Why Washington's Red Sea Truce With the Houthis Is Haunting Hormuz
One year after the Trump-Houthi ceasefire in the Red Sea, the same pattern is playing out at the Strait of Hormuz.
One year ago today, the United States and the Houthis agreed to stop shooting at each other. The ceasefire agreement that went into effect on May 6, 2025, covered American vessels and almost nothing else. Despite the fact that Houthis' operations scaled back, the Red Sea remained under their residual control, and Operation Rough Rider was declared a success while the Eisenhower and Lincoln carrier groups went home.
Two months earlier, the operation had been launched allegedly to restore freedom of navigation. The president called the Houthis “sinister mobsters and thugs” who were “hated by the Yemeni people”. For a moment, that gave Yemenis hope that Washington might finally care about who actually lives under them. The hope did not survive contact with the campaign. A superpower had failed to defeat the Houthis. The Signal leak had exposed the administration as confused about its own war plan. And the people on the ground who were resisting the Houthis drew the obvious conclusion: if the United States could not turn this tide, no one could. The Houthis came out cemented.
But for anyone paying attention, the United States never enters these conflicts to fix them. There is always a limited objective, a limited authority, a limited timeframe, and a limited interest in strategic outcomes. The May 6 ceasefire was that pattern made literal. By the time the mission ended, the only commitment that survived was that U.S.-flagged vessels would not be struck. The mission had narrowed from the freedom of the seas to the protection of the same American hulls that had been deployed to confront the Houthis. I argued at the time that the May 6 ceasefire handed the Houthis a rare and unearned diplomatic win. In a sense, it was the original sin of this administration’s Iran policy. The same narrowing is now happening at the Strait of Hormuz, and the question is whether Washington has learned anything in the year between.
The United States has a long history of limited intervention, and the Red Sea, unfortunately, is not unique. In 1983, the Reagan administration sent Marines into Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping force but after 241 Americans were killed in the barracks bombing that October, the mission narrowed from peacekeeping to force protection, and within months had narrowed further to extraction. In 2011, the Obama administration helped launch a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians; but once Gaddafi fell, NATO walked away from a country that has not had a stable government since. The pattern held across administrations and is quite familiar for outside observers. American interventions are designed to be exited, and the exit is where the original objective gets traded for something less embarrassing to abandon.
On paper, the May 2025 ceasefire restored freedom of navigation, but in practice, it covered American hulls and left every other flag to its own luck and arrangements with the Iran-backed Houthis. The distinction was tested almost immediately. When the Houthis sank the Magic Seas and the Eternity C in July 2025, neither vessel flew an American flag, and the administration offered no public protest. The signal landed in Sanaa.
The signal also landed in the boardrooms. In December 2025, Maersk resumed Red Sea transits for the first time in two years, citing a “temporary suspension of attacks” by the Houthis. CMA CGM followed in January 2026. The Houthis themselves described the resumption in carefully phrased language about the “conditions they were providing” for the Red Sea corridor. The phrasing was awkward enough to be revealing. Whether through quiet contact, third-party signaling, or accurate reading of the moment, the largest Western shippers had returned to the Red Sea contingent on Houthi forbearance. And the Houthis were openly characterizing that forbearance as something they had granted.
By 2026, the Houthis were stopping Red Sea traffic and deciding who could pass. Behnam Ben Taleblu and I argued at the Atlantic Council that Iran’s proxies do not require battlefield victories. They require diplomatic patience from their adversaries, and time to use it. The May 6 ceasefire provided both.
After the Ceasefire
The whole American intervention in the Red Sea was a circular exercise without a strategy. The Houthis had not been seriously targeting American assets before the carriers arrived, but they were already a significant regional threat, and a sustained campaign could have meaningfully degraded them. The Houthis did take real damage in those two months. Personnel, infrastructure, weapons stockpiles. But the campaign was not designed to translate that into anything strategic, rather it was designed to be limited, and exited. And exit it the United States did, walking away from a mission it apparently came to see as someone else’s job, or Europe’s, or anybody’s. Washington came out of the operation in roughly the same strategic position as before, with one new addition: a ceasefire that legitimized the Houthis’ assertion that they had not lost.
The day after the truce, Trump went to the cameras and praised the Houthis. They “had a great capacity to withstand punishment.” They had “taken tremendous punishment.” And “you could say there’s a lot of bravery there.” A great deal could be said about that assessment, but what came through most clearly was that Trump had been surprised. Surprised that a movement that had spent nearly a decade fighting Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the internationally recognized Yemeni government in an asymmetrical war, that had absorbed weapons and missile know-how from the IRGC’s ballistic program, that had ridden out the Biden administration’s strikes, and that had been firing at Israel for two years, did not, in fact, simply roll over after sixty intermittent days of American bombing.
By the end of it, Trump told reporters that the Houthis had capitulated. Abdul-Malik al-Houthi denied it on television and kept attacking Trump by name. Admitting the truth would have undermined him with his own followers. The Houthi project is built on the religious claim of leading a war against America and Israel. Capitulation is theologically impossible for them. The press ran with the denial. From firsthand sources, the capitulation was real. But amid the backlash against Washington’s handling of the war, the Houthis’ version of events became the accepted public account. By February 2026, with Israeli operations against Iran underway, the working assumption on every policy panel was that the Houthis would re-enter the Red Sea. Few people stopped to ask whether they were still capable of it.
But the Houthis were in a weaker position by early 2026 than the commentary suggested. Israeli strikes on Hodeidah and Ras Isa, plus tightening sanctions, had done more sustained damage across the year than two months of American bombing did. There was an opening. Nobody took it. As I wrote for the Stimson Center, the Southern Transitional Council fell apart in January 2026, its leader left for Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia took over the south. The coalition that should have been ready for this moment no longer existed.
Mirror at Hormuz
The same pattern, on a far larger scale, is now visible at Hormuz. Iran has absorbed extraordinary losses, beginning with the killing of Ali Khamenei on the first day of operations and extending through the deaths of IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, the strikes on Bandar Abbas and Bushehr, and the systematic targeting of military and civilian infrastructure. The Islamic Republic, however, has not adjusted its coercive behavior at the strait in response to those losses. It continues to mine the waterway and to apply selective pressure on transit, and in April, the parliament formalized the latter into a $2 million toll, written into law. The question of whether Iran’s coercion at Hormuz will eventually recede is, in important ways, less consequential than whether Washington has already begun adjusting its objectives downward to accommodate that coercion. The latter question, on present evidence, increasingly answers itself.
The negotiating drafts are perhaps the clearest indicator. The American opening position required the unconditional reopening of the strait. Iran’s counterproposal offered controlled passage coordinated with the IRGC, which is to say with the same institution that had imposed the closure. Between the fifteen-point American plan and the ten-point Iranian response, every operative provision concerning Iran’s enrichment program had been removed. Trump characterized the result as “a workable basis.” What had begun as an effort to prevent a nuclear Iran has, in the space of two negotiating drafts, become an effort to negotiate with Iran for transit through a waterway the intervention itself rendered contingent on Iranian permission. The pattern is the Red Sea pattern, recurring at the scale of a great-power confrontation. Operation Project Freedom, the Navy escort mission designed to enforce passage by military means, lasted forty-eight hours before being suspended in favor of talks.
That the Islamic Republic has continued to function through this scale of decapitation is not without precedent. The Houthi precedent. Between August and October 2025, Israeli strikes killed Houthi Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi, roughly a dozen cabinet members, and Chief of Staff Mohammed al-Ghamari. The system did not collapse. As I wrote at the time, what gets killed in these operations and what does not are not the same thing. An acting prime minister was named within forty-eight hours. The movement kept firing at Israel, at a slower rate. The IRGC is built on the same architecture: distributed revenue streams, proxy relationships, parallel ministries, ideological infrastructure. All of it designed to absorb the loss of any individual figure, including the most senior one. Mojtaba Khamenei was named Supreme Leader nine days after his father’s death. He has yet to make a public appearance, and rumors of his own death circulate. The regime continues to function regardless.
Tehran is also reading the American political clock. Rising oil prices, growing domestic dissatisfaction with the war, the visible difficulty of sustaining a kinetic phase into a second one. These are inputs Iran can use to conclude that the United States will run out of political will before the Islamic Republic runs out of institutional capacity. These signals are not lost on the axis, which monitors American domestic dysfunction precisely for its strategic value. Losses are absorbed inside that calculation rather than against it. The ideological project on which the regime was built does not require its original architects, in the same way that the Houthi project did not require its original cabinet. The live test of that theory is underway. A month ago, my team and I tracked how the Houthis claimed the April ceasefire between Washington and Tehran as their own victory within hours. Tehran’s behavior at the strait is consistent with the Houthi precedent having been fully absorbed, and the proxies are already rewriting its terms in advance.
What Washington Is Selling
There were lessons available from the Red Sea. It is unclear the administration weighed any of them. Perhaps the most striking parallel is how the locals were not part of the calculation at all. After the abrupt ceasefire and the speech about Houthi bravery, the movement turned its weapons inward. It silenced dissent, executed people accused of spying for Western intelligence, raided UN offices, and labeled an expanding circle of Yemenis as American or Israeli agents. The paranoia hardened. The grip on the governed population tightened, and the international community, through aid agencies and humanitarian frameworks, was effectively conscripted into legitimizing it.
This is the part that should give pause to the Iranian dissidents currently calling for American military intervention and betting on the regime’s weakness. They have misread the offer. What Washington is selling is risk mitigation, not regime change. The calculation is that a weakened regime that still collects tolls at the strait is preferable to the chaos of a collapsed one. The Red Sea has already shown what such an intervention actually produces: a narrow ceasefire, a victory speech, and a regime more entrenched at home than it was when the bombing started.
The political and ideological system Tehran is betting on was built for this kind of pressure, and designed to keep functioning under it. The truce that briefly substituted for sustained pressure in Yemen was a much smaller agreement than its framing suggested. The same gap between framing and substance is now showing up at Hormuz. The operation has been called a victory. The Strait has been called reopened. The U.S. Navy is back in the Strait, clearing the way for ships. Force does not reach the parts of these systems that matter most. Whether Washington recognizes that this time is the only thing still in question.