You’re reading an excerpt from the WorldView newsletter.Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Washington is abuzz in the wake of the revelation that top Trump officials shared their plans to bomb targets in Yemen over a commercial messaging app. The bombshell report by the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently invited into the chat, consumed a day of hearings on the Hill.
Democratic lawmakers assailed the recklessness of top Cabinet members — including the vice president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the director of national intelligence, the director of the CIA — as well as the White House national security adviser, who all participated in the chat on the Signal app where they shared details about plans to strike targets belonging to Yemen’s Houthis.
For now, all the focus in the U.S. capital is on the propriety and ethics of how these top officials handled their discussions, during which it appears some classified information was shared over an insecure platform. Democrats are demanding resignations; White House officials and some of the Cabinet members have waved away the scandal, saying the participants did not share classified information (a claim that may not pass muster if the full transcript is revealed) and that the conversation itself illustrated a sophisticated internal debate over the merits of what the Trump administration claims has been a successful operation.
The U.S. attacks, which began March 15 and have kept pace in the days since, were justified as a punitive measure to stop the faction’s assault on naval vessels and cargo ships in the Red Sea. The Houthis, who control a large stretch of war-torn Yemen after years of internal strife, are loosely allied to Iran and have cast their actions as resistance to Israel’s deadly campaign in the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of last year, the Biden administration engaged in strikes on the Houthis, efforts that did not seem to fully deter the group from menacing global shipping.
In the group chat, a participant who appears to be Vice President JD Vance voiced misgivings about further entangling the United States in another Middle Eastern conflict, but opted to defer to the judgment of a participant identified as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The latter outlined the necessary “messaging” for the strikes: “1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded” — that is, that Trump would make domestic political hay out of the strikes, and that the administration would stress the Houthis’ connections to the regime in Tehran as part of a broader geopolitical pressure campaign.
“We’re doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on television two weekends ago. “That’s the mission here, and it will continue until that’s carried out.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 24 denied reports that top White House officials inadvertently shared sensitive military plans via the Signal app. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Allison Robbert/The Washington Post)
The reality is more complex, yet seems a nonfactor in the current political battles playing out in Washington. For more than two decades, the United States has been conducting airstrikes on Yemen — first, against al-Qaeda targets and more recently in support of regional efforts to combat the Houthis.
A decade ago, a coalition involving chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and equipped with a steady flow of U.S. armaments, launched a war to unseat the rebel faction from power in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. But, despite hideous bloodshed, a relentless bombing campaign, a blockade and the immiseration of the country, those efforts yielded only a fragile stalemate. Areas of southern Yemen are now controlled by Saudi and Emirati proxies and the country’s north by the Houthis. The warring parties agreed to a fragile truce in March 2022.
Details on the impact of the current wave of U.S. strikes on the Houthis remain sketchy, though local authorities say dozens of people have been killed in attacks that hit cities that are major population centers. Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said over the weekend that the United States had taken out key Houthi leaders. “We’ve hit their headquarters,” Waltz told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We’ve hit communications nodes, weapons factories and even some of their over-the-water drone production facilities.”
Most analysts, though, doubt that airstrikes can fully defeat the Houthis. In a webinar hosted by the Middle East Institute this month, Nadwa Al-Dawsari, an associate fellow at the Washington-based think tank, suggested the airstrikes “will only slow down” and “not diminish the threat” posed by the Houthis. Joseph Votel, a retired general and former commander of U.S. Central Command, said in the same conversation that the Houthis “have learned a lot about protecting their assets” and “protecting their resources” through years of conflict.
Gregory Johnsen, associate director of the Institute of Future Conflict at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a Yemen scholar, suggested on social media that the Trump administration’s maximalist vision for neutering the Houthis was foolhardy. “It seems as though current U.S. thinking is that to achieve its one goal it will need to defeat the Houthis and for this the U.S. will need more than airstrikes,” he wrote on X. “But the U.S. doesn’t want to use ground troops, Saudi Arabia and the UAE aren’t interested in getting more involved in Yemen, and the [local] anti-Houthi alliance has a number of problems” — including factional infighting and broader unpopularity.
Houthi-owned TV filmed thousands in Yemen on March 17 protesting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza after the U.S. carried out new airstrikes in Yemen. (Video: Reuters)
The risks presented by a sustained campaign may multiply. “Large-scale destruction and civilian casualties are bound to provoke outrage, which the Houthis can exploit to rally more support,” noted Osamah al Rawhani of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies. “Without a comprehensive approach that disrupts weapons and parts smuggling from Iran, and addresses the political and economic drivers empowering the Houthis, this week’s bombings risk prolonging the suffering of Yemenis.”
That suffering is already acute. Much of the country’s civilian infrastructure is destroyed. Schools and hospitals lie in ruins. The collapse of the country’s economy precipitated a currency crisis that means basic necessities like food, water and health care can be unaffordable to many Yemenis. Some 17 million people in the country — roughly half the population — is food insecure.
The Trump administration’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization has complicated the work of humanitarian agencies trying to help communities living in areas under Houthi control and, according to international advocacy group Oxfam, dents the flow of crucial remittances from Yemenis abroad to their cash-starved families. Oxfam also bemoaned the difficulties introduced to relief work by the Houthis themselves, who have stymied humanitarian operations and detained humanitarian workers.
“Yemenis deserve — and have the right — to live in safety, have access to food, water, health care and to lead on a path towards a peaceful future,” Pauline Chetcuti, Oxfam International’s head of humanitarian advocacy and campaigns, said in an email. “The last decade has been devastating for Yemenis, and we’ll only see these deadly consequences compounded without urgent action from authorities and the international community to allow the economy and the aid community to operate.”