the Houthis control in northern Yemen.

The geographic spread is total. Rayma. Rural Taiz. Ibb. The Hodeidah coast. Saada. Al-Bayda. This has extended well beyond the highland Zaidi heartland into communities with no organic connection to the movement’s ideological foundations.

The institutional capture is where the apparatus becomes undeniable. Universities now function as recruitment pipelines: a student parade at Dhamar University, graduates presenting in Bani Qais, events at Al-Hudaydah University. But the monitoring reveals how far this extends beyond campuses. Employees of the Telecommunications Corporation in Ibb were graduated from the courses in a formal ceremony. The Water Corporation in Sana’a ran combat maneuvers for its staff. Hodeidah International Airport personnel completed what was described as the Authority’s 17th course. In Bani Qais, Hajjah, more than 500 athletes from local sports teams were paraded in a single graduation display organized by the directorate’s mobilization office and youth branch. Government ministries host combat courses for their employees. Armed demonstrations in Hajjah confirm “readiness to confront enemies.” Utmah tribes in Dhamar declare mobilization.

When an employee’s workplace, a student’s university, a worshipper’s mosque, and a villager’s tribal sheikh are all feeding into the same pipeline, and when graduation is photographed and broadcast on state media, the voluntariness is structurally coerced. There is no institution left in Houthi-controlled northern Yemen that is not also a mobilization apparatus.

By March 6, the system delivered. Hodeidah rallied across 317 locations (some of this could be exaggerated by Houthis’ reporting but we have tracked over 160 mobilizations in 2026 alone.) Locations accross their territory including Saada marched. A clerics’ meeting at the Great Mosque declared supporting Iran a religious obligation. Every governorate activated within hours.

Who Goes To Battle First?

The Houthis have historically operated through tight circles of trust. Leadership positions, sensitive military roles, and command structures are drawn from a narrow base of Zaydi families with long-standing ties to the movement. What is unusual is what the monitoring shows happening at the periphery.

Across Houthi-controlled northern Yemen, the mobilization apparatus has extended into predominantly Shafi’i (Sunni) communities that have no historical alignment with the movement’s theological foundations. These are areas long known for rejecting the kind of sectarian mobilization that the Houthis represent. Yet the monitoring documents not only military recruitment in these communities but the imposition of the movement’s own commemorative rituals, its martyrdom culture, its Quranic school system, and its loyalty frameworks onto populations whose religious traditions are distinct from Zaydi practice.

Rayma stood out in the monitoring because the concentration of events in a Sunni governorate raised an immediate question: what is the Houthis’ interest in a place like this?

A search of Houthi official media coverage of Rayma reveals the answer. The record shows a three-layered system operating simultaneously. The first layer is overt mobilization: waqfat, or public stands, organized on a mass scale. On January 10, Houthi official media reported 445 separate stands across Rayma “confirming readiness to confront enemies.” On January 16, 424 stands “confirming continued mobilization.” On January 30, 450 stands under the slogan “If you return, we return, and ready for the next round.” On February 6, 150 marches “confirming readiness for the next round with the enemy.” Three to four hundred organized events in a single governorate on a single day, repeated weekly.

The second layer is institutional indoctrination. Every government office in Rayma, health, education, agriculture, security, finance, zakat, civil service, roads, cleaning fund, tourism, produced separate events commemorating Zaydi martyrdom figures: Hussein al-Houthi, Saleh al-Samad. Officials were photographed visiting shrines, laying wreaths, reciting Al-Fatiha. The Martyr Al-Ghamari Football Championship ran through Rayma’s schools. Al-Aqsa Flood courses cycled through their phases: courses launched in Al-Jabin in late 2024, graduates marched in January, new cohorts enrolled throughout.

The third layer is the deepest. A “Martyr of the Quran Secondary School for Islamic Sciences” operates in Al-Jabin, teaching Zaydi theological content in a Shafi’i community. The mobilization officer inspected it in January, stressing the need to “protect the youth from misguided cultures.” Quranic academies held graduation ceremonies. Religious seminars on the Isra and Mi’raj and the birth of Fatima al-Zahra were organized by the local authority. This is not mobilization. This is the construction of a permanent ideological infrastructure in territory where it did not previously exist.

Rayma is where the monitoring went closest. It is almost certainly not where the pattern is most intense.

Ibb, another predominantly Shafi’i governorate, confirms this is systemic. The same search of Houthi official media reveals the identical apparatus: Al-Aqsa Flood course graduates from the Telecommunications Corporation and the Media Office paraded in formal ceremonies. In Al-Makhadir district, 180 fighters graduated from the second level of the courses as early as September 2025, months before Rayma’s earliest recorded events. Armed tribal gatherings in Al-Udayn, Al-Radma, Al-Sabra, Madikhara, and Far’ al-Udayn declared “general mobilization and readiness.” The water corporation held a waqfa celebrating the spy network crackdown. Al-Jazeera University held a joint commemoration of both Hussein al-Houthi and Saleh al-Samad. The “Shahid al-Samad Secondary School” operates and graduates students. District by district, ministry by ministry, the same template.

Two Sunni governorates. The same three-layered system: mass public stands, institutional participation forced through every government office, and the implantation of Zaydi religious education infrastructure. The communities marching through Al-Jabin and Al-Makhadir did not build the Quranic schools their children are now enrolled in. They did not choose the martyrdom commemorations they are now required to attend. The apparatus was brought to them.

What is emerging is a two-tier system: an inner ring of committed Zaydi fighters who staff the command structure and technical units, and an outer ring of conscripted Shafi’i and Sunni foot soldiers who provide the mass. These are communities that do not share the Houthis’ theological commitments, that have no ideological stake in the “Axis of Resistance,” and that are being dragged into a war that is not theirs by a movement that treats their bodies as a renewable resource.

If the Houthis enter this war, the structure of this mobilization suggests it will be conscripts from Rayma and other areas who bear disproportionate frontline risk. Not because they believe in the cause, but because they are expendable to those who do.

The Loyalty Machine

Totalitarian movements do not merely demand obedience. They demand participation. The distinction matters. Obedience can be passive. Participation is a form of complicity that restructures the individual’s relationship to the system: once you have marched, you are implicated; once you are implicated, dissent becomes self-incrimination.

The Houthis have built exactly this kind of machine, and they have disguised it as religious observance.

Every martyrdom anniversary becomes a mobilization event. The commemoration of Saleh al-Samad’s assassination, which the Houthis observed on a timeline disconnected from the actual date, produced armed tribal gatherings across multiple governorates, each concluding with declarations of “readiness for the next round.” The anniversary of Hussein al-Houthi’s death generates identical mobilizations framed as “loyalty to the martyrs.” The Friday of Rajab, the birth of Fatima al-Zahra, and the Quran desecration protests of December 2025 each produce the same output. Armed demonstrations. Combat exercises. Pledges to the leadership. New enrollments in Al-Aqsa Flood courses.

This is what I flagged in my January 26 signal report, more than 40 separate events on a single day commemorating al-Samad, with institutional participation photographed and documented across every ministry and governorate. Ministries of Oil, Education, Agriculture, Economy, Health, Finance, Culture, and Social Affairs held formal commemorations. Officials from each were photographed visiting shrines, laying wreaths, and reciting Al-Fatiha.

These commemorations function as loyalty diagnostics. Participation is ritualized, visible, and documentable. The leadership can assess who showed up and who didn’t, which institution complied and which dragged its feet, before the real mobilization demands arrive. The population was sorted ahead of what was to come.

The system extends into sports. The “Martyr Al-Ghamari Football Championship” ran simultaneously across Al Mahwit, Hajjah, Rayma, and Ibb, with each tournament functioning as a community mobilization event. Mobilization officers attended award ceremonies. Readiness declarations were embedded in the proceedings.

The Houthi system does not feel like coercion because it saturates every calendar date, every social function, every institutional encounter. No one is conscripted in the formal sense. Everyone simply lives in a society where every structure they encounter is already oriented toward their eventual military participation. The protest is the recruitment event. The grievance is the lubricant. The commemoration is the census.

By March 6, when the call for Iran solidarity marches went out, every governorate had delivered within hours. Not because the population spontaneously chose to act, but because the infrastructure had already determined that they would.

From Missiles to Manpower.

The mobilization surge correlates precisely with a convergence of strategic pressures that degraded the Houthis’ sophisticated capabilities while leaving their manpower reservoir untouched.

Between August and October 2025, Israeli airstrikes killed the Houthi Prime Minister, approximately a dozen cabinet members, and Chief of Staff Mohammed al-Ghamari. International naval operations complicated weapons resupply. The collapse of Assad in Syria removed a critical Axis node. Hezbollah absorbed devastating strikes. The patron who built the Houthis’ military machine became less able to sustain it.

The numbers confirm the squeeze. Through July 2025, UN experts counted 101 Houthi ballistic missiles fired at Israel, of which 38 percent failed outright. In a single interdiction that July, U.S. Central Command seized over 750 tons of Iranian-origin materiel bound for the Houthis, including hundreds of missiles, warheads, seekers, drone engines, and radar systems. A 2026 supply chain study found that more than 80 percent of items seized in 2024-2025 were manufacturing inputs, not finished weapons, evidence that the pipeline had shifted from smuggling complete systems to attempting to sustain domestic assembly. But seekers, guidance electronics, and engines remain the bottlenecks. Every one of those requires an import. A conscript does not.

Then came the theater of a security crackdown. In November 2025, the Houthi Ministry of Interior announced the dismantling of what it called a spy network linked to a joint CIA-Mossad-Saudi intelligence operations room based in Riyadh. The operation, branded “And the Plot of Those Is Bound to Fail,” was broadcast across every Houthi outlet with extraordinary production value: filmed confessions, displayed equipment, named agents, photographed devices.

The confessions were absurd on their face. The “spies” were a port worker in Ras Issa given a phone and 20,000 Yemeni riyals, approximately $35. A villager recruited by a neighbor. A taxi driver. A woman used as what the broadcast called “family cover” for car trips. Their alleged crimes included photographing wheat ships at port and taking pictures of residential buildings. These are things visible on freely available commercial satellite im agery. The Saudi-led coalition, which operates aerial surveillance, signals intelligence, and real-time satellite reconnaissance, does not recruit villagers with mobile phones to photograph grain shipments. The people paraded on screen were not intelligence operatives. They were ordinary civilians, many of them poor, selected to perform a narrative of penetration that justified what came next.

The function of the broadcast was collective intimidation. By putting these faces on television, the Houthis sent a message to every community in northern Yemen: anyone can be accused. A photograph, a car trip, a conversation, any ordinary activity could be recast as espionage. The enemy is everywhere, and anyone who does not demonstrate loyalty is suspect. The spy network narrative was the stick. The Al-Aqsa Flood courses were the carrot. Together, they created a closed system in which participation was the only safe option.

Simultaneously, the Iranian weapons pipeline has been increasingly constrained. Sanctions, naval interdiction, and the exposure of smuggling routes have disrupted the flow of advanced components. The Houthis have pushed a “local manufacturing” narrative, branding weapons like the “Red Sea” missile as domestically produced, but the specifications of their most effective systems still track to Iranian lineages that require external supply chains.

Facing this environment, the Houthis executed a rational adaptation. When missiles and drones become constrained, you substitute with mass. When external supply chains become unreliable, you exploit the one input that doesn’t require imports: the population of northern Yemen.

Foot soldiers are the one military capability the Houthis can generate at scale without Iranian supply chains, without components that can be interdicted by naval blockades, without launch sites that can be targeted by precision strikes, and without command nodes that can be decapitated by intelligence-driven operations. You cannot sanction a conscription program. You cannot bomb a foot march. You cannot interdict a tribal gathering.

And the weapons to arm them are already there. International forces have seized an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 assault rifles and over two million rounds of ammunition bound for the Houthis since 2015, and the flow was large enough that surplus small arms are reportedly trafficked onward to Somalia for profit. Inside Houthi territory, a single demining organization has removed roughly 460,000 mines, IEDs, and unexploded ordnance, a fraction of what was laid.

Infantry is the Houthis’ hedge against everything else being degraded. The Houthis are converting their isolation into the one asset their adversaries cannot degrade: human capital.

Why the Delay

The Houthis promised to activate if Iran was attacked. Iran has been attacked. Abd al-Malik al-Houthi has now pledged to join the fight, following a week of escalating rhetoric. But as of this writing, no missiles have been fired, no ships have been struck, and no ground offensive has been launched. The delay is not accidental. There are specific, concrete reasons for it.

The leadership is exposed. Israeli airstrikes in 2025 killed the Houthi Prime Minister, a dozen cabinet members, and eventually the Chief of Staff. The Houthis learned from Hezbollah’s experience: Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a precision strike. The senior Houthi leadership knows that the moment they launch a visible military operation, they become targetable in a way they are not while holding rallies and giving speeches. The calculus of self-preservation is real, even if it is never stated publicly.

The missile and drone capability is degraded. The Red Sea campaign of 2023-2025 depended on weapons systems that have been hit by sustained strikes, complicated by naval interdiction, and undermined by the loss of technical commanders. The Houthis can still launch, but their capacity is diminished, and every launch reveals positions. The asymmetry that made their maritime campaign effective, cheap missiles against expensive ships, works less well when the launch infrastructure itself has been mapped and targeted.

The force they built is designed for a different war. This is the critical point. The air campaign over Iran, the ballistic missile exchanges between Tehran and the Gulf states, the Hezbollah rocket barrages from Lebanon: none of this requires what the Houthis spent months constructing. They did not build a missile force. They built an absorption force. A ground force. A coastal defense force. A force designed for what comes after the air war ends and someone has to decide who controls northern Yemen. Committing it to solidarity strikes on shipping would waste the asset on the wrong fight.

The southern front is unstable. Before the Iran war, the anti-Houthi coalition had fractured. Saudi and UAE proxies were fighting each other. Houthi media from December and January covered this collapse in gleeful detail: the closure of Southern Transitional Council headquarters, STC leaders confined to Riyadh hotels. The Iran war has, ironically, pushed Riyadh and Abu Dhabi closer together as Iranian missiles rain on both their territories. But the structural dysfunction in the south has not been resolved by shared threat, and a mobilized Houthi ground force remains positioned to exploit any opening, in Marib, toward Aden, wherever the vacuum deepens. Launching Red Sea attacks now would risk unifying the coalition against them precisely when it is at its most fractured. The threat to the Yemeni and Saudi Governments is real.

The restraint itself is a weapon. Every day the Houthis hold back while maintaining the posture of imminent action, the threat of Red Sea disruption drives shipping insurance premiums higher. The threat of a southern offensive constrains Saudi decision-making. The threat of escalation adds a card to whatever remains of a negotiating position. The mobilization built the credibility. The restraint extracts the value. This is leverage, and it is working.

The Ground War Question

When the air campaign against Iran ends, someone will have to decide what to do about the Red Sea.

The Houthis have controlled Hodeidah and the northern Yemeni coast for a decade. They have spent months building a mass infantry force explicitly framed around coastal defense. The “Red Death” is not, despite its maritime branding, primarily a missile capability. It is a ground force designed to make any attempt to secure Bab al-Mandab or the Yemeni coastline prohibitively costly.

Any ground operation would face that force: a mobilized population dug into terrain they know, with the ideological infrastructure to absorb casualties at rates that would break a conventional military. Northern Yemen’s Houthi-controlled areas contain roughly twenty million people. After a decade of war, military service has been normalized. Economic collapse has eliminated alternative livelihoods. The theological apparatus that converts death into martyrdom removes the political cost of casualties.

And Iran’s strategic depth remains relevant even if the current regime falls. Whoever emerges in Tehran will need leverage. A northern Yemen that can threaten the Red Sea indefinitely, absorb ground operations indefinitely, and sustain chaos on the Arabian Peninsula indefinitely, remains valuable.

The Houthis are not sitting out this war because they lack commitment. They are sitting out this phase because their capabilities are designed for a different fight. The ground force makes several expansion vectors possible. Rayma’s geography positions it as a gateway to Hodeidah’s coastal approaches from the highlands. A renewed push on Marib would pressure Saudi Arabia’s southern flank and threaten the oil regions. Skirmishes along the Saudi border, quiet in recent months under what appears to have been a tacit understanding, could resume as a pressure tool. And a southern drive toward Aden would exploit the coalition fracture the Houthis have been documenting with visible satisfaction. None of these require the missile capability that has been degraded. All of them require the ground force that has been built. The most reckless option, a direct push toward the Saudi border, would be suicidal for the movement. But a movement that has conscripted populations with no loyalty to its cause may calculate that the cost of that suicide falls on someone else’s sons.

From Nothing to Lose to Everything to Lose

Nothing in this analysis rules out the possibility that the Houthis will enter the war. But the structure of what they have built, and what they now stand to lose, suggests a movement whose incentives have fundamentally shifted.

The Houthis of 2015 were insurgents. They had territory but no state, no institutions, no international profile, no Red Sea leverage, no seat at any table. You cannot lose what you do not have. That recklessness was what made them dangerous.

The Houthis of 2026 run ministries. They control ports. They have a tax system, a zakat authority, a university network, a diplomatic track with the UN, an indirect channel with Riyadh. They have spent months conscripting the population into a machinery of total control. The mobilization documented in this piece is not just a military asset. It is evidence of how much they have invested in holding power.

And that is the trap. The more you build, the more you have to protect. The insurgent who risks everything for a strike on a tanker in the Red Sea is not the same actor as the one running Hodeidah’s port authority and negotiating prisoner exchanges through Muscat. There is no exile option for Abd al-Malik al-Houthi. There is no second Saada to retreat to. The mountain caves that sheltered an insurgency cannot shelter a state apparatus.

This creates a final paradox. The conscription machine documented in this piece depends on the mythology of Houthi strength. The 445 stands in Rayma, the 180 graduates in Al-Makhadir, the institutional participation forced through every government office: all of it was sustained by the perception that the Houthis were powerful, that their Iranian patron was ascendant, that resistance was futile. That perception is now under pressure. The patron’s supreme leader is dead. The arsenal is degraded: ballistic missile launches have dropped 69 percent, drone attacks 55 percent. Israel’s defense minister has publicly vowed to continue operations to prevent the Houthis from strengthening their capabilities and has threatened to strike their leadership if they join the Iran war. Houthis bravado does not match the behavior.

The Houthis are beholden to Iran in every dimension: military, strategic, ideological, and institutional. But at a moment of deep uncertainty over Iran’s own survival, following that patron into the fire would mean risking everything the Houthis have accumulated over a decade of war for solidarity with an entity that may not survive to reciprocate. The ground force documented in this piece is not just a military asset. It may be the only leverage the Houthis have left. Without the Iranian arsenal, without the supply chain, without the patron’s strategic umbrella, manpower is the one card that sustains their position at any future negotiating table. Without it, they have nothing at all.

The Sunni communities that were coerced into this system have no ideological loyalty to it. The outer ring of conscripts from Rayma and Ibb and other areas in Yemen was built on fear and the absence of alternatives, not on belief. If the Houthis cannot demonstrate that they can sustain an external war, if they cannot deliver on the promises that justified the mobilization, then the very population they armed and organized could become their greatest vulnerability. An armed population that was conscripted rather than recruited does not need to be convinced to resist. It only needs to see weakness.

The rational calculus, for now, is that subjugating Yemenis is safer than fighting Americans. Maintaining the conscription machine is lower risk than deploying it. Holding Hodeidah is more valuable than attacking from it. The ground force they built is worth more as a threat than as a sacrifice.

The Red Death is waiting. Not for missiles. The monitoring that we conducted in the Ideology Machine shows what it is waiting for: the bodies it has spent months preparing to spend. But whether those bodies will fight for the Houthis, or against them, may depend on what happens next.

If you are watching what happened this weekend and processing it through the lens of “is this another Iraq?” or “are we being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict?”, that skepticism is legitimate. The United States has done this before, launched operations in this region that were tactically impressive and strategically aimless, and taken out individuals without ever addressing the conditions that produced them. And the question people are asking, “and then what?”, is not defeatist. It is probably the most important question in strategy right now, and those asking it deserve an honest answer.

But skepticism should be informed by what is actually in front of us, not by pattern-matching to wars that looked nothing like this. What happened this weekend is not an invasion, or an occupation, or a war premised on fabricated intelligence, but rather a strike, dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the Pentagon and Operation Roaring Lion by Israel, against a regime that, for over four decades, built and directed a network of armed proxies that killed Americans, destabilized sovereign nations, hijacked international shipping, and pursued a nuclear weapons capability while negotiating in bad faith to preserve it. Three American service members are dead today from Iranian missiles, and thus, this is not theoretical.

And Khamenei was an 86-year-old man. He had ruled Iran for thirty-six years, longer than most of the people reading this have been paying attention to the Middle East. His death was always coming, and the system he built was always going to have to outlive him. What is consequential is not that he is gone but how he went: not quietly, not through succession planning on Tehran’s terms, but in a strike that no one in the axis believed would happen at this scale. Because Khamenei did not merely lead the Islamic Republic. He made it replicable. He built something that functions less like a government and more like an operating system, one that served not just Iranian interests but an emerging order designed to compete with American power: ideology as infrastructure, proxy networks as force projection, and a media architecture capable of synchronizing narratives across Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Chinese ecosystems within hours. The system was designed to survive him. And in the first twenty-four hours, it did.

The axis had been preparing for a post-Khamenei world for years, although not necessarily this version of it. In the weeks leading up to the strike, Iranian, Houthi, and Russian state media were growing increasingly confident that American deterrence was a bluff, that the strike wasn’t coming, and that diplomacy would prevail. That confidence was wrong. However, the system doesn’t plan for one outcome, it builds contingencies, and the Provisional Leadership Council that formed within hours, with hardline judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei and President Pezeshkian assuming temporary leadership duties, was not improvisation but Article 111 of the constitution executing as designed. The question worth watching is whether the axis always viewed Khamenei as replaceable within the architecture he built, and whether this moment, for all its violence, is one the system had already rehearsed.

Several things are true at the same time.

Israel’s reach was extraordinary. A joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed the Supreme Leader in his compound in Tehran, along with IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, and Armed Forces Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi. The fact that they located him, got to him, and took out that much of the command structure in a single operation is something the resistance axis genuinely did not think was possible.

The chaos Iran is unleashing in response is real but limited. Six waves of retaliatory strikes under “True Promise 4.” Missiles at Israel, at the UAE, at Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. Three American troops killed. Fires at Jebel Ali port and the Burj Al Arab. It sounds like a region on fire, and parts of it are. But most of the missiles were intercepted. The Strait of Hormuz threat is oscillating. And the retaliation, for all its fury, is running on a pre-programmed escalation ladder, one that was designed to execute without the leadership that just died. The IRGC is firing on pre-authorized commands, protecting its own survival. That is the system working as designed. It is not the same as a system that knows what comes next.

And the axis, the network of proxies and allies that Khamenei spent decades building, was not prepared for this, although they believed they were. For months, axis leaders appeared on television in military uniforms, held press conferences, and issued statements about readiness and resilience. Moscow and Beijing reinforced the message, projecting through state media and diplomatic channels that the American calculus would never go this far. The deterrence posture was real, and for a time it worked. The 12-day war in June 2025 was the reference point: a limited exchange with defined boundaries that everyone survived. The axis calibrated for a repeat of that pattern, and the psychological shock of discovering otherwise is, in strategic terms, as significant as the strike itself.

Moscow's response has been instructive. Putin called the killing a "cynical murder" and praised Khamenei as an "outstanding statesman," while Russian state media had spent weeks assuring its audience that Washington lacked the will to act. RT echoed Iran's framing of the December protests as foreign-backed riots, and helped build the narrative that deterrence was holding. It wasn't. RIA Novosti columnist Dmitry Savchuk argued the threat was a pricing instrument, not a war plan, reading it from commodity futures rather than military signals. Petr Akopov wrote that Trump 'doesn't want to open Pandora's box.' Victoria Nikiforova framed the entire Iran escalation as 'world war in a light format,' a forcing function for tighter axis coordination, not an actual countdown to strikes. The consensus position in Russian state media as late as the week before the operation was that American deterrence was a bluff, or rather, limited.

By Sunday, a Russian columnist in RIA Novosti had already recast Khamenei's death as a strategic act, martyrdom by design, succession pre-arranged, Trump handed an off-ramp. Even in death, the system found a use for him. And Russian analysts are already saying the quiet part out loud: regime change in Iran would almost certainly produce a government that is distrustful of or openly hostile to Moscow, and Russia's position in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Caspian is now exposed. If Russia could not deter the United States from killing its most important regional partner, the value of a Russian security guarantee just got a lot harder to sell.

Over the past two years, it became almost routine to watch Israel and the United States take out militia commanders, proxy leaders, and even senior Hezbollah figures like Nasrallah, and the resistance axis absorbed those losses and kept operating. But killing the Supreme Leader of a sovereign state, however illegitimate its origins in a revolution no one asked for, is categorically different, and the scramble that followed shows it. Hezbollah escalated from solidarity to operational commitment language but hasn’t fired a shot across the border. Iraqi militias stormed toward the Green Zone and struck Erbil, the only node that actually went kinetic. And the Houthis, who told the Associated Press on Saturday they would resume Red Sea attacks “tonight,” called a million-man march on Sunday instead.

The system held in the sense that it didn’t collapse, though it stumbled in ways it never has before. The denial-to-confirmation of his death was messy, with Al Mayadeen still reporting him alive while other outlets had already confirmed his killing, and across the proxy network what we saw wasn’t coordination but a scramble dressed up as continuity. This was embarrassing for actors who have long preached that martyrdom is the ultimate honor, yet when it arrived for their Supreme Leader, their first instinct was to deny it happened and buy time. And beneath the embarrassment lies something deeper: if American and Israeli intelligence could locate Khamenei inside a fortified compound in the heart of Tehran, the axis does not know what else has been compromised, and that is a psychological blow that no retaliatory missile salvo can undo.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah, long the crown jewel of the axis, spent much of Sunday in a state of visible deliberation. While Secretary-General Naim Qassem had previously vowed that the group would not remain neutral if Khamenei were targeted, the group’s response on March 1 moved from rhetoric to kinetic action with a rocket and drone barrage toward a missile defense site south of Haifa. Framed by the group as “revenge” for the Supreme Leader, the strike served as a clear signal of intent. It suggests a leadership caught between the ideological necessity of escalation and the cold reality of a severely degraded command structure. Meanwhile, Iran-aligned Iraqi militias mobilized toward the Green Zone and carried out limited strikes near Erbil, signaling retaliation for Khamenei’s killing without opening a sustained front.

IRGC drove the agenda. It always has.

I want to zoom in on the part of this I know best, because it illustrates the broader dynamic more clearly than anything else.

Through observation of what has happened in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq, the single most consistent feature of these conflicts is how external their driver has always been. The Houthis are not an autonomous movement, although they would love to think they are, and much of the Western policy community still treats them as one. They are a proxy, instrumentalized to extend Iran’s reach, and everything they have become, from the arsenal that shut down Red Sea shipping to the missiles that reached Ben Gurion Airport, was built with Iranian weapons, training, money, and IRGC mentorship. That does not mean the Houthis have no reason to exist without Khamenei, or that they will pack up and leave now that he is gone. They have their own domestic power base, their own territorial control, and their own incentives to survive. But it does mean that the source of their transformation from a mountain insurgency into a regional military threat was always Tehran.

What distinguishes the Houthis from Iran’s other proxy investments is the depth of ideological integration. When Assad fell in Syria, Iran lost its foothold almost overnight, because that relationship was transactional. The Houthis are something more dangerous: an ideological project grafted onto Yemeni grievances and tribal structures at the grassroots level. Iran didn’t just arm them. It gave them a worldview, one reinforced daily through compulsory lectures, religious indoctrination, child recruitment, and a media ecosystem that functions as a loyalty-extraction machine.

I wrote last August, after Israel killed the Houthis’ prime minister and a dozen ministers: what dies in Yemen is names, titles, placeholders. What doesn’t die is the system. I believed that then and I believe it now. But in August I was writing about dead ministers. Today I am writing about the dead architect. The stakes of that framework just escalated, and so did the test.

But “the architecture remains” is not the same as “nothing has changed.”

What the Houthis are doing, and what they aren’t

The Houthis promised attacks Saturday. By Sunday, their media apparatus was running wall-to-wall IRGC operational claims, “we targeted the Abraham Lincoln,” “land and sea will become a graveyard,” but not a single Houthi operational statement of their own. Yahya Saree, their military spokesman, has not issued a formal claim. The “Yemeni Armed Forces” brand that narrated two years of Red Sea strikes has gone quiet. Instead, the Yemeni Scholars Association placed Khamenei in the lineage of Ali and Hussein, and the rally at Sabaeen Square extracted loyalty from the population.

That could change at any moment, and as this piece was being finalized, it did. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi appeared on television Sunday evening to deliver exactly the speech the system required: Khamenei is a martyr, his blood consecrates the path, the axis continues with “Husseini defiance and Khomeini determination.” He framed the assassination as proof that the American-Israeli project seeks to dominate the entire region and eliminate any obstacle to Zionist control. He praised the IRGC’s retaliation as “strong and continuous.” He called on the Islamic world to take inspiration from the sacrifice. It was not grief. It was an operational statement dressed in theological language, and it confirmed in real time what this piece argues: the system reproduces itself. The architecture didn’t need Khamenei alive to generate this speech. It only needed someone authorized to deliver it.

But rhetoric is not operations. The speech was theological and political. It was not a military claim. And that operational restraint is not normal for them. This is a group that fired with abundance for two years and claimed operations within minutes. The silence on that front suggests recalibration, and a real question of capacity.

Over the past year, the Houthis lost their chief of staff, Muhammad al-Ghamari, to an Israeli strike. They lost Zakaria Hajar, the head of their missile and drone unit, to a U.S. strike acknowledged only in December. Operation Rough Rider killed multiple mid-level commanders. Their airport is destroyed, their port repeatedly hit, their power infrastructure degraded. And the IRGC personnel who provided the technical expertise to operate their most advanced systems are now part of a decapitated command structure themselves. The pipeline has been severed at both ends.

Meanwhile, Iran fired 137 missiles and 209 drones at the UAE, 66 missiles at Qatar, and 45 missiles and 9 drones at Bahrain, and those numbers will likely increase. It struck directly at U.S. bases across the region, doing in one night what the Houthis spent two years threatening to do on Iran’s behalf. The patron bypassed the proxy. That doesn’t happen in a functioning network. That happens when the principal is in extremis and no longer has time for intermediaries.

No need to underestimate, but no need to overcorrect either

People have been underestimating the Houthis for twenty years, and they have been wrong every time. This is a group that started with nothing, rifles and mountain terrain, and built a force that shut down twelve percent of global trade. Their threat has always been asymmetric. They don’t need full-spectrum capability to cause disproportionate damage. They have manpower, they have territory, and they can cause chaos around the Red Sea, affecting Bab al-Mandab. That matters, and they know it. The fight, for them, is not over.

But Abdul-Malik al-Houthi has been here before. He watched his brother Hussein, the founder of the movement, killed in 2004, took over a guerrilla movement as a young man and turned it into the force it is today, then watched Soleimani die, Nasrallah die, Assad escape, and his own prime minister and cabinet killed in a single Israeli airstrike last August, and now Khamenei. Abdul-Malik is still in his 40s, and he may outlast them all.

The Houthis will act. The question is what they can deliver, and whether what comes next reflects real capability or performance designed to maintain their standing in a network that may no longer need them the way it once did.

There is one more thing worth sitting with. Hours before the strikes began, Oman’s foreign minister was on American television saying a peace deal was “within our reach.” Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium, full IAEA verification, and irreversible conversion of existing material into fuel, further than the 2015 deal ever got. The strikes happened anyway. Trump has since said regime change and estimated “four weeks or less,” but his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs cannot predict what regime change would actually produce, and the E3 have moved from concern to threatening direct defensive action against Iran’s missile capability, which is not something allies do when they think the plan is working.

So here is what I keep coming back to. If the system survives the decapitation, and the axis reconstitutes under new leadership, does Washington have the will to sustain something that lasts far longer than four weeks? Congress wasn't briefed before the strikes. The domestic appetite for a sustained Middle East campaign is thin at best. It remains unclear whether this becomes a sustained American campaign or one Israel is left to carry forward alone. I don’t have answers yet. I’m not sure anyone does. But these questions need to be asked out loud, because right now the only people with a plan for the day after are the ones we just bombed.

The system just lost its architect. What happens now depends on whether the architecture can reproduce itself without Khamenei, and whether the proxies he built, diminished and exposed, can find their footing in a war that may have already outgrown them.

Week in Brief

The second round of indirect Iran-U.S. talks opened Monday in Geneva, mediated by Oman. Hardline Iranian media declared nuclear enrichment rights “non-negotiable,” while IRGC-linked outlets used Omani statements to claim “tangible progress” and argued Iran has leverage because Trump needs a deal more than Tehran does. By midweek, the frame inverted: Tehran sent a formal letter to the UN warning of a “decisive response” to any attack, the IRGC Navy commander issued a maximum-deterrence statement, and Russian state media amplified CBS sourcing that Washington was “ready to strike as early as Saturday.” A joint Iranian-Russian naval exercise near a U.S. carrier appeared on both Houthi and Iranian outlets simultaneously with identical framing.

The Russia-Ukraine Geneva trilateral was described as “difficult but businesslike” across Russian state media. Chinese state media mirrored the framing. Russian opinion columnists were blunter: one argued the talks create “space and time for Russian military action,” while another claimed they are splitting “Zelensky’s gang” into two camps.

Houthi outlets ran Ramadan mobilization all week. Houthi state media published rallying slogans (”In Ramadan our mobilization is stronger”), tribal formations in Dhamar declared combat readiness under the hashtag “Ready for the Next Round,” and Houthi outlets republished a Russian forecast of imminent U.S. strikes on Iran. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the movement’s leader, delivered daily Ramadan lectures, each published in full transcript by Houthi state newspapers, a pace that turned religious programming into sustained strategic communication. By Feb 22, the lectures had become reactive to breaking news: al-Houthi addressed the Huckabee interview directly from the pulpit (see Deep Dive 2 below).

Hezbollah-aligned media documented Israeli violations in south Lebanon (drone flights, explosive drops, eight fighters killed in a Bekaa strike) and ran Nasrallah commemorative coverage timed to Ramadan. One Hezbollah-linked outlet featured Sheikh Fayyad, a senior Hezbollah cleric, declaring “this generation grows up loving the Sayyed,” while remarks by Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s secretary-general and Nasrallah’s successor, that “the resistance continues in leadership, fighters, and people” were carried by a Houthi outlet, extending the message across the axis. Hormuz energy chokepoint coverage ran alongside tariff-driven market turbulence, linking deterrence and economic disruption in the same editorial space.

Chinese state media covered both Geneva tracks, and one analysis examining what signal Iran sends by conducting military exercises while negotiating framed it as a rational dual-track strategy rather than provocation.

Deep Dive

1. Iran Escalation

On Monday (Feb 17), the Geneva talks opened with process-forward framing: IRGC-linked media claimed agreement on “general principles,” Oman’s positive messaging was relayed as external validation, and a detailed analysis argued Iran arrived with its full team (political, legal, economic, technical), that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sees “the path as clearer than Round 1,” and that Trump needs a deal to avoid war and to sell to voters.

Read more

Week in Brief

Ali Larijani, Khamenei's senior advisor and special envoy, traveled to Muscat on Feb 10 for high-level diplomatic engagement, including a meeting with Mohammed Abdulsalam, the Houthis' chief negotiator and head of their negotiating delegation. Oman's foreign minister called the meeting "constructive", while Houthi military media framed the Muscat talks as a "brink of the abyss" test and amplified Larijani's remarks that Washington had chosen the "rational path." Iraq and Kuwait's endorsement of the indirect talks was framed as regional legitimization. By Feb 15, Araghchi departed for Geneva and met Oman's foreign minister there, while Rubio acknowledged a diplomatic opportunity, "difficult but possible." By week's end, the diplomatic track had advanced from Muscat to Geneva with enough regional support to sustain it.

At the annual commemoration of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, pro-government supporters turned out for demonstrations and parades featuring symbolic coffins of U.S. and Israeli military commanders, a direct response to recent American military threats. Iranian hardline media reinforced the message with an article titled "Iran's missile program is a red line", while a separate piece warned that if "wrongdoing occurs under the cover of negotiations, the enemy's interests in the region will be crushed." Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi, Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces, was quoted saying that "a battle with Iran will be a lesson for Trump." By week's end, the IRGC Navy had launched its "Smart Control of the Strait of Hormuz" exercise, with Iranian outlets amplifying warnings that closing Hormuz could collapse the U.S. economy and quoting a former NATO official calling the exercise "a direct message to Washington." Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister and lead nuclear negotiator, meanwhile stated that "zero enrichment is not on the table."

Iranian media used the anniversary turnout to frame national unity, claiming tens of millions were marching and publishing Khamenei's pre-march call for attendance as a mechanism to force "enemy retreat." Khamenei's post-march message closed the loop: "Iran was uplifted and the enemy was disappointed." In Sana'a, Houthi media ran a parallel commemoration: the eleventh anniversary of the U.S. Marines'

Read more

Week in Brief

The week was dominated by the Muscat channel for Iran–U.S. nuclear negotiations. On Feb 3, Tasnim reported that Pezeshkian had instructed Araghchi to prepare for talks only if they were free of threats, setting the tone for conditional engagement. Over Feb 4–5, Iranian outlets broadcast red lines over scope: missiles, enrichment levels, and regional influence were explicitly declared non-negotiable, narrowing the talks to the nuclear file alone. On Feb 6, Al-Mayadeen’s envoy reported live from Muscat that indirect negotiations had concluded with both sides agreeing to continue dialogue. Throughout, the coordinated narrative insisted Iran was negotiating from strength. By the weekend, the Iran-ecosystem shifted to institutional management: IRNA framed the channel as a “dance of shadows,” parliament announced a closed session to review the process, and Kayhan was already reframing the U.S. return to talks as proof that Washington’s earlier claims about destroying Iran’s nuclear capability were a lie (The logic was straightforward: if Trump actually destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability, why is Washington now negotiating over it?)

Chinese coverage stayed notably inward-facing: APEC "China Year" stewardship, Spring Festival Gala rehearsals, and Guancha asking whether Japan's LDP landslide could avoid a "Truss-style collapse", with limited direct engagement on the Muscat mechanics beyond Xinhua relaying Pezeshkian's "Iran will not accept bullying."

The Houthi ecosystem read the Muscat talks differently. A Houthi outlet ran an op-ed titled “Muscat Negotiations and the Edge of the Abyss,” noting the CENTCOM commander’s presence with the U.S. delegation and concluding that Washington’s demands amount to surrender. When Iran was given those two options, the author wrote, it chose confrontation. The piece also expressed frustration that Russia and China failed to deliver during “the 12-day war,” and argued that Israel no longer wants normalization or the Abraham Accords but submission, claiming that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Qatar all sense it. The framing is notable: the resistance axis is no longer positioning this as “us vs. them” but as “everyone vs. Israel.”

A second major storyline emerged mid-window with the expiration of the New START treaty on Feb 5. Russian outlets led the framing, with RIA Novosti declaring that “now everything will be decided by weapons,” while TASS positioned the lapse as the first time since 1972 that no binding nuclear treaty governed U.S.–Russia arsenals. IRNA carried Guterres calling it “a grave moment,” Guancha reported the only U.S.–Russia nuclear treaty had expired, and by Feb 6, RT was framing the post-treaty environment as one requiring trilateral talks including China. By the weekend, Moscow had pivoted further: RT ran “Europe needs Russia to survive” while RIA’s daily battlefield dashboarding normalized territorial claims as routine scorekeeping. The system was preparing audiences for a world without arms-control guardrails while positioning Russia as the responsible party seeking dialogue.

Beneath these two dominant storylines, persistent threads continued: U.S. institutional decay coverage (from the Epstein scandal’s reach to Hezbollah-aligned and Lebanese outlets coordinating on the Washington Post’s mass layoffs and CEO departure) and Hezbollah-aligned outlets’ sustained documentation of southern Lebanon “environmental extermination” by Israel.

Deep Dive

1. Iran-U.S. Negotiations: Diplomacy and Deterrence as One System

This was the week’s clearest display of how the system actually works. On Feb 4, Kayhan published “the answer to threats is threat, not negotiation” alongside a defense-doctrine shift claim toward “rapid, wide-ranging operations.” Simultaneously, IRNA reported that the White House confirmed that talks would proceed. On Feb 6, Kayhan framed domestic unrest as a CIA-Mossad multi-layer operation under the Supreme Leader’s “war of meaning” guidance; IRNA carried Russia’s “hope for U.S. rationality toward Iran.”

By Feb 7-8, the pattern continued: Kayhan declared “enemies are condemned to defeat” and ran blame-displacement about U.S. sanctions engineering economic pain, while IRNA served the “dance of shadows” diplomatic framing and a Richard Haass quote validating de-escalation. Kayhan maintains deterrence credibility for the IRGC base; IRNA manages the diplomatic optic. Without Kayhan’s deterrence lane, IRNA’s diplomacy loses leverage. Without IRNA’s engagement lane, Kayhan’s deterrence lacks an off-ramp.

By mid-week, Tehran tightened message discipline around the Muscat channel. Pezeshkian stressed “precision in statements related to nuclear talks.” Parliament scheduled a closed session to review the negotiation process, with Araghchi and Chief of Staff Mousavi both attending. IRGC forces arrested 11 leaders of PJAK, a Kurdish militant group operating along Iran’s border with Iraq, on charges of running two sabotage cells in Kermanshah province with direct links to the group’s external leadership. Combined with a hardline outlet’s Feb 6 framing of domestic unrest as a CIA-Mossad multi-layer operation, the pattern is a security posture calibrated for sustained diplomatic engagement: locking down internal threats while keeping the external lane open.

Iranian deterrence messaging ran continuously alongside the Muscat diplomacy. On Feb 3, Iran’s state news agency ran “one week of closing Hormuz is sufficient for the world to recognize Iran’s power” alongside three new space-industry achievements, with a second Iranian outlet framing space as a “new geopolitical environment.” On Feb 5, the same outlet quoted “dozens of Zionist officers” saying Israel had “reached the point of collapse.” On Feb 7, Maj. Gen. Mousavi warned “any adventurism against Iran has a heavy price.” By Feb 8, an Iranian hardline daily was citing the Wall Street Journal to validate that Iran’s missile capability “changed the equations” and assigning regional war consequences to the U.S. and Israel.

On Feb 9, a Houthi newspaper carried Iranian defense ministry claims of new equipment joining defense units, while the Houthi news agency relayed Russian General Staff statements framing AI as “decisive for military superiority.” The external-validation sourcing intensified as the week progressed: WSJ on missiles, an Israeli expert arguing on Israeli radio that Trump’s confrontation with Iran is not about nuclear weapons but about seizing oil reserves to outcompete China. Each deploys a Western or Israeli voice to say what Tehran wants heard but gains credibility by not saying itself.

The deterrence messaging wasn’t limited to editorials and wire quotes. On Feb 7,

Tasnim’s Arabic account published a clip from “Apocalypse War,” a high-production Japanese anime-style series produced by Iran’s Fatima Zahra Animation Studios. The clip, set in “The Middle East 2026,” depicts Iranian Fattah hypersonic missiles, Shahed-series drone swarms, and IRGC fast-attack boats destroying a U.S. carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf. Real U.S. bases are named on screen as targets. U.S. President Trump is shown panicking in the Oval Office. The animation also depicts sea mines and Ghadir-class midget submarines deployed to trap the U.S. fleet before the missile strikes begin. The commander who gives the final launch order is modeled on Qassem Soleimani. Tasnim captioned it: “The confrontation between Iran and America!” This is the IRGC’s deterrence doctrine rendered as entertainment for a younger, anime-consuming audience, and amplified by a state outlet during the same week Iran was negotiating in Muscat.

IRNA ran the most layered coverage of the Muscat channel across the full week: pre-talk ambiguity (”dance of shadows”), managed-tension framing (”diplomacy amid war-mongering navies and lobbies”), external validation (Richard Haass: “Washington never seeks broad conflict with Iran”), and institutional management (parliamentary closed session). A Lebanese Hezbollah-aligned broadcaster deployed its envoy in Muscat for real-time scope reporting, filing five bulletins on Feb 6 alone, each reinforcing that Iran controls the agenda ceiling. The consistent thread: diplomacy is something Tehran permits and controls, not something it seeks. Regional amplification followed the same logic. Tasnim carried Beijing’s reaction to the talks as stabilizing validation, Xinhua ran Pezeshkian’s “Iran won’t accept bullying,” and IRNA amplified a Russian representative’s “sanctions hit a dead end.” Limited mechanical engagement from Moscow or Beijing with the talks themselves, but consistent sovereignty-frame amplification across both ecosystems. On Feb 3, Hezbollah's Qassem called the confrontation with Israel and the United States "part of a regional campaign led by Iran." By Feb 9, he told Al-Manar that "American pressures will not disarm the resistance."

2. New START Expiration and Unconstrained Signaling

The Feb 5 treaty expiration was treated as a structural event across three ecosystems. Russian state wire service ran “first time since 1972” historical framing. A second Russian outlet placed it within an “end of globalization” historiography. By Feb 6, the wire service signaled Oreshnik expansion and Russian state broadcaster proposed trilateral talks with China. By Feb 8, the same broadcaster was running “Europe needs Russia to survive,” while battlefield dashboarding continued to normalize daily territorial claims. Lavrov told NTV the expiration “should not be dramatized” since the treaty had not been in force for three years, and that Russia would not be “the first to take a step towards escalation.” The reassurance ran alongside continued capability marketing of systems that Russia claims put it decades ahead of the U.S.

Houthi outlets mirrored the framing: Saba and a Houthi state newspaper both carried “Moscow says it is no longer bound” wire stories on Feb 5, reinforcing the narrative that the post-treaty world is an American-made danger. By Feb 8, the same newspaper was relaying Lavrov’s warning that Russia “does not intend to attack Europe but is prepared for a comprehensive military response.”

3. Western Delegitimization: Epstein and Institutional Decay

Epstein files saturated coverage across all five ecosystems simultaneously, and unlike most narrative bundles, this one sustained intensity across the full seven-day window. On Feb 5, Houthi outlets ran the most aggressive coverage: one published multiple analysis pieces framing the documents as “organized international blackmail,” a separate piece asked “What do the Epstein documents reveal about the nature of power?”, and the Houthi news agency cited The Spectator on UK political fallout. On Feb 6, a Lebanese Hezbollah-aligned outlet ran a photo report on the “ethical and political dimensions.” On Feb 7, an Iranian hardline daily framed it as “Mossad hostages on the vice island” and a second Iranian outlet ran “Mossad’s leverage tool over deviant American politicians.”

By Feb 8, Hezbollah-aligned and Lebanese outlets coordinated on the Washington Post’s mass layoffs and CEO departure, institutional decay completing the portrait. By Feb 9, a Houthi outlet published “Epstein scandals expose the moral bankruptcy of Western civilization,” and Houthi satellite media ran an extended interview framing the scandal as “a political and moral crisis threatening the West’s global standing.” Elsewhere, the delegitimization ran the full week: Trump calling an athlete a “loser,” Republican lawmakers criticizing Trump over a social media post described as racist, and a Russian outlet’s Bessent piece attributing Iranian protests to U.S. financial actions, giving Russian state imprimatur to Tehran’s blame-displacement narrative. A Houthi satellite channel’s opinion piece framed American immigration restrictions on the Yemeni diaspora as a coercion tool, casting Yemeni-Americans who oppose Sana’a as recruits pressured into service rather than acting on their own volition. The stories are different; the function is identical. U.S. decision-making is compromised from the inside, Western elites are controlled via blackmail, and the moral authority to police others is forfeit.

The targeting varied by ecosystem. Iranian state newspaper Iran dedicated a full two-page spread to Epstein’s Mossad links and Western elite corruption. Houthi newspaper Laa ran a front page splitting Epstein’s face with the Kaaba’s sacred cloth, turning the files into an indictment of Saudi religious custodianship. Same documents, different enemies.

The Russian ecosystem ran the most strategically layered Epstein coverage of any state actor this period. On Feb 9, Lavrov told NTV that the files “have revealed the face of the West and the deep state, or rather a deep union that rules the entire West and seeks to rule the whole world,” calling the contents “pure satanism.” State broadcaster Rossia 24 demonstrated the operational application. A 10-minute Epstein segment named Gates, Musk, and other Western figures while omitting every Russian name that appears in the files. The segment then pivoted to Ukraine: “Zelensky could also have been involved in human trafficking, according to the files. Epstein was keeping a close eye on Ukraine.” RIA Novosti ran the headline: "Zelensky's name is mentioned in the Epstein files in connection with human trafficking," while omitting any connection to Russia.

The Chinese ecosystem invested editorial weight in the Epstein files. On Feb 9, Xinhua ran a dispatch on the political fallout across multiple countries, amplifying Lavrov’s “pure satanism” framing and documenting the cascade of European resignations. Global Times ran a full investigative treatment framing Epstein as evidence of a “dark zone” in American governance “where capital, power, and the judiciary operate in collusion,” sourcing the analysis to a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher.

4. Red Sea New Activity and the Houthi Ecosystem

On Feb 8, a Houthi outlet reported that the Gemini Cooperation, the Maersk/Hapag-Lloyd alliance that is one of the world’s largest shipping partnerships, had announced its return to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. The article is notable for what it includes and what it omits. It attributes the disruption to “Yemeni armed forces launching operations against the entity in support of Palestinians in Gaza.” It ties the return to the Gaza ceasefire. It notes ships will pass “in front of Yemen’s coasts through Bab al-Mandab.” It quotes Maersk expecting a “full return” contingent on no renewal of war.

What it does not mention: the naval escorts that Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd explicitly announced would secure every passage, or the contingency plans to revert routes if security deteriorated. The omission is the signal. In the Houthi media frame, shipping returns because Sana’a’s conditions allow it, not because of military protection. This is consistent with earlier framing: in a 2025 piece, the same outlet reported shipping companies resuming Red Sea transit as a response to “reassurance messages sent by the Sana’a government.” The register has shifted from kinetic boasting to regulatory authority.

The shift itself raises a question. Historically, sustained calm in contested maritime corridors has involved arrangements, whether formal or informal, between the parties that control risk and those that need passage. Houthi media's emphasis on Sana'a "permitting" transit rather than simply not attacking it may reflect something more than narrative preference.

The sovereignty framing found unexpected reinforcement from Cairo. On Feb 8, during talks with Somalia’s president, Sisi declared that “securing the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is exclusively the responsibility of the littoral states,” explicitly rejecting external security arrangements. Egypt’s motivations differ from the Houthis’, but the positional alignment is striking: both frame the Red Sea corridor as regional sovereign space, not an international security problem requiring outside intervention. When a Houthi outlet and the Egyptian presidency arrive at the same jurisdictional claim from opposite directions, the framing gains structural weight.

On Feb 3, two Houthi outlets reported on U.S.-Israeli joint naval exercises in the northern Red Sea, framing them as “a contradiction between negotiation and preparation for blowing up the region.” Another outlet covered Somalia’s president warning of Israeli involvement in the Horn of Africa as a threat to Red Sea stability. The Houthis’ ecosystem is transitioning its Red Sea narrative from battlefield to jurisdiction.

The Houthi ecosystem this week produced an extensive catalog of governance: over 800 prisoner releases across multiple governorates timed to Ramadan, a branded “Ahlan Ramadan” programming package, renewable energy projects, digital court systems, and price stability declarations. The mobilization track ran in parallel: “Al-Aqsa Flood” combat drills in Taiz, tribal mobilization declarations in Marib, and preparations for a “Fourth International Palestine Conference.” The same population sees both tracks at once. That’s what makes the Houthi project durable for external actors: a militia can be isolated, but a government that also runs a militia is something you have to negotiate with.

The contrast is deliberate. On Feb 9, a defense outlet headlined the UAE deploying “political and media arms” to block the Zandani government from entering Aden. The actual dynamics in the south are murkier: the UAE has largely withdrawn, the STC’s residual networks operate with unclear authority, and no faction exercises clean control over Aden. But the Houthi outlet isn’t trying to report southern politics accurately. The function is contrast: southern figures struggle over a capital none of them fully hold, while the North governs. Separately, a Houthi newspaper carried Kim Jong-un affirming the North Korean army will play “a prominent role in the coming five years,” the first DPRK coverage in the Houthi ecosystem this monitoring period. Throughout the week, Houthi outlets also relayed Iran-U.S. dynamics with increasing granularity: Saba reported Kharrazi describing negotiations as “successful, but all possibilities remain open,” a Houthi newspaper carried Araghchi “responding in kind” to a Witkoff-Kushner “message of force,” and another outlet relayed the Iranian parliament’s closed session on “options for confrontation with Washington.” The ecosystem isn’t just relaying Iran’s diplomatic posture; it’s distributing the full spectrum of Tehran’s Muscat-adjacent signaling.

The documentation extended beyond the Houthi ecosystem. IRNA quantified over 1,520 ceasefire violations and 556 killed in the first days of the window, while a Hezbollah-aligned outlet cited UNICEF-attributed figures of 37 children killed since the start of the year. Houthi outlets carried parallel reports on the same violations: Saba, 26 September, and Al-Thawrah all covered Feb 5 violations, while Saba tracked 15 resistance actions in the West Bank over 24 hours on Feb 6. Three separate ecosystems maintaining independent ledgers of the same ceasefire creates a cross-referenced archive that no single outlet could build alone.

The Gaza ledger serves multiple functions at once. It keeps anti-Israeli sentiment current and emotionally charged, provides the moral justification for continued mobilization (”for Gaza” rather than for any faction’s own strategic interests), and sustains the legal-sounding language of “violations” that positions the ceasefire as something Israel broke and the resistance axis monitors. For the Iran-backed Houthi ecosystem specifically, it connects every tribal mobilization and combat drill to Palestinian suffering rather than to Tehran’s agenda or Sana’a’s territorial ambitions. The documentation is real. The framing of why it’s being documented is the operation.

Solidarity with Iran took a different form. The February 6 rally at Sabaeen Square was branded by Al-Masirah as a million-man march for Palestine. But the event’s own footage showed interviews aired on Houthi media with participants speaking about Iran and Gaza, not as separate causes but as a single continuum. The official branding is Palestine, but the crowd has already internalized the merger: Iranian strategic interests and Palestinian suffering as one undifferentiated cause. The banner reads “steadfast and ready for the next round” without naming what the next round actually serves. Gaza is the stated cause. The infrastructure, the command structure, and the strategic payoff all run through Tehran.

Finally, in an attempt to keep the information environment in Yemen completely controlled, the Houthis launched the #اوبه ("Beware") campaign, warning Yemenis that disclosure can aid America and Israel. The campaign uses the same Epstein material to enforce silence domestically that the ecosystem uses to attack Western moral authority externally. Ideology moves outward as accusation and inward as discipline.

Assessment

The week reveals a system that has learned to run diplomacy and deterrence as a single instrument at different frequencies. That sounds abstract until you watch it work. Iran negotiated in Muscat while Kayhan threatened to close Hormuz. Russia mourned the death of arms control while marketing the weapons that made arms control irrelevant. The Houthis released 800 prisoners for Ramadan while graduating combat units in Taiz. None of these contradictions are accidents. They are the product.

The return of major shipping alliances to the Red Sea, framed by Houthi media as transit permitted by Sana’a rather than secured by navies, suggests the sovereignty claim is beginning to function as commercial reality, not just narrative. When Maersk comes back and nobody challenges the framing, the framing wins. The Houthi ecosystem’s simultaneous output of governance and mobilization reinforces the problem: external actors cannot treat it as a militia to be isolated when it is also branding Ramadan programming, building solar panels, and declaring price stability. Russia’s management of the New START expiration followed a similar logic, positioning itself as the restrained party in a post-treaty world it helped create. And the Epstein saturation across all five ecosystems for seven consecutive days demonstrated something beyond opportunism: it is the most synchronized cross-ecosystem narrative operation this monitoring period has recorded.

The system is preparing audiences for a sustained, low-intensity diplomatic process with Washington that the Axis can present as strength-based engagement without strategic concession. If talks succeed, Iran deterred the aggressor into reason, the resistance held firm, and diplomacy validated the Islamic Republic’s model. If talks fail, the U.S. was never serious, Kayhan was right all along, and the hardliners who warned against trusting Washington get to say they told you so. The infrastructure for both narratives is already built. The talking points are already written. The only thing that changes is which ones get published.

Additional Sources

Iranian Ecosystem

Kayhan

• “The answer to threats is threat, not negotiation” (Feb 4): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327344/

• CIA-Mossad multi-layer operation framing (Feb 6): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327485/

• “Enemies are condemned to defeat” (Feb 7): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327532/

• U.S. sanctions blame-displacement (Feb 7): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327533/

• WSJ missile validation (Feb 8): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327547/

• PJAK arrests (Feb 8): https://kayhan.ir/fa/news/327549/

IRNA

• Ceasefire violations: 1,520 violations and 556 killed: https://www.irna.ir/news/86069494/

• “Dance of shadows” Muscat framing: https://www.irna.ir/news/86069500/

• Richard Haass: “Washington never seeks broad conflict with Iran”: https://www.irna.ir/news/86072483/

• Russia’s “hope for U.S. rationality toward Iran”: https://www.irna.ir/news/86070200/

• Russian representative: “sanctions hit a dead end”: https://www.irna.ir/amp/86070798/

• Parliamentary closed session: https://www.irna.ir/amp/86071475/

Tasnim

• Pezeshkian instructs Araghchi on talks (Feb 3): https://www.tasnimnews.com/3390507

• “Dozens of Zionist officers” — Israel “reached the point of collapse” (Feb 5): https://www.tasnimnews.ir/fa/news/1404/11/18/3510762/

• Beijing reaction to Muscat talks: https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1404/11/14/3507513/

• “Apocalypse War” anime clip — “The confrontation between Iran and America!” (Feb 7):

https://x.com/Tasnimarabic/status/[see

• screenshot]

Russian Ecosystem

RIA Novosti

• “Now everything will be decided by weapons” — New START (Feb 5): https://ria.ru/20260205/ssha-2072246239.html

• Iran sanctions coverage (Feb 5): https://ria.ru/20260205/iran-2072366506.html

• Sanctions framing (Feb 5): https://ria.ru/20260205/sanktsii-2072374316.html

• Bessent piece — blame-displacement (Feb 6): https://ria.ru/20260206/bessent-2072588353.html

• Battlefield dashboarding (Feb 8): https://ria.ru/20260208/spetsoperatsiya-2073061507.html

TASS

• “First time since 1972” — New START historical framing: https://tass.ru/info/26342521

• Oreshnik expansion signaling: https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/26365713

RT

• Trilateral talks with China proposal (Feb 6): https://russian.rt.com/world/news/1592436-ssha-dogovor-rossiya-knr

• “Europe needs Russia to survive” (Feb 8): https://russian.rt.com/world/news/1593009-rossiya-evropa-vyzhivanie/amp

• EU dialogue with Russia — Politico framing: https://russian.rt.com/world/news/1592516-es-dialog-rossiya-politico

• Kremlin commentary: https://russian.rt.com/russia/news/1592462-peskov-kreml-rossiya

Chinese Ecosystem

Xinhua

• Pezeshkian: “Iran will not accept bullying”: https://www.xinhuanet.com/20260206/08d4fc2d45714666a37ac5a8d0a13f33/c.html

• Coverage (Feb 8): https://www.xinhuanet.com/20260208/af8f847949e9446a8ea6ffc638974cd4/c.html

• Coverage (Feb 8): https://www.xinhuanet.com/world/20260208/3ca7564356ee4e9bb28827f2ff705876/c.html

Guancha

• U.S.–Russia nuclear treaty expired: https://www.guancha.cn/internation/2026_02_05_806200.shtml

• Japan LDP / “Truss-style collapse”: https://www.guancha.cn/internation/2026_02_08_806514.shtml

CCTV

• Coverage (Feb 6): https://news.cctv.com/2026/02/06/ARTIiGvTtWaZULarLDVlyxYw260206.shtml

• Coverage (Feb 8): https://news.cctv.com/2026/02/08/ARTIy2KNhMeni2BB3aJRuds8260208.shtml

Hezbollah-Aligned / Lebanese Ecosystem

Al-Manar

• Epstein photo report — “ethical and political dimensions” (Feb 6): https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/541722/

• UNICEF figures — 37 children killed: https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/542937/

• WaPo layoffs and CEO departure: https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/538802/

• Southern Lebanon coverage: https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/537257/

• Additional coverage: https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/538622/

• Additional coverage: https://www.almanar.com.lb/article/118877/

Al-Akhbar

• WaPo coordination coverage: https://www.al-akhbar.com/Newspaper%20Articles/lebanon/878252/

• Additional coverage: https://www.al-akhbar.com/Newspaper%20Articles/lebanon/878381/

• Additional coverage: https://www.al-akhbar.com/news/lebanon/878416/

• Additional coverage: https://www.al-akhbar.com/news/lebanon/878429/

• Additional coverage: https://www.al-akhbar.com/news/world/878580

Al-Ahed

• Epstein — “Heavyweight names”: https://alahednews.news/post/93474/

Al-Mayadeen

• Muscat envoy — live scope reporting (Feb 6): https://live.almayadeen.net/latestnews/2026/2/6/

• Additional coverage: https://live.almayadeen.net/news/politics/

Houthi Ecosystem

26 September

• U.S.-Israeli naval exercises — Red Sea (Feb 3): https://26sep.net/index.php/global/121819-2026-02-03-05-05-19

• Additional Red Sea (Feb 3): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/121820-2026-02-03-05-11-07

• Coverage (Feb 3): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/121825-2026-02-03-06-06-29

• Gaza ceasefire violations (Feb 5): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/121920-2026-02-05-07-22-06

• Trump “loser” coverage: https://26sep.net/index.php/sports/121959-2026-02-06-05-09-29

• Somalia president — Horn of Africa (Feb 7): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122034-2026-02-07-13-53-26

• Tribal mobilization — Marib (Feb 8): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122109-2026-02-08-17-31-35

• “Ahlan Ramadan” programming (Feb 8): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122129-2026-02-08-19-18-46

• Gemini Cooperation — Red Sea return (Feb 8): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122131-2026-02-08-19-27-31

• Prisoner releases — Ramadan (Feb 8): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122137-2026-02-08-19-40-40

• Price stability declarations (Feb 8): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122167-2026-02-08-01-09-36

• Gemini return — 2025 precedent: https://26sep.net/index.php/local/97357-2025-02-04-19-32-53

• UAE “political and media arms” — Aden (Feb 9): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122184-2026-02-09-05-46-46

• Iranian parliament closed session relay (Feb 9): https://26sep.net/index.php/global/122186-2026-02-09-07-23-54

• Additional coverage (Feb 9): https://26sep.net/index.php/local/122188-2026-02-09-08-12-54

• Additional coverage: https://26sep.net/index.php/newspaper/26locals/122176-2026-02-08-23-24-21

Saba News Agency

• “Moscow says it is no longer bound” (Feb 5): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641183.htm

• New START coverage (Feb 5): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641199.htm

• Gaza ceasefire violations (Feb 5): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641202.htm

• Additional coverage (Feb 5): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641216.htm

• 15 resistance actions — West Bank (Feb 6): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641722.htm

• Lavrov warning relay (Feb 6): https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3641717.htm

• “Al-Aqsa Flood” combat drills — Taiz: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643175.htm

• Digital court systems: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643180.htm

• Coverage: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643212.htm

• Coverage: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643271.htm

• Coverage: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643307.htm

• Russian AI — military superiority relay: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643495.htm

• Coverage: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643509.htm

• Kharrazi — “successful, but all possibilities remain open”: https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3643515.htm

• English coverage: https://www.saba.ye/en/news3642438.htm

• English coverage: https://www.saba.ye/en/news3642616.htm

• “Fourth International Palestine Conference”: https://www.saba.ye/en/news3642670.htm

• English coverage: https://www.saba.ye/en/news3642703.htm

• English coverage: https://www.saba.ye/en/news3643033.htm

Al-Thawrah

• “Moscow no longer bound” (Feb 5): https://althawrah.ye/archives/1133245

• Coverage (Feb 5): https://althawrah.ye/archives/1133260

• Gaza ceasefire violations (Feb 5): https://althawrah.ye/archives/1133274

• Coverage: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1133747

• Coverage: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1133753

• “Epstein — organized international blackmail”: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1134665

• “Nature of power”: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1134746

• Coverage: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135143

• Renewable energy projects: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135156

• Coverage: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135221

• Lavrov — “comprehensive military response”: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135233

• Araghchi “responding in kind”: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135322

• Coverage: https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135328

• Kim Jong-un — DPRK army (Feb 9): https://althawrah.ye/archives/1135336

Al-Masirah

• Epstein — “international blackmail system” (Feb 3): https://masirahtv.net/post/293157

• Additional coverage: https://masirahtv.net/post/293159

• “Political and moral crisis threatening the West” interview: https://masirahtv.net/post/293611

• Diaspora coercion framing: https://almasirah.net.ye/post/293531

• Additional coverage: https://almasirah.net.ye/post/293570

• “Moral bankruptcy of Western civilization”: https://almasirah.net.ye/post/293645

It sounds absurd until you see the pattern. Within 48 hours of the DOJ releasing over three million Epstein documents, authoritarian media ecosystems from Moscow to Sana'a had processed the same raw material into different weapons. The Houthis weaponized it against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their domestic Islamist rivals. Russia weaponized it against Zelensky. Iran used it to accuse Trump of murder while attempting to de-escalate a nuclear confrontation with him. What was interesting for me was seeing how these files exposed which regime considers its real enemy right now.

I will start with the Houthis, who did the most elaborate and creative work, overstretching the truth to reach those included and those who were silent.

Epstein, long associated with sex trafficking and elite impunity, ran what many investigators believe was a kompromat operation: a system designed to lure influential figures, compromise them, and record the evidence. For the Houthis, this reading was a gift. It confirmed everything they already believed about how power works in the region.

The Houthis naturally zoomed in on Saudi and UAE relations with Epstein, then expanded outward. Al-Thawra, the Houthi flagship daily, ran an editorial framing the documents as proof of civilizational war. Mohammed Al-Farah, a Political Bureau member, announced that the “New Middle East” project Netanyahu promotes is “in essence an extension of the Zionist project on Epstein Island.” A political cartoon by Kamal Sharaf showed Trump physically blocking a folder labeled “Epstein Files” while victims’ hands reached out from behind it. They attacked Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel laureate affiliated with the Islah party, for her silence.

Emails in the DOJ files showed a UAE businesswoman had shipped pieces of the Kaaba's kiswa, the sacred black cloth covering Islam's holiest site, to Epstein's Florida mansion in 2017. The emails are real and have been widely reported in the media. Aziza Al-Ahmadi, a UAE-based businesswoman, coordinated with Abdullah Al-Maari in Saudi Arabia to ship three pieces of the kiswa via British Airways between February and March 2017. One piece came from inside the Kaaba itself, a second from the outer covering that had been in use, and a third from identical materials but never deployed. The unused piece allowed the shipments to be declared as "artwork" for customs.

In one email, Al-Ahmadi described the cloth’s religious significance to Epstein. “The black piece was touched by a minimum of 10 million Muslims of different denominations... they walk around the Kaaba seven rounds, then everyone tries as much as they can to touch it, and they kept their prayers, wishes, tears, and hopes on this piece.”

The correspondence continued after the kiswa arrived. When Hurricane Irma hit Epstein’s island in September 2017, Al-Ahmadi sent messages asking after his safety.

The kiswa is replaced annually during Hajj and distributed under strict official supervision to institutions and dignitaries, never to private collectors and certainly never to a convicted sex offender in Palm Beach.

Houthi paper, al-Maseira framed this as “doctrinal betrayal.” The sacred cloth, carrying the prayers of millions of pilgrims, ended up in a pedophile’s mansion while ordinary believers faced restrictions on visiting Mecca. The UAE and Saudi Arabia, in this framing, had participated in the desecration of Islam itself. Al-Thawra called Saudi Arabia “the Horn of Satan.” The moral authority of the Iran-backed Houthi group, whose officials are under UN sanctions for systematic sexual violence, was borrowed for the occasion.

The Houthis also attacked domestic rivals. Tawakkol Karman, the Nobel laureate affiliated with the Islah party (the Houthis’ main Islamist opposition) was called out for her silence on the documents. Her Western-funded human rights work was exposed as selective. If she cared about victims, where was her voice now?

For the Houthis and the ecosystem they belong to, truth is purely instrumental. The files matter not for what they reveal, but for what they can be made to do.

The Houthis’ Epstein material was also not merely conspiratorial. It was theological. One widely circulated poster framed the files as an “American-Zionist scandal” and then pivoted immediately into Qur’anic exhortation, asking how the Islamic الأمة could “submit” to such rulers. Epstein was not treated as a crime to investigate, but as a civilizational sign, absorbed into a sacred narrative of humiliation and resistance.

Houthi media also seized on the Yemen-linked correspondence in the files, pointing to emails between Jeffrey Epstein and the late Yemeni businessman Shaher Abdulhaq, and folded it into a far more expansive ideological claim. In one video segment, the movement portrayed the newly formed Presidential Leadership Council itself as an “Epstein council,” alleging that its structure had been “tailored in Epstein’s dark rooms” before being unveiled from Riyadh as a façade for an American-backed project to fragment Yemen. The leap was unmoored from evidence and completely absurd, but useful for them. Epstein was a convenient narrative instrument through which domestic rivals could be cast as puppets and geopolitics reframed as civilizational conspiracy.

The Houthis weren’t the only ones fighting their local wars through Epstein.

Russian state media covered the files heavily. One revealing example came from RIA Novosti columnist Viktoria Nikiforova (she’s sanctioned by the EU for her propaganda), who treated Barack Obama’s absence from the released material not as exculpatory, but as suspicious, an implied sign of elite protection without evidence. She peddles what she describes as “Republican theories” about the Bidens and Obama’s absence from the files, then widens into a familiar authoritarian conclusion: that both parties are hopelessly compromised and American politics is irredeemably corrupt. In this conspiratorial grammar, even silence becomes evidence, and scandal becomes a vehicle for delegitimizing the system itself.

Russia’s more distinctive move was to fold Epstein into Ukraine. RIA published a March 2014 email where Epstein told Ariane de Rothschild (a name that carries its own conspiratorial freight) that "the coup in Ukraine will provide many opportunities." Epstein-Rothschild correspondence about Maidan fit into Russia’s core narrative about Western-backed coups. ” Other Russian-state outlets discussed what the files revealed about Zelensky’s “competence to govern.” A sex trafficking case became evidence for a theory in 2014.

The Russian-aligned sphere extended further. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, amplified by Russian mouthpiece Tsargrad, suggested the timing of the release was meant to pressure Trump on Iran. His comparison was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which broke just before Clinton bombed Kosovo. Dugin went further. In a piece titled "Pedophile Presidents and the Epstein Files," he called the release proof that "this civilization has signed its own sentence." Epstein, he wrote, was a "personnel department for world government" where candidates "passed through certain rituals, including abuse of minors, murder, and cannibalism." This is the end of the West.

Meanwhile, Iranian Kayhan, the hardline daily close to the Supreme Leader, ran this headline: “Trump is drowning in sexual corruption; he likely also killed Epstein!” IRNA framed the story as “Epstein’s ties with power-holders; Israel’s influence over U.S. politicians.” Fars News ran “Chain failures, hard days for Trump and Netanyahu.” Tasnim pushed the cover-up angle: “Several Epstein files disappeared, including a photo involving Trump.” For Iranian domestic audiences, this is useful. It shows a morally corrupt administration and a morally corrupt system, Republican or Democrat. An empire struggling with its own rot. In other words, the man threatening you is drowning.

In a similar vein, Hezbollah’s media chimed in. Al-Manar called the scandal “a mirror of the American system and the intersections of power, money, and wars.” Al-Ahed ran “Heavyweight names in Epstein documents... apologies and resignations.” The focus was on Ehud Barak, Israel’s former Prime Minister, whose documents showed multiple stays at Epstein’s New York apartment, and Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, who resigned from the Labour Party after $75,000 in apparent Epstein payments surfaced.

Here is something that was not reflected anywhere in Russia or the Axis media. The same DOJ files that Russian state media mined for anti-Western ammunition revealed Epstein's network included Russian-connected operatives. Masha Drokova, a former leader of Putin's Nashi youth movement turned Silicon Valley investor, exchanged over 1,000 messages with Epstein, introducing him to figures like Serguei Beloussov, who helped launch Russia's state quantum computing program and whose company, Acronis, was banned from U.S. intelligence contracts in late 2025. Kremlin spokesman Peskov once praised Beloussov for paying his 'debts to the Motherland.' Poland reopened an inquiry into Epstein-Russian intelligence links based on the same documents. While RIA was shopping through the files for a 2014 email about Ukraine and Dugin was pronouncing the “death of Western civilization,” those same files suggested Russian intelligence-adjacent figures were embedded in the very network they were pretending to judge from the outside.

What Russia, Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and others are doing here is not complicated. They are turning Epstein into a unit of ideological production, a verdict against Ukraine, against the West, against anyone who still believes the other side has moral standing. In America, the same files are being pulled into the open for a different reason. People want accountability. Outside the United States, the files function differently. They are not a demand for justice. They are a resource. Authoritarian ecosystems treat Epstein less as a crime than as proof of civilizational corruption.

But here is what these regimes miss. In most countries, those pages never see daylight. They are sealed, buried, or quietly destroyed. The fact that this is public, contested, investigated, argued over, that journalists are combing through it and citizens are demanding consequences, that is not the rot. That is the fight against it.

In fact, suppression of information is the rule. Campaigns like #اوبه (“Beware”) urge Yemenis to watch what they say, warning that disclosure can aid America and Israel. Ideology moves outward as accusation and inward as discipline. A Houthi activist, later reposted by Nasr al-Din Amer, a senior figure in the movement’s media apparatus, circulated an illustration in which America becomes “Epstein Island,” a blood-drinking trap for migrants, captioned with a warning that U.S. immigration and customs officers will “kill you or drink your blood.”

None of this is surprising. The West gets deconstructed endlessly, and fine, there’s plenty to work with. But these same systems never turn the lens on themselves. Russia doesn’t talk about its influencer who corresponded with Epstein. Iran doesn’t allow this kind of scrutiny. The Houthis don’t demand accountability from their own allies. The critique only flows one way. And here’s the thing about moral rot: if it exists, it exists everywhere. It doesn’t stop at borders. The same systems that produced Epstein exist in Moscow, in Tehran, in Sanaa. Power protects itself the same way everywhere. But acknowledging that would require looking in the mirror. So instead, they consume Western scandal-like content, endlessly, hungrily, while producing none of their own. In essence, this is not moral clarity, it’s just a strategy designed to influence their own populations and reinforce a coalition that holds together not through shared values, but through shared enemies.

The Houthis have a theory about Epstein. So does Russia. So does Iran. So does Hezbollah. The theory is always the same: the other side is rotten. The mirror stays covered.

Sources:

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Week In Brief

The week opened with the EU’s January 29 designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization and the USS Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in the Persian Gulf, triggering a cascade of retaliatory narratives and capability signals. By week’s end, Iran had designated EU armies as “terrorist groups” in a parliamentary spectacle, while announcing joint naval exercises with Russia and China, the seventh iteration of the “Maritime Security Belt” since 2019, scheduled for late February.

Russian media positioned Moscow as mediator and alternative pole (Putin-UAE summit, “positive” U.S. assessment of Abu Dhabi talks,) Trump-Putin cooperation framing), while Chinese outlets covered what they perceived as American dysfunction (Washington Reagan Airport crash killing two Chinese citizens, 300-city immigration protests, government shutdown1. Iranian media delivered the hard deterrence messaging (carrier vulnerability claims) “unprecedented response” warnings, Hormuz “intelligent management”, and Houthi outlets amplified capability signals while conducting mass mobilization under sacred war framing.

Russian media’s posture evolved notably over the week. Early coverage maintained an aggressive stance: RIA’s Victoria Nikiforova, under EU sanctions as a “central figure of government propaganda,” celebrated “turmoil” among American allies and urged middle powers to defect, while RT framed any potential U.S. strike on Iran as proxy war against Beijing (”Strike China through Iran”). But once diplomatic coordination with Trump materialized, Moscow pivoted to cooperative framing, positioning Putin as peacemaker and partner rather than adversary. This created a deliberate narrative split: Tehran, Sanaa, and Beirut cast Trump as “criminal tyrant” while Moscow pursued diplomatic rehabilitation.

The week featured notable escalation signals held in reserve. Iran-backed Houthi military media released Marlin Luanda strike footage on the second anniversary with detailed “Red Sea” missile specifications, yet no new kinetic action materialized. Iranian officials warned the Abraham Lincoln was a “legitimate target” and carriers were “sitting ducks,” but Tasnim notably made no mention of widely-reported IRGC exercises, noting only “foreign media claims.” This pattern suggests the Axis is maximizing narrative pressure while holding operational cards, preparing audiences for either negotiated de-escalation (via Gulf mediators and Russian backchannel) or regional conflagration that will be framed as American aggression against a unified resistance front.

Iran-Russia-China announced the “Maritime Security Belt” joint naval exercise for late February, with Russia supplying Mi-28 helicopters and Spartak armored vehicles to Tehran. Hezbollah-aligned media published detailed analysis of post-Israeli strikes intelligence sharing between Beijing and Tehran titled “Toward Closing Pandora’s Box.” A Houthi-Somali joint seminar declared any Israeli base in Somaliland would constitute “a state of war,” expanding the Axis threat perimeter to the Horn of Africa. The system is building operational redundancy while conditioning audiences for an extended confrontation.

Russian Mediation Positioning

Russian media diverged sharply from other Axis nodes by framing Trump as a cooperative partner rather than an adversary. RIA Novosti highlighted Trump’s personal request to Putin to “refrain from strikes on Kyiv and other cities,” while RT amplified his use of the Russian pronunciation “Kiev,” symbolic alignment signals designed to frame Moscow as a reasonable partner while Washington plays aggressor elsewhere. This created a deliberate narrative split: Tehran, Sanaa, and Beirut cast Trump as “criminal tyrant” while Moscow pursued diplomatic coordination.

This marked a notable shift. Earlier in the week, Russian media had maintained a more aggressive posture: RIA’s Victoria Nikiforova

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The week was dominated by dual martyrdom anniversaries that served as vehicles for comprehensive domestic mobilization. The anniversary of Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi (”Martyr of the Q…

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