Pressure on Iran, Price in the Red Sea
The Houthis are sending deterrence signals to Washington and Riyadh in defense of Iran, despite their diminishing capacity.
Not everything Houthi leadership says is worth reporting. The group produces a steady stream of religious commemoration, grievance recitation, and anti-American rhetoric that rarely moves the needle. What matters are the signals and the timing.
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi had been absent for nearly two months before resurfacing on January 15 with explicit warnings directed at Israel over Somaliland. His January 22 address does something different. Rather than foregrounding Israel, it situates the Houthis squarely within the pressure campaign surrounding Iran, framing escalation elsewhere as inseparable from Tehran’s confrontation with Washington.
Amid rising U.S. rhetorical pressure on Iran and renewed speculation about military action, the Houthis are positioning themselves as a forward instrument of deterrence. They are not merely reacting to events; they are preparing their base—and their adversaries—for escalation by presenting regional disruption as a form of defense, with the Red Sea and its chokepoints as the primary arena.
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s January 22 speech commemorated the “martyrdom” of former Houthi president Saleh al-Sammad, recasting the killing as an “American act,” with Saudi Arabia assigned full responsibility.
The speech came at a moment of regional flux: Iran under internal pressure, southern Yemen fragmenting amid Saudi- and Emirati-backed factions, Riyadh shoring up its allies. The economic framing was unusually granular with emphasis on oil revenues, port access, inspection delays, and sovereign wealth. This was mentioned for the first time in a long time, likely indicating that the Houthis are attempting to leverage regional security for a price.
Unlike his January 15 speech, which directly threatened Israel over Somaliland recognition, this address keeps Tel Aviv in the background. Israel appears only in Palestinian framing, without specific operational language. The signals are not aimed at Israel, but at those who underwrite escalation.
This is a split-screen speech. One frame plays to the domestic audience: martyrdom, faith, steadfastness. The other delivers signals to the capitals that control money and force. To Riyadh: you control proxies, not outcomes. To Washington, the Red Sea remains the price of pressure; it is the first line of defense for Iran.
The indoctrination frame
The first part of the speech is what most analysts tune out. It’s also where the real work is being done. Abdul-Malik frames the conflict as a unified front against a single “US–UK–Israeli” axis (محور أمريكي بريطاني إسرائيلي). Gaza and Yemen become chapters in the same story. The struggle is civilizational: “الغرب الكافر” (the infidel West) versus the faithful.
This does three things: it positions Houthi military action as regional resistance rather than local insurgency, it builds justification that operates independent of any single front’s status, and it gives the Houthis a story to sell as they coerce tribes to comply with their demands.
Al-Sammad’s death becomes political capital as Houthis translate it into proof of endurance, evidence that the movement metabolizes loss into continuity. The message: we’ve absorbed this before and emerged stronger. The “American-Israeli project” is overextended. We wait.
The chokepoints are the message
Abdul-Malik al-Houthi returns repeatedly to Bab al-Mandab, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden (باب المندب، والبحر الأحمر، وخليج عدن), emphasizing foreign “greed” for these waterways. He casts the UN inspection mechanism, which was designed to inspect and monitor illicit arms shipments to the Houthis, as deliberate economic suffocation: ships delayed, costs imposed on traders, burdens passed to civilians, despite U.S. Treasury estimates that the Houthis generate nearly $2 billion annually from illicit oil sales.
But what is worth noting is that when Houthi leaders begin detailing the bureaucratic mechanics of maritime restrictions, they are identifying pressure points and conditioning their base to accept escalation as economic defense.
The South is occupied territory
Al-Houthi dedicates significant time to southern Yemen, framing the southern and eastern provinces as under “direct occupation.” Most islands and territorial waters are under foreign control. The current political arrangement is a temporary injustice awaiting correction.
The resource narrative is pointed: southern oil wealth has been “seized” and “looted,” wealth belonging to “all Yemenis.” When Houthi drones struck the Al-Dhabba oil terminal in 2022, this was the logic. He names the prize explicitly: the “massive oil wealth” of Hadhramaut and Mahra is “the object of greed for America, Israel, Britain, and Saudi Arabia.” The emphasis on oil and resources, again, suggests economic strain and escalation as leverage.
Abdul-Malik references the recent Southern Consultative Meeting in Riyadh, where the southern separatist flag appeared alongside the Saudi flag, as proof that Saudi Arabia “doesn’t care about unity or separation, only control.” The STC and allied southern factions are dismissed as “tools”—humiliated, controlled, disposable. He describes Riyadh’s management of its proxies as “كالمذياع الذي يتم رفع الصوت أو تخفيضه”—like a radio whose volume gets raised or lowered at will. The logic is selective: foreign control is named; Iranian control is not.
Weaponizing Trump’s Greenland logic
In another passage, Abdul-Malik cites Trump’s push to acquire Greenland:
“Even when Denmark gave America military bases, economic access, opened the door to exploit resources and rare minerals, America still wants complete control. This is a major lesson for our nation.”
The message here is that accommodation doesn’t work. In other words, full cooperation gets you swallowed. Don’t bother negotiating.
He applies the same frame to Trump’s “Peace Council,” dismissing it as a vehicle for disarming Palestinians and opening Gaza for American and Israeli investment. The Arabic is blunt: “مجلس ترامب أعطي عنوان: مجلس السلام! وهو في الحقيقة مجلس ترامب”, ”Trump’s council was given the title ‘Peace Council,’ but in reality it’s just Trump’s council.”
Al-Houthi is stating the obvious. By pointing to Trump’s pressure on Denmark, he is betting on a reality that is hard to argue with: this administration views even its closest alliances as transactional. For his audience, this isn’t “rhetoric,” it’s a live news cycle in which a NATO founder is being threatened with a trade war over territory.
He transforms isolation and economic hardship into a strategic necessity rather than a failure of leadership. He isn’t protecting Yemen from a bad deal; he is leveraging the real untrustworthiness of the current U.S. posture to keep his population trapped in permanent mobilization, where “honor” is the only currency he has left to spend. This framing omits the Houthis' May ceasefire agreement with the Trump administration.
Solidarity with Khamenei
Al-Houthi addresses Iran directly, dismissing recent unrest as American-Israeli subversion that “failed completely.” Iranian protesters are described as “العصابات الإجرامية التي حركتها أمريكا وإسرائيل”, ”the criminal gangs mobilized by America and Israel.” The Islamic Republic, he assures his audience, has “complete control.” Houthi media echoed this framing, holding the U.S. and Israel responsible for what they termed “deadly riots and acts of terror” in Iran.
Thousands of Iranians have been killed by the regime; more are imprisoned in the most brutal crackdowns Iran has witnessed. Yet the same speech that invokes “مظلومية” (oppression) for Yemenis and Palestinians labels Iranians who challenge their government as foreign-backed thugs. The solidarity is selective. The oppressed are sorted into those who serve the axis and those who threaten it.
“There is complete control over the situation in Iran, and America has failed utterly there. We must never be deceived by the slogans America raises, no matter how much some regimes beat the drums for them and promote them, they are merely deceptive slogans.”
The mobilization push
The speech is matched by a parallel push across Houthi-aligned outlets, emphasizing tribal and popular mobilization framed as readiness for “the next round.” Armed gatherings in multiple governorates publicly declared general mobilization (النفير العام) and “full preparedness for the coming round of conflict.” Al-Masirah highlighted continued mobilization alongside training courses framed as preparation rather than the launch of a specific operation.
This coverage is performative by design. It is not evidence of imminent action or battlefield capability. But it is evidence of posture, conditioning domestic audiences, normalizing escalation as defensive necessity, signaling that the infrastructure for renewed disruption is already in place.
In his article “The Repetition of Ruin: American Aggression Is Not a Whim but an Open-Ended Zionist Project,” Mohammed al-Farah, a member of the Houthi political bureau, frames a prospective U.S. military response to Iran as part of an entrenched American war project. By drawing parallels to Afghanistan and Iraq, he presents escalation as a recurring regional pattern. An attack on Iran becomes a pivotal moment requiring ردّ جماعي (collective response), with Iran’s defense treated as a shared obligation.
Iran’s state media has reinforced the same message. Throughout January, state outlets have amplified Houthi operations as effective leverage: Eilat port revenues at near zero, Israeli military presence near Bab al-Mandab framed as a “legitimate target”, Red Sea disruption treated as an asset rather than a liability. Iranian officials have warned that U.S. “adventurism” will carry regional costs. Tehran is treating the Houthis as a functioning pressure point.
What this means for ordinary Yemenis is never addressed. Every tribal gathering framed as "readiness" is another extraction, men, resources, futures, for a confrontation that serves Tehran's strategic depth, not Yemeni survival. The Houthis are committing to a fight they cannot sustain. The cost will fall on those who cannot leave.
What this means
The message to Washington and Riyadh is classic deterrence signaling: pressure on Iran carries a regional price, and the Red Sea remains the instrument for collecting it. The Houthis have spent months conditioning their base to treat escalation as a religious obligation. The tribal mobilizations, the martyrdom framing, the invocations of collective response, this is preparation. Iran has positioned them as a forward line of defense.
But the signal is louder than the capacity. The Houthis are economically strained, militarily degraded after months of sustained American and Israeli strikes last year, and reliant on a patron that may not be able to resupply them. The deterrence framing is designed to obscure that weakness.
Read together, this week’s messaging is less about imminent escalation than about shaping the terms under which escalation would be understood. The Houthis are signaling that any pressure campaign on Iran will be answered not symmetrically, but opportunistically through disruption at sea and calibrated pain for nearby actors. The Houthis’ capacity may be constrained, but their intent is clear.