I approach this subject as a political scientist by training and a researcher of global geopolitics by vocation, not as an advocate for any capital or any cause. A doctorate in political science, if it teaches anything durable, teaches distrust of the comfortable verdict rendered in the first week of a crisis. It teaches one to ask what an instrument of coercion was designed to achieve, what it actually achieved, and what residue it deposited once the communique announcing success had already been filed and forgotten.
My interest in Yemen and Iran is therefore scholarly rather than partisan. I hold no brief for Sana’a or Riyadh, for Tehran or Washington. My brief, such as it is, belongs to the discipline itself: to the gap that so often opens between the stated aim of force and the strategic aftermath it produces.
There is something dangerously seductive about the idea of the short war. It promises decision without inheritance, punishment without prolonged responsibility, restoration without occupation. A missile is fired, a commander is removed, a capital announces that deterrence has been restored, and for a brief moment the choreography of power appears complete.
History is rarely so obedient. The true measure of coercive force is not what it destroys on the day it is employed but what survives it, what learns from it, what adapts to it, and what political order eventually occupies the space it has cleared.
Thomas Schelling understood coercion as an attempt to alter an adversary’s choices rather than merely to inflict pain upon him.
Carl von Clausewitz, more severe, insisted that war possesses no grammar of its own, that it remains always an instrument of political purpose, and that when the purpose is vague the grammar collapses into something closer to slaughter than to strategy. Both insights are most easily forgotten precisely when a state possesses overwhelming military superiority, because superiority breeds the illusion that capability is equivalent to control. It is not, and the Middle East has spent the better part of two decades demonstrating why.
Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, begun in March 2015, and the sustained American campaign of coercive pressure against Iran are different in legal form, in operational scale, and in political context, and I do not propose to force them into artificial equivalence. Yet they rhyme, and the rhyme has grown louder rather than fainter with time. Both confronted genuine security problems rather than manufactured ones. Both relied on superior coercive instruments to resolve what were, at bottom, political problems. Both sought to restore a more favourable strategic order. And both have produced residues that have proved considerably harder to manage than the original threats they were designed to discipline.
Barry Buzan’s notion of the regional security complex is useful here: Yemen was never a sealed civil file, and Iran was never a contained bilateral dispute. Each was a subsystem whose insecurity travelled, and the travelling has now brought both files to meet in the same waters.
Yemen is the clearer place to begin, because the original logic of intervention appeared, on its face, almost unobjectionable. Ansar Allah, the Zaydi movement better known as the Houthis, had seized Sana’a, made an opportunist accommodation with the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and pressed toward Aden, challenging the internationally recognised government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Saudi Arabia faced instability along a long and porous border, and it feared the consolidation of an armed movement with growing, if at that stage still modest, links to Iran.
Hadi requested assistance, and Riyadh, under a new king and an ambitious young defence minister assembling a reputation for decisiveness, responded with a coalition and a campaign. The threat was not fiction conjured for domestic consumption. A collapsed neighbour, a hostile force on a long frontier, and a rival power’s growing footprint were not seminar-room abstractions for a state of Saudi Arabia’s geography.
Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat framework helps explain the decision to intervene: proximity, offensive capability, and perceived offensive intent are precisely the variables that move states toward the use of force, and all three were present on Saudi Arabia’s southern border in 2015. There was, in short, a case for response. But a legitimate security concern does not automatically yield a sound strategy, and this is where the Yemen war becomes instructive rather than merely tragic.
The coalition campaign rested heavily on airpower, blockade, and support for a fragmented array of Yemeni factions, and it possessed immense capacity to destroy. What it never adequately possessed was a coherent political theory of the state that might have replaced the military balance it sought to overturn. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pursued different local relationships and different political preferences; Yemeni allies were divided among themselves; the recognised government never developed the unified coercive authority that genuine restoration would have required.
Max Weber’s classical definition of the state as the entity that successfully claims a monopoly of legitimate violence identifies precisely the object that was missing. Bombardment could destroy a position, but it could not manufacture legitimacy. It could remove a commander, but it could not construct an institution.
Principal-agent theory adds a further layer to the diagnosis: a coalition is not a unitary actor, and when its principals disagree about the ultimate political end, the agents they arm and finance on the ground become, in effect, a marketplace of competing projects rather than an instrument of a single strategy.
As the war ground on, Yemen’s civilian infrastructure deteriorated: ports, roads, hospitals, and the ordinary circuits of food and fuel were disrupted or destroyed, producing a humanitarian catastrophe that was simultaneously a strategic fact. When civilian institutions collapse, armed organisations tend to grow relatively stronger, because they alone retain the discipline and the coercive capacity to function amid the wreckage.
Historical institutionalism offers the appropriate vocabulary for what followed: early choices closed off later options, locking the conflict onto a path from which extrication became progressively more costly. The war did not create the Houthis; that claim would be historically careless. Ansar Allah had deep indigenous roots in northern Yemen long before Saudi aircraft entered the skies above it. But the war transformed the environment in which the movement operated. It gave the Houthis years of combat experience, deepened their incentives to accept external military support, hardened their command structures, and helped convert an insurgent movement into a far more formidable political-military authority.
By the time a United Nations-brokered truce took hold in 2022, the movement remained entrenched across Yemen’s northern population centres, its ties to Iran were deeper rather than shallower, and its missile and drone capabilities had expanded to the point of threatening Saudi cities and energy infrastructure directly. The border problem Riyadh went to war to shrink had, in significant part, become a longer-range strategic problem. The truce was a genuine achievement in humanitarian terms, but it was not a reversal of the underlying transformation; it was a pause in which the war’s stronger residue was left free to study the strait.
The subsequent mutation confirmed the pattern rather than interrupting it. Following the war in Gaza that began in late 2023, the Houthis opened a campaign against shipping in the Red Sea and against Israel, and a movement rooted in Yemen’s internal political struggle became, almost overnight, a maritime actor capable of shaping global commercial decisions. Shipping companies diverted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, insurance costs rose, and the United States and the United Kingdom launched their own strikes against Houthi targets.
A pause negotiated in 2025 quieted attacks on American shipping without restoring the Houthis’ underlying capacity or resolving the Yemeni war itself, and when the wider regional weather shifted again in 2026, that capacity resumed in new and more consequential combinations. I do not claim that the Saudi-led war alone determined every later Houthi decision; history rarely moves through such convenient single lines of causation. The more defensible claim, consistent with Robert Jervis’s account of system effects, is that the organisation conducting those later operations was more militarily experienced, more institutionally coherent, and more regionally consequential after eleven years of war than the movement that entered Sana’a in 2014. That is how unintended consequences ought to be understood: not as mysterious causation but as observable political transformation.
The renewed fighting on Yemen’s western coast in September 2026, including the reported Houthi advance around Mokha and onto Perim Island in the throat of Bab al-Mandeb, illustrates with unusual clarity how the residue of an earlier intervention can return, years later, in a form its original architects did not anticipate. Yemeni officials and international reporting described government forces withdrawing from positions along the western shore, tens of thousands of people displaced within days, and the United Nations envoy warning that the country faced its highest risk of major war since the 2022 truce. The tactical picture remains fluid, and scholarship must resist the temptation to freeze a battlefield that is still moving. But the strategic implication is already visible, and it is this: Bab al-Mandeb matters because Hormuz matters.
At one end of the Arabian Peninsula lies the Strait of Hormuz, inseparable from the ongoing confrontation with Iran; at the other lies Bab al-Mandeb, the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez route. Pressure on one raises the strategic value of the other. Saudi Arabia’s western export infrastructure becomes more valuable precisely when Hormuz is threatened, yet that alternative depends entirely on stability around a strait that a war Riyadh itself began has helped render unstable.
Here lies one of the great ironies of contemporary Middle Eastern strategy: Saudi Arabia went to war in 2015 partly to prevent the consolidation of a hostile, Iran-aligned armed actor on its southern flank, and eleven years later that actor has become relevant to the security of a maritime route whose importance grows precisely as confrontation with Iran destabilises the opposite side of the peninsula. This is not a morality play. It is, in Jervis’s sense, a system effect: the punch lands on one node, and the system rearranges itself elsewhere, often in ways the puncher did not price into the original calculation.
The American experience with Iran reflects a related strategic problem, pursued through different instruments toward a similar bet. Iran’s nuclear programme, its missile arsenal, and its network of armed partners across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen have posed real challenges to American interests and to those of Washington’s regional allies; Qasem Soleimani was not an innocent bureaucrat but one of the principal architects of Iran’s regional military reach.
To acknowledge this is not to endorse the strategy through which Washington sought to contain him. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action placed verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. Its critics were correct that the agreement left the missile programme untouched and the regional networks intact, and that some of its restrictions were time-limited. It was, in the language of institutional bargaining theory, an incomplete bargain. But incomplete bargains are not necessarily failed ones, and the withdrawal from that agreement in 2018, followed by a policy of maximum economic pressure, rested on the wager that sufficient pain would force Tehran into a more comprehensive settlement.
The sanctions imposed genuine hardship on the Iranian economy. Yet pain is not settlement, and the central question in any coercive strategy is not whether pressure hurts but whether it produces the specific political choice the coercing power actually desires.
That distinction sharpened considerably with the killing of Soleimani in January 2020, a strike that succeeded completely at the tactical level and immediately raised the harder question of what strategy begins where the tactical report ends.
The decapitation literature in political science has always offered mixed and contested findings on precisely this point: networks with deep local roots, multiple internal principals, and sacralised narratives of resistance do not necessarily behave like corporations that have simply lost a chief executive.
Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles against bases housing American personnel; Iraqi politics turned more hostile toward the American military presence; Iran’s regional networks did not dissolve, and in important respects became harder for anyone, including Tehran itself, to fully manage, an outcome principal-agent theory would predict once a coordinating hand is removed and local commanders inherit greater autonomy. On the nuclear file, Tehran progressively moved beyond the limits it had accepted under the 2015 agreement as the wider cycle of pressure and counter-pressure intensified.
Care is required here, as in Yemen: not every subsequent Iranian decision can be attributed directly to a single American strike, nor can every later nuclear development be reduced to one decision made in Washington. The more defensible conclusion, and the one Alexander George’s classic conditions for successful coercive diplomacy would anticipate, is that the coercive cycle steadily narrowed the available political off-ramps, because neither side’s demand was limited, neither side’s deadline was genuinely credible, and neither side offered the other a believable assurance of restraint following compliance. Each round of pressure and retaliation taught both governments that only capacity, and not restraint, could be relied upon.
This is why deterrence should be treated as an outcome to be measured rather than a vocabulary to be deployed. Governments frequently announce that an operation has restored deterrence; the assertion means nothing unless subsequent behaviour actually confirms that the adversary has been deterred.
Military superiority is not strategic mastery, and nowhere is this clearer than at the point where the Yemen and Iran narratives now intersect.
The Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb function, in effect, as two valves within a single regional energy system: instability around one increases the value, and therefore the vulnerability, of the other. What happens in Yemen is no longer simply Yemeni, and what happens around Iran is no longer simply Iranian. The United States has been a central actor in both theatres, a major partner to the original Saudi-led coalition, the author of maximum pressure and the architect of the Soleimani strike, and later the leader of its own campaign against Houthi attacks on shipping.
This is how path dependence operates in international politics: early choices generate commitments, client relationships, and reputational stakes that later leaders inherit as though they were natural facts of the regional landscape rather than products of prior policy choices that might have been made differently.
History offers sobering parallels that this pattern does not permit us to ignore. Egypt entered Yemen in the 1960s believing that superior force could settle a local political struggle and found itself trapped in what its own generation called Egypt’s Vietnam, a distant war that consumed treasure and fractured the army while leaving the local conflict more militarised than it found it. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon sought to destroy a hostile armed presence on its northern frontier and helped produce the conditions in which Hezbollah would eventually emerge as a far more formidable adversary than the one the invasion had been designed to eliminate.
The United States removed Saddam Hussein in 2003 with striking military efficiency, but in doing so it also removed one of the principal regional counterweights to Iranian influence, opening political space for networks that Washington would spend the following two decades attempting to contain. None of these cases is identical to Yemen or to the Iran confrontation, but the recurring mechanism is difficult to overlook: tactical disruption, political fragmentation, adaptation, the institutionalisation of new armed power, and eventual strategic constraint upon the very state that struck first.
The lesson I draw from this record is not that states must never use force; that conclusion would be as intellectually unserious as the adventurism it seeks to condemn. Realism does not require pacifism, and Saudi Arabia could not simply have ignored the collapse of order on its southern border in 2015, nor could the United States reasonably have treated Iran’s nuclear and regional military activities as inconsequential.
The alternative to adventurism is not quietism but proportion: the disciplined matching of instrument to an achievable political end, and the humility to ask, before force is employed, not only whether a state can strike but what political order the strike is likely to leave behind. There are enemies one may have to bargain with precisely because one has failed to defeat them outright. There are agreements one may dislike yet ought to retain, because the alternative produces fewer constraints rather than more. And there are military victories that should never be mistaken for political solutions, however satisfying the communique that announces them.
The costs of forgetting this distinction are never distributed evenly, and the first victims are rarely the authors of strategy. Yemenis have paid in death, hunger, displacement, ruined schools, and a generation formed inside war, and this September they are paying again as towns already emptied once are emptied a second time. But the costs travel outward in the end. Saudi Arabia pays in border insecurity, threatened energy infrastructure, and a shipping lane it can no longer take for granted.
The United States pays in repeated military commitments and strategic distraction across two overlapping theatres. Shipping companies and energy-importing states pay through higher insurance, longer routes, and price volatility. The international system pays whenever regional wars acquire the capacity to disrupt global trade at its narrowest points. Military adventurism begins, characteristically, by externalising its costs onto others; history has a habit, patient but reliable, of returning them to their point of origin.
The deepest lesson of Yemen and Iran, then, is not merely that military action produces unintended consequences, since every consequential policy does. It is that military action can change the identity, the capability, the geography, and the alliance structure of the very actors against whom it is directed. It can educate armed movements even as it degrades them. It can deepen dependencies it was meant to sever. It can destroy weak institutions while leaving coercive ones standing more or less intact. It can transform peripheral actors into regional actors, and it can make today’s tactical victory into tomorrow’s strategic constraint.
The Middle East has not been remade according to the blueprint of any single victor; it has been remade through the interaction of ambitions, interventions, adaptations, and residues, none of which was fully anticipated by the states that set the process in motion. That record ought to impose a measure of humility upon states with powerful militaries, and upon the analysts who advise them.
Before force is employed, the relevant questions are not only whether a strike can succeed but what political order it is likely to leave behind; not only what the adversary will lose today but what it may learn tomorrow; not only whether a commander can be killed or a coastline retaken, but whether the altered battlefield brings anyone closer to an achievable political settlement. Otherwise the first explosion is mistaken for a conclusion, and it is not.
Military adventurism is measured, in the end, not by the brilliance of the opening strike or the confidence of the communique that follows it, but by the strategic environment that remains once the smoke has cleared, the adversary has adapted, the alliances have shifted, and the supposed short war has entered its second decade still unresolved.
In Yemen, an intervention intended to restore the state helped create the conditions in which an existing insurgent movement became a hardened political-military authority with reach into a global chokepoint. In the confrontation with Iran, coercive policies designed to force strategic retreat inflicted considerable pain without producing durable political submission. Today, the residues of both policies increasingly meet across the same waters, and perhaps that is the most enduring warning of all: power may determine how a war begins, but it does not guarantee control over what the war teaches, what it creates, or what eventually survives it.
Dr. Haruna is a Political Economist and Global Affairs Analyst. He writes from No. 14, Spring Drive Avenue, Minna, Niger State, and can be reached at msquare1306@gmail.com
