What the Red Sea Conflict Between the U.S. and the Houthis Taught Iran

A year on from the Trump-Houthi ceasefire of May 6, 2025, the Red Sea remains volatile and under the residual influence of the Iran-backed Houthi movement. The U.S. intervention lasted about two months. It started something but did not finish it.

Operation Rough Rider was launched to restore freedom of navigation and end Houthi attacks on commercial shipping. By the time it ended, however, the only commitment that survived was that U.S. vessels would not be struck. The wider objective had narrowed in a pattern that appears to have been replicated regarding U.S. demands that Iran end its control over the Strait of Hormuz. Whether Washington learned anything from the Red Sea effort is a question Iran is currently testing.

On the anniversary of the Houthi ceasefire, members of the Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” congratulated themselves for a job well done in the Red Sea. A Lebanese military analyst on Houthi TV credited the Houthis with rewriting the concept of naval warfare, while a Houthi information chief described the American carrier as having “fled the battlefield at record speed.” For an entire week, Houthi-aligned outlets marked the anniversary under the hashtag #American_Hegemony_Failure.

The pattern is familiar from Lebanon to Libya, where U.S. interventions have pursued narrow objectives that tend to end with smaller demands than when they began. These interventions are meant to be brief, and the exit is where the original objective gets traded for something smaller.

Operation Rough Rider‘s ceasefire is a case in point. Because the agreement covered only U.S. naval and government-flagged vessels, much of what else occurred was ignored by Washington. So, when the Houthis sank the Liberian-flagged Magic Seas and Eternity C in July 2025, Washington did not react. By 2026, the Houthis were sorting Red Sea traffic by political identity and deciding what got through. The mission that had begun as freedom of navigation ended as force protection for U.S. hulls, with no movement on underlying Houthi control.

In a sense, the intervention itself could be seen as a circular exercise. Before the U.S.S.Eisenhower and Lincoln carrier deployments, the U.S. was not a central feature of the Houthi threat picture. The administration defined the threat as Houthi fire on its assets, struck the Houthis in Yemen for almost two months, and exited through a truce in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking the targets that the U.S. had positioned there to attack them. The truce never asked for more than the removal of a problem that the United States had partly created.

The ceasefire arrived abruptly, and after weeks of maximalist rhetoric about hitting the Houthis hard. Then came the surprise: the day after the truce, President Donald Trump told reporters that the Houthis “had a great capacity to withstand punishment,” that they “took tremendous punishment,” and that “you could say there’s a lot of bravery there.”

Somewhere between ceasefire and capitulation, it was the United States that appeared to have backed down, not the other way around. Perhaps the most troubling part of the U.S. intervention is that the Houthis’ reputation survived it intact, irrespective of the damage that fell on them. And this has affected the general perception of the militant group. So when Israeli operations against Iran began in late February 2026, the dominant question across maritime, policy, and intelligence commentary was whether the Houthis would re-enter the Red Sea, rather than whether they were still in a position to do so.

In fact, the Houthis have so far only lobbed a few symbolic missiles at Israel. The group has been substantially degraded over the year, not by the U.S. operation itself but through the sustained pressure that ensued from Israeli airstrikes on Hodeidah and Ras Isa in 2025 to a tightening sanctions environment that prevented resupply of critical materials the Houthis use to build their weapons. At the same time, the coalition that would have been the political mechanism for translating Houthi degradation into Houthi displacement no longer existed because the United States had signaled, by launching an intervention and walking away, that it had no interest in resolving the underlying conflict. That signal raised the stakes for everyone else because any actor moving against the Houthis risked moving against the backdrop of a US-Houthi deal and knowing it would be acting without American backing.

At the same time, no other actor moved to capitalize on the Houthis’ operational degradation. The internationally recognized Yemeni government and the anti-Houthi coalition remained fractured, while the U.S. ceasefire had effectively consolidated the status quo. There was no group positioned to translate operational degradation into political change.

The same pattern appears to be visible at the Strait of Hormuz, on a much larger and more devastating scale for the Middle East and the global economy.

The Islamic Republic has been somewhat degraded by the initial strikes in the war, starting with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of operations, and senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and military leadership were eliminated through March, including IRGC commander-in-chief Mohammad Pakpour, Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh.

Iran’s critical port at Bandar Abbas and the Bushehr nuclear site were also struck as were a number of sites related to the Iranian nuclear program and other infrastructure. But Iran continues to exercise live coercion at the Strait of Hormuz through mining and selective transit pressure, and has codified that coercion into a$2 million toll formalized by the Iranian parliament in April and creation of a Persian Gulf Strait Authority to collect those tolls and determine which ships are allowed safe passage. Whether Iran’s coercion at the strait ultimately recedes is one question. Whether Washington is already narrowing what it set out to achieve, the way it did in the Red Sea, is a separate one, and the signals are already visible.

The negotiation language shows constant shifting objectives. Washington’s initial 15-point plan demanded the complete reopening of the strait while Iran’s 10-point counteroffer proposed controlled passage coordinated with the IRGC, which Trump initially called a workable basis. Between those two documents, the objective appears to have drifted from preventing a nuclear Iran to reopening the strait, which was closed due to U.S.-Israel intervention in the first place. This is reminiscent of the circular logic at work in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Operation Project Freedom, a Navy escort mission for ships transiting the strait, started and paused within forty-eight hours after Saudi Arabia reportedly refused to allow its airspace and U.S. bases there to be used in support.

The IRGC was built on similar distributed architecture of revenue streams, proxy relationships, parallel ministries, and ideology that allows the system to absorb the loss of senior figures. Mojtaba Khamenei was selected as Supreme Leader on March 8, nine days after his father’s death, and the regime has continued to function despite the fact that he was reportedly grievously wounded and has made no public appearances.

Tehran is also reading the political clock around the U.S. intervention. Iranians are looking at rising oil prices, growing American dissatisfaction with the war, and the visible difficulty of sustaining the kinetic phase. These are all evidence Tehran can use to conclude that the United States will run out of political will before the Islamic Republic runs out of institutional capacity. The ideological project on which the regime was built does not require the original architects to remain, in the same way that the Houthi project did not require its original cabinet.

There are many lessons that could have been drawn from the brief U.S. Red Sea operation, but it is unclear whether the administration weighed any of them in pursuing its current objectives at Hormuz. Perhaps the most striking parallel is how the locals were not part of these considerations at all. After the abrupt U.S. ceasefire, the Houthis turned their weapons inward. They 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 and spies. Their paranoia hardened, and the way they operated changed in ways that consolidated their grip on the population.

In a similar manner, Iranian dissidents calling for U.S. and Israeli military intervention against the current regime, betting on its weakness, appear to have misread the situation. Regime change is not what the United States is now offering, and the Red Sea precedent had already shown that a U.S. intervention tends to produce a narrow ceasefire, a victory speech, and a regime more brutal and entrenched than when the bombing started.

The political and ideological system Tehran is betting on was built for this kind of pressure. The truce that briefly substituted for sustained pressure in Yemen was a much smaller agreement than its framing suggested. That 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, and yet the U.S. Navy is back in the strait blocking traffic while Iran also maintains it is in charge. Force does not reach the parts of these systems that matter most. Whether Washington recognizes the lesson this time is the question.