Rough Rider military operation, ordered by the United States President Donald Trump, against the Houthi rebels in Yemen commenced on March 15, 2025 because they threatened to attack Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, but on May 7, hours after Trump suspended U.S. operations, the Houthis repeated exactly the same threat against Israel and “Israeli ships.”, according to an opinion published by The Hill.com
The author, Michael Knights, who is a Fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, added “After 52 days of combat, President Trump ordered the cessation of U.S. airstrikes on the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization on May 6. A fragile Omani-brokered agreement will notionally see the Houthis stop attacking U.S. military ships, aircraft and drones if the U.S. stops its strikes on the Yemeni group. Thus, Operation Rough Rider — over a thousand U.S. airstrikes launched in seventy waves — comes to an untidy end, at least for now”.
Knights, who visited all the front lines in Yemen during multiple trips in 2017 and 2018 and is the author of two books and numerous reports on the Yemen war, thought that “This perfect circle makes one ask: Did the U.S. just conduct a thousand airstrikes, spend about a billion dollars, and lose eight drones and two F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft for nothing?” adding “ The Trump administration was never united on the issue of Rough Rider, as the leaked Signal conversation underlined. The chief “restrainer,” Vice President JD Vance, struggled to find direct U.S. trade interests to post-facto justify the U.S. pressure campaign against the Houthis.
Almost from the outset, Trump and his team repeatedly stressed their willingness to end the operation if the Houthis would return to the status quo ante bellum — the exact same circumstances as before Rough Rider began. Masters at seizing the narrative, the Houthis are already convincingly portraying the U.S.-sought ceasefire as a U.S. defeat.
For all the doom and gloom, the operation has done some good. Fifty-two days of U.S. airstrikes delivered long-overdue “mowing of the grass” of Iran-provided missiles, drones, radars and air defenses in Yemen, plus the military industries and technicians needed to build and maintain them.
The reality, however, is that all of this can be rebuilt, possibly within a year, unless Iran is prevented from rearming the Houthis by sea and via smuggling routes in eastern Yemen and Oman.
The Houthis have a long track record of using such ceasefires to break the momentum of enemy efforts, recover, and then return to the offensive — overrunning domestic opponents, seeking to seize oil and gas sites in Yemen’s east, and demonstrating their ability to threaten international shipping — except, of course, ships from their partners in China and Russia.
Knights concluded that “What does not kill the Houthis makes them stronger, and they will get much stronger if the U.S. now washes its hands of Yemen. In a brutal reckoning, the Trump administration was smart to extract itself from endless bombing of the Houthis. They can now be smarter than prior U.S. administrations by recognizing that there are median options between all-in and all-out. That means convening under one umbrella the forces that want to end the Yemen war and contain the Houthis, all while keeping the Suez Canal open and creating the stability needed to supercharge U.S.-Gulf economic partnership.