Ahmed Kawah
Yemen is again testing the limits of Saudi strategy. More than a decade after Riyadh led the Arab coalition into the war in 2015, the Saudi-backed camp remains fragmented, while the Houthi group has preserved a centralized command structure and the military capacity to exploit moments of regional disruption.
The problem is not that Saudi Arabia failed to search for an exit. It tried almost everything: war, containment, indirect negotiations and eventually direct talks with the Houthis. The negotiations that gathered momentum from 2023 included salary payments for public employees in Houthi-controlled areas, reopening ports and Sana’a airport, and broader economic arrangements intended to prepare the ground for a political settlement.
The logic was understandable. Saudi Arabia wanted to end an expensive conflict, protect its border and remove Yemen from the list of permanent threats to its economic transformation.
But de-escalation did not produce a durable political settlement, and it did not dismantle the Houthis’ military structure.
That distinction now matters.
A settlement can freeze a battlefield. It does not necessarily change the balance of power behind it. Saudi Arabia spent years trying to turn the Houthis from a military adversary into a negotiating counterpart, while the group retained its weapons, institutions and territorial base. When regional conditions shifted, that preserved capacity remained available.
The second weakness lies inside the anti-Houthi camp itself.
The United Arab Emirates was not a peripheral member of the 2015 coalition. Abu Dhabi committed military forces, helped develop local formations and became particularly influential in southern Yemen and along the western coast. Over time, however, Saudi and Emirati priorities diverged, especially over the political future of southern Yemen and the forces that should dominate it.
The consequence was bigger than a disagreement between two Gulf capitals. The anti-Houthi coalition lost one of its most capable military partners while Yemen’s competing factions became increasingly difficult to fit beneath a single political umbrella.
Riyadh’s attempt to consolidate the Yemeni interior may therefore have produced the opposite result: fewer competing power centers on paper, but less effective power on the ground.
Saudi Arabia has simultaneously turned toward broader regional partnerships. The emerging security architecture around the Mecca alliance reflects Riyadh’s search for deterrence beyond the traditional Gulf framework. Partnerships with countries such as Pakistan and Turkey can deepen Saudi strategic depth and signal that the kingdom is no longer relying on a single circle of allies.
But Yemen exposes the limits of distant alliances.
Collective-defense arrangements can deter attacks on Saudi territory. They cannot automatically build an effective Yemeni force, hold coastal cities or create a political order capable of challenging the Houthis inside Yemen. A treaty may widen Riyadh’s strategic options, but geography still requires reliable partners on the ground.
This is where Saudi policy faces its most uncomfortable contradiction.
The kingdom pursued accommodation with the Houthis while trying to reorganize their Yemeni opponents. It sought new alliances while its most important original coalition partner, the UAE, moved further away from the Saudi approach. It tried to reduce the costs of the war without fully resolving the balance of power that created the war in the first place.
None of this means that returning to the 2015 military model would solve the problem. A decade of conflict already demonstrated the limits of air power without a coherent Yemeni political and military structure beneath it.
But Yemen is delivering a harder lesson: negotiations can buy time, and alliances can widen deterrence, but neither can substitute for a functioning local balance of power.
For Saudi Arabia, the central question is therefore no longer how to leave Yemen. It is whether Riyadh still has a political and military architecture inside Yemen capable of shaping what comes after it leaves.
And at the moment, that answer looks far less clear than the kingdom would want.