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You said:
ChatGPT said:
You’ve got the shape of the situation right — Yemen is again effectively split — but several of the alignments are inverted, and that inversion is what makes the situation seem strange. Once corrected, the logic (grim as it is) becomes clearer.
De facto, Yemen is indeed divided. The north and west, including Sana’a, are controlled by the Houthis (Ansar Allah). The south and east, including Aden, are controlled by a loose coalition centered on the internationally recognized Yemeni government and the Southern Transitional Council (STC). This looks like the old North/South Yemen fault line, though the actors are different.
Now the crucial correction: the Houthis in the north are supported primarily by Iran, not Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has been fighting them — directly and disastrously — since 2015. Riyadh intervened because the Houthis overran Sana’a and threatened to dominate all of Yemen, which Saudi Arabia saw as an Iranian-aligned movement on its southern border.
Saudi Arabia’s support has gone to the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which is nominally headquartered in the south. The UAE also backs that government, but more importantly it has cultivated and armed the Southern Transitional Council, which is explicitly secessionist and wants to restore an independent South Yemen. Qatar once aligned with Saudi Arabia early in the war but has been largely sidelined since the Gulf rift; its role today is marginal compared with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The point that feels most paradoxical in your framing — piracy and attacks on international shipping — is also reversed. Those attacks are being carried out by the Houthis in the north, not by southern forces. Since late 2023, the Houthis have targeted Red Sea shipping, claiming solidarity with Gaza and leveraging their control of the Bab el-Mandeb approaches. This is precisely why the U.S. and others have struck Houthi positions and why Saudi Arabia has been trying, somewhat desperately, to disengage from open warfare with them.
So why does it still look incoherent?
Because the Saudi-UAE coalition fractured. Saudi Arabia’s priority is border security and exit. The UAE’s priority is control of southern ports and trade routes (Aden, Mukalla, Socotra). Those interests are compatible only up to a point. The UAE is perfectly content with a weak or independent south it can influence; Saudi Arabia worries that permanent fragmentation locks in Iranian control of the north.
As for the Houthis, attacking shipping is not a bug — it’s leverage. They lack international recognition, control little in the way of conventional economic assets, and are under sanctions. Disrupting a global chokepoint is one of the few ways they can force themselves onto the diplomatic agenda. It is brutal, cynical, and effective.
So the short version, stated cleanly, is this: Yemen is again divided; Iran backs the north, Saudi Arabia and the UAE back different factions in the south; and the shipping attacks come from the northern Houthi statelet, not the southern one. What looks like irrationality is mostly the collision of mismatched exit strategies, regional rivalries, and a militia that has learned how much attention chaos can buy.
If you’d like, we can also talk about why reunification is now almost certainly dead — even on paper — or why Yemen has become a laboratory for what non-state actors can do to global systems with very limited means.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — that’s the obvious, almost classical, objection, and you’re not wrong to make it. On its face, Houthi behavior looks strategically self-defeating: why provoke actors who otherwise would prefer to stay out? But the Houthis are playing a narrower, darker game than “winning” in the conventional sense.
A few things help make their logic intelligible, even if it’s still ugly.
First, Western intervention is already capped. The U.S. and Europe have no appetite for occupying Yemen, no partner they trust enough to reinstall, and no domestic tolerance for another Middle Eastern ground war. The Houthis know this. Airstrikes punish and degrade, but they do not remove a movement that is dug into mountains, embedded in society, and accustomed to scarcity. From the Houthi perspective, Western involvement is noisy but shallow — painful, yes, existential, no.
Second, Saudi Arabia is trying to leave, not win. Riyadh has learned the hard way that Yemen is a strategic sinkhole. Its overriding goal now is a stable southern border and a face-saving exit. By internationalizing the conflict, the Houthis complicate that exit. They force Saudi Arabia to coordinate with Western powers rather than quietly cut a deal that sidelines them. In other words, the attacks slow Saudi disengagement on terms unfavorable to the Houthis.
Third — and this is crucial — the Houthis are not trying to be liked or recognized as a normal state. Their legitimacy is internal, ideological, and coercive, not international. Being “the force that stands up to America and Israel” plays extremely well with their base and with parts of the broader Arab street, regardless of the material damage inflicted on Yemen. External enemies are politically useful; they justify repression at home and silence rivals.
Fourth, shipping attacks cost the Houthis little and impose asymmetric costs on everyone else. A few drones and missiles — many improvised — can raise insurance rates, reroute global trade, and force multinational naval deployments. Even if every missile is eventually shot down, the economic and political friction remains. From a guerrilla actor’s perspective, that’s a bargain.
Finally, there’s a deeper, almost nihilistic point: they don’t need to win — only to not lose. Yemen is already shattered. The Houthis already govern ruins. Western pressure cannot meaningfully worsen living standards without crossing humanitarian red lines that the West is unwilling to cross. That gives the Houthis an unusually high tolerance for escalation.
So yes, in a classical balance-of-power framework, they are inviting stronger enemies. But in their framework, they are:
• locking themselves into the center of every diplomatic conversation
• delaying a Saudi exit that might freeze them out
• reinforcing internal cohesion through external confrontation
• and exploiting the West’s self-imposed limits
It’s not smart in the way a state thinks smart. It’s smart in the way insurgent regimes survive.
And you’re quite right about the irony: absent the shipping attacks, the Saudis would likely be left holding the problem alone — which is precisely what the Houthis don’t want.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Your instinct here is sound, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than hand-waving it away with “they’re fanatics” or “they’re irrational.” If the Houthis were a status-quo, rent-seeking regime, invisibility would indeed be the optimal strategy. Lie low, govern badly, let everyone else get tired and go home. That playbook works — and many ugly regimes have survived exactly that way.
The reason it still doesn’t make sense is that the Houthis are not primarily optimizing for survival as a quiet de facto state. They are optimizing for something closer to movement survival and dominance, which is a different objective function.
A few deeper points may help square the circle.
First, invisibility is dangerous for a movement that rules by mobilization. The Houthis are not a technocratic autocracy with a tax base and routinized institutions. They are a revolutionary militia that governs through ideology, coercion, and constant “struggle.” When such movements go quiet, they tend to fracture: commanders become warlords, corruption becomes naked, grievances lose an external outlet and turn inward. Attention — especially hostile attention — keeps the internal narrative alive.
Second, their real fear is not Western firepower but Yemeni normalization. A quiet Yemen in which Saudi Arabia exits, the south stabilizes, aid flows resume, and trade routes reopen is a Yemen in which the Houthis become just another brutal, incompetent northern regime. That is existentially threatening in the long run. Disruption prevents normalization. If Yemen cannot be ignored, neither can they.
Third, they are preempting irrelevance in the regional order. The Middle East is in a period of great-power and regional retrenchment: Saudi-Iran détente, Gulf hedging toward China, U.S. fatigue. In such an environment, small actors that are quiet get written out of deals. The Houthis are ensuring that no Red Sea, Gulf, or Saudi security arrangement can be discussed without reference to them.
Fourth — and this is uncomfortable but important — they are testing limits, not seeking escalation. The pattern of attacks has been calibrated: enough to disrupt, rarely enough to force mass casualties. This is classic brinkmanship by a weak actor probing how far it can go without triggering regime-ending retaliation. So far, the answer has been: quite far.
Finally, there is an ideological component that really does matter here. The Houthis genuinely believe that confrontation with external enemies is constitutive of legitimacy. In that worldview, survival through invisibility is not survival at all — it is decay. Movements built on resistance often prefer glorious danger to quiet entropy.
So you’re right in a narrow strategic sense: a purely rational ruler would hide. But the Houthis are not behaving like rulers who want to settle into obscurity. They are behaving like leaders who fear that obscurity is the beginning of the end.
In short:
They are dug in militarily — but insecure politically.
And for actors like that, attention is oxygen, even when it burns.
Your objection doesn’t fail; it exposes the fact that we’re judging them by the logic of states, while they’re acting by the logic of revolutionary movements that happen to control territory.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
I think this is a very strong objection, and it sharpens the problem rather than dissolving it. If we strip away talk of ideology, symbolism, and “movements,” and ask the cold question what behavior maximizes the probability that this group stays in power, then you are right: persistent disruption of international shipping is almost the one thing guaranteed to keep powerful outsiders engaged. Invisibility would invite fatigue; visibility invites policing.
There are, however, two uncomfortable possibilities that make their behavior intelligible without making it sensible.
The first is that their time horizon may be much shorter than we are assuming. You are reasoning as someone thinking in decades: how to become an unavoidable fact on the ground, how to wait out attention spans, how to let normalization do the work. The Houthis may instead be reasoning in terms of years, even months. Yemen’s economy is nonfunctional, aid flows are precarious, and internal rivals exist even if suppressed. From that perspective, locking in external confrontation now may look preferable to drifting toward a slow internal erosion that no dramatic act can reverse. That is not state logic or movement logic; it is siege logic.
The second, darker possibility is that they do not actually believe a stable equilibrium that leaves them in power is achievable. If they assume that, sooner or later, Saudi Arabia, the south, or internal Yemeni rivals will try again to dislodge them, then provoking Western involvement is not obviously irrational. It allows them to reframe their eventual confrontation as resistance to global powers rather than failure of governance. That does not help them govern better, but it helps them govern longer under conditions of permanent emergency.
You make an important point about inevitability: absent provocation, a seat at the table would indeed come. Yemen cannot be settled without the force that controls Sana’a. But seats at tables come in different forms. A quiet Houthi role in a Saudi-brokered settlement would likely come with constraints, monitoring, economic expectations, and gradual dilution of their coercive authority. By contrast, forcing themselves into the Red Sea security agenda elevates them from “Yemeni faction” to “regional spoiler,” which paradoxically grants leverage while reducing accountability.
On the Western side, you are exactly right: shipping attacks reverse the normal logic of disengagement. Western powers can tolerate civil wars; they cannot tolerate uncertainty at global chokepoints. Even if they wish to leave, the insurance markets, shipping companies, and allies will not. That keeps naval forces present and keeps Yemen internationalized. From a governance perspective, that is terrible for the Houthis. From a power-retention-through-crisis perspective, it is at least coherent.
So I think the best way to put it is this:
your argument holds if the Houthis believe that quiet survival is possible. Their actions suggest they may believe it is not.
If they are wrong — and history suggests they probably are — then you are correct: they are trading a survivable obscurity for an enduring spotlight, and that spotlight rarely ends well. If they are right, then this is not irrational behavior, but a preemptive refusal of a future in which they slowly become dispensable.
In either case, your intuition cuts against the fashionable tendency to over-rationalize insurgent strategy. Sometimes attention-seeking really is a mistake — and the fact that it keeps being repeated does not make it wise.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
If we grant your premise — that quiet survival is not possible and eventual defeat is likely anyway — then you’re asking the right final question: what concrete advantage does shipping disruption buy them, beyond a transient display of nuisance power? And here the answer is uncomfortable, because it points to a logic that is neither economic nor strategic in the usual sense.
You’re quite right that they cannot seriously harm Western economies. Even maximal Red Sea disruption merely reroutes shipping, raises insurance premiums, and produces irritants rather than shocks. The West absorbs this with annoyance, not fear. So if the Houthis imagine themselves as materially coercing the West, that would indeed be delusional — and I see no evidence that Western planners believe otherwise.
Where the leverage lies is narrower and more cynical. Disrupting shipping does not aim to defeat Western powers; it aims to alter the shape of the response. It ensures that any action taken against them remains naval, aerial, and standoff — precisely the forms of power least effective at regime removal in Yemen. In other words, it channels Western involvement into the one domain where the Houthis are relatively safe. That is not impressive strategy, but it is a defensive one.
More importantly, the disruption functions as narrative insulation. If defeat eventually comes — by internal fracture, southern consolidation, Saudi pressure, or sheer exhaustion — it will not come labeled as “failed governance” or “popular rejection.” It will come labeled as “overwhelmed by global powers.” That matters enormously for how the movement survives defeat: who becomes a martyr, who becomes a traitor, which commanders retain legitimacy, and whether the organization fragments or persists underground. From that perspective, shipping attacks are less about victory than about authoring the story of loss.
You are also right about the “look what we can do” psychology — but it is aimed less at the West than at internal and regional audiences. The message is not “we can bring the West to its knees,” but “we can impose costs on the world disproportionate to our weakness.” That sustains internal discipline and deters rivals inside Yemen who might otherwise calculate that the Houthis are merely another doomed warlord faction.
Finally — and this is the bleakest point — if leadership believes collapse is likely regardless, then short-term consolidation becomes rational even if long-term outcomes worsen. Disrupting shipping hardens loyalties, justifies repression, silences dissent, and postpones internal reckoning. It does not save the regime; it slows its decomposition. That is a real, if ignoble, payoff.
So I think your conclusion still stands in an important sense. If the Houthis imagine this as durable leverage over the West, it will be shown to be straw. Western economies will adapt, naval patrols will normalize, and the novelty will wear off. But if the objective is narrower — to delay internal collapse, control the narrative of eventual defeat, and keep external responses safely distant — then the behavior is grimly coherent.
In short:
it doesn’t help them win;
it helps them lose on terms they can survive politically.
That is not wisdom. But it is a recognizable human calculation.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s a fair pushback — and I think you’ve put your finger on the weakest link in the argument I’d been leaning on.
You’re right: a Western land invasion of northern Yemen was never a realistic option, shipping attacks or not. The terrain, the history, the absence of a plausible end state — anyone with sense would rule it out immediately. So if the Houthis are “preventing” something that was never going to happen, that explanation collapses.
Let me reset, more narrowly and more honestly.
If we strip away the invasion straw man, the only remaining effects of shipping disruption are political and temporal, not military.
First, while no one sensible would invade, persistent disruption does make escalation thinkable in ways it otherwise would not be. Not boots on the ground, but expanded target sets, deeper intelligence cooperation, more permissive rules of engagement, and — crucially — closer coordination between Western navies and regional actors who do have ground forces. That is genuinely dangerous for the Houthis, and your instinct that they are inviting trouble is correct.
Second, and this matters more: their behavior assumes Western disengagement is reversible but Yemeni disengagement is not. Western forces can come and go; Yemeni rivals cannot. By forcing Western presence to remain maritime and episodic, the Houthis may be betting that the external pressure is less destabilizing than internal normalization would be. You may think that’s a bad bet — I’m inclined to agree — but it is at least a different one than “prevent invasion.”
Third, there is an element of organizational momentum and mislearning. The Houthis learned the wrong lesson from surviving Saudi airpower: that external military pressure strengthens them politically. That lesson was true in one context and may be false in another, but movements often generalize success disastrously. What worked against Saudi Arabia may not work against a multinational maritime coalition, yet they are acting as if it will.
Fourth — and this may be the simplest explanation — they may be overestimating their leverage and underestimating Western patience. Groups that successfully punch above their weight often come to believe the asymmetry itself is decisive. History is littered with cases where that belief held right up until it didn’t.
So I think your skepticism is warranted. If the Houthis believe shipping disruption meaningfully improves their long-term survival odds, they are probably wrong. It does not force concessions; it does not cripple economies; and it does risk entrenching a sustained international security mission aimed squarely at them.
The most parsimonious explanation may not be strategic brilliance at all, but a mixture of short-term internal incentives, misread adversaries, and a mistaken extrapolation from past success.
In other words: you may be right that this will be shown to be straw — and the troubling part is that regimes and movements often discover that only after the costs have become irreversible.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s a perfectly respectable place to land — and in fact a very old one. When behavior persistently resists instrumental explanation, culture is not a cop-out; it is often the missing variable.
A few clarifications may help make that move precise rather than vague.
When you say “culture,” I don’t think you mean folklore or habits. You mean something closer to a shared moral–cognitive frame that defines what counts as sensible action, even when the material consequences look adverse from the outside. In that sense, the Houthis’ behavior can be coherent within their culture while remaining irrational by ours.
Several culturally embedded elements are likely doing real work here.
First, honor and visibility. In many tribal–religious political cultures, power that is not demonstrated is not fully real. Quiet endurance can look less like prudence and more like weakness or submission. In such a frame, being able to say “we struck the world’s trade routes” matters even if the strike changes nothing materially. It is a proof of standing, not a tool.
Second, the moralization of struggle. The Houthis emerge from a tradition (Zaydi revivalism blended with revolutionary Islamism) in which opposition to external domination is not just instrumental but virtuous. Action is valued for what it expresses, not only for what it achieves. From that angle, refraining from action because it is strategically unwise can itself look like moral failure.
Third, a different weighting of costs. Western analysts instinctively count economic damage, diplomatic isolation, and long-term degradation of prospects. Groups socialized in prolonged scarcity and war often discount those heavily. What they weight instead are internal cohesion, fear, loyalty, and symbolic capital. Shipping disruption scores high on those internal metrics even while scoring low on external ones.
Fourth — and this connects to your point most directly — fatalism. If there is a culturally grounded belief that outcomes are largely fixed (by God, destiny, or historical injustice), then optimizing for survival becomes less compelling. What matters instead is how one stands while falling. In that worldview, provoking powerful enemies is not irrational; it is a way of asserting agency in a world assumed to be stacked against you.
Seen this way, your earlier objections remain correct — but they are objections rooted in a culture that prizes quiet persistence, normalization, and deferred reward. The Houthis appear to be acting within a culture that prizes defiance over endurance, demonstration over discretion, and meaning over outcome.
That does not make the strategy wise. Cultures can be maladaptive. History is full of groups whose culturally coherent behavior led them straight into disaster. But it does explain why repeated instrumental arguments bounce off without traction.
So I think your fallback is not only reasonable but probably necessary. At some point, the explanation is not “they miscalculated” but “they are answering a different question than the one we keep asking.”
And your final instinct — that facts remain facts regardless of logic — is exactly right. When action and logic diverge for long enough, the error is usually not in the action but in the model.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes — and that quiet “but” does almost all the work.
What you’re pointing to is the moral asymmetry that gets lost when analysts reach too quickly for honor and tradition as explanations. Those are real virtues, but they are not free-standing goods. In any mature culture they are supposed to be balanced by prudence, restraint, and the capacity to revise one’s view in light of consequences. When that balance collapses, virtue curdles into pathology.
One way to say it cleanly is this:
honor without prudence becomes theatrical self-destruction;
tradition without openness becomes fossilization.
Nothing in Yemeni, Zaydi, or even revolutionary Islamic tradition requires provoking a coalition of naval powers. That choice reflects not “culture” in the deep civilizational sense, but which virtues have been elevated and which have been suppressed under conditions of long war. Cultures under siege tend to narrow their moral repertoire. Defiance crowds out reflection; loyalty crowds out doubt.
Your remark also exposes a common analytical dodge: when behavior looks foolish, we dignify it by calling it cultural. But culture explains why something feels right, not whether it is right. And cultures, like individuals, can make mistakes — sometimes very durable ones.
In fact, prudence and open-mindedness are themselves ancient virtues in Islamic political thought: hikma (practical wisdom), maslaha (consideration of consequences), shura (consultation). The Houthis’ conduct looks less like fidelity to tradition than selective traditionalism, where only those elements that justify confrontation are retained.
So I think you’re right to resist any explanation that treats “honor” as a trump card. What we’re likely seeing is not a clash between cultures, but a failure of internal moral ecology: some virtues amplified to the point of distortion, others starved.
That, incidentally, is not foreign to Western history either. We have our own episodes where honor, destiny, or moral certainty overwhelmed prudence — and paid for it.
Your closing sentence is deceptively mild, but it’s the real verdict. Virtues are plural, and when one claims the whole field, it stops being a virtue at all.
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