Key Points and Summary – The Houthis won’t collapse if Iran’s regime falls. They are rooted in Yemen’s Zaydi politics, possess growing indigenous weapons capacity, and benefit from Iranian smuggling plus increasing Chinese assistance, including guidance systems and supplies funneled via Djibouti to Yemeni ports.

-U.S. strikes in spring 2025 paused after a limited pledge from the Houthis, leaving wider shipping and Israeli targets exposed.

(August 1, 2025) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG 108) approaches the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) for a replenishment-at-sea in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. (Official U.S. Navy photo)

-Counting on Tehran’s demise echoes 1990s misreads of North Korea. Even post-Iran, Beijing could back the Houthis to pressure Bab el-Mandeb and Western supply chains.

-Policy implication: treat Yemen as part of the China problem and act accordingly.

China’s Quiet Lifeline to Yemen’s Houthis, Explained

The Houthis are not a creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran; instead, they are a tribal and Zaydi sectarian group that rose up in Yemen due to genuine grievances compounded by the cynicism of the northern Yemeni establishment.

When the Houthis rose in revolt, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps saw an opportunity. They moved to co-opt the movement and incorporate it into the Islamic Republic’s so-called “Axis of Resistance.”

As Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s regime teeters, many U.S. and regional policymakers hope that the Houthis’ grip on Yemen will unravel should the Islamic Republic fall. Superficially, the optimists can point to Syria. When the going got tough in Syria, the Revolutionary Guards abandoned their four-decade partnership with the Assads. To this day, many Assad supporters are bitter that the Iranian regime would not send additional forces to stop the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham push toward Damascus.

After Houthis attacked U.S. ships in the Red Sea, President Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to bomb Houthi positions from March 15, 2025, to May 6, 2025, when Trump unilaterally declared a cessation of hostilities with the Houthis so long as they would no longer directly attack U.S. interests.

The Houthis might attack other shipping and launch drones at Israel, but, from the White House perspective, that is a problem for different countries and not a U.S. responsibility to counter.

The North Korea Test Case

There is also an element of wishful thinking in the White House and the intelligence community that with the Axis of Resistance faltering, the Houthis are living on borrowed time. Here, there is a parallel to the Clinton administration’s approach to North Korea.

With Communism collapsing worldwide, President Bill Clinton falsely believed North Korea’s demise was inevitable. His belief, shared by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, colored the U.S. approach toward the 1994 Agreed Framework. Because the U.S. believed that the North Korean regime’s demise was inevitable, it neither pressed too hard nor undertook strategies that would block the regime’s eventual path to nuclear weapons acquisition.

This History

It would be as foolish to pursue a passive policy in the belief that the end of the Islamic Republic will mean the end of the Houthis. First, it misunderstands Yemeni history. The Zaydis have deep roots in Yemen and, indeed, many Yemenis see the Houthis as the newest incarnation of the Imamate, which dominated Yemen from the late sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries and then, again, after a brief Ottoman interlude, and then in the early 20th century under Imam Yahya Hamiduddin. Egypt ultimately backed Arab nationalists who overthrew the Imamate in 1962.

The Iran Factor

Indeed, Iran continues to back the Houthis. The Yemeni group maintains an embassy in Tehran. It hosts a small number of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps trainers, though in far smaller numbers than the Islamic Republic did in Lebanon and Iraq. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also continues to smuggle advanced weaponry to the Houthis via dhow from Djibouti, into the poorly monitored Yemeni port of Hudaydah, whose inspections remain more theoretical than practical, and across tribal smuggling routes from Oman through the sparsely populated Yemeni provinces of Mahrah and Hadramawt.

Much of the Houthis’ capability, however, is now via indigenous production. As in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Emomali Rahmon’s Tajikistan, Iranian authorities have exported not only drones and missiles, but also the capability to make them.

Increasingly, though, the Houthis appear to have acquired not only Iranian weaponry but also advanced missile guidance systems from China. Many of the Iranian anti-ship missiles the Houthis use are clones of Chinese missiles that the Houthis can acquire directly from Chinese suppliers. The counter-Houthi alliance has tracked some of these supplies as they are transferred between ships and offloaded at various ports.

The Chinese presence in Djibouti makes it easier for China to transfer weapons to the Houthis, as Djibouti has reverted to its historical role as a smuggling hub. When missile components, ammunition, and even sodium perchlorate used in solid fuel for missiles get loaded onto much smaller dhows and fishing boats destined for small ports, it can be harder to track and trace.

Chinese Firms Help with Targeting

In April 2025, against the backdrop of the U.S. campaign against the Houthis, evidence emerged that Chinese firms were actively helping the Houthis hunt and attack American ships. While Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby seeks to shift U.S. focus more myopically on China, he imagines the Chinese theater in practice to be limited almost entirely to the Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean basins.

The Chinese have a much broader approach and increasingly see value in disrupting American and European supply chains by blocking ready access to the Bab El-Mandeb strategic chokepoint. Long after Khamenei is dead and the Islamic Republic falls, expect the Chinese to continue to prop up the Houthis as their satrapy on the Arabian Peninsula.

Too often, there is wishful thinking in Washington that when Iranian regime sponsorship ends, the forces of altruism will take hold. That is never the case. Turkey filled the vacuum in Syria and is now trying to establish itself in northern Lebanon. Iran is hoping for a comeback in southern Lebanon, and its ties to Iraqi militias remain strong. In Yemen, it is China that is positioning itself to defend the status quo on the day after.

To believe the United States should not engage in Yemen to focus more on China misreads both Yemen’s reality and China’s strategy. It is negligence that will get Americans killed.

About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. The opinions and views expressed are his own. A former Pentagon official, Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and postwar Iraq. He also spent time with the Taliban before 9/11. For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts, culture, and terrorism, to deployed US Navy and Marine units. The views expressed are the author’s own.

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