President Donald Trump has a prime opportunity to finally end the threat the Houthi rebels in Yemen pose to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

The U.S. conducted precision strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen Saturday, aiming to decapitate the group by targeting leadership and other key technical figures, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich told reporters Monday at a press briefing. Trump made a name for himself in dealing with terror groups in his routing of ISIS during his first term, and while the Houthis present a unique challenge compared to ISIS, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Trump has the opportunity to re-establish order against another Middle Eastern insurgency.

“During the Biden administration, they took what they called ‘defensive strikes,’ defensive actions against the Houthis, but allowed them to continue operating. And President Trump has made it clear that will not continue,” Simone Ledeen, senior fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, told the DCNF. “It already looks to be a more holistic operation that’s not just focused on defense, but on offense, and removing the threat in order to enable freedom of access to the Red Sea, which is what we Americans need.”

For nearly a decade, Houthi rebels have wreaked havoc on the Red Sea shipping route, which cuts international shipping times down considerably by connecting to the Suez Canal. From December 2023 to February 2024, shipping traffic through the route declined by 90% due to the attacks on commercial shipping vessels, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report.

The Houthis have so far attacked U.S. naval vessels 174 times and commercial vessels 145 times since 2023, according to the White House.

The alternate route, around the Horn of Africa, cost ships an additional $1 million in fuel and adds roughly two weeks of transit time, according to the DIA report.

The Houthi rebels are a close ally of Iran, which supplies the group with weapons and logistical support often used to attack the shipping lane, as well as U.S. allies like Israel.

Since 2002, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in Yemen, later directly assisting Saudi forces beginning in April 2016, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

“We’ve been in a protracted conflict in Yemen for years, and we don’t want to be, because they’ve been attacking us,” Ledeen told the DCNF.

During Trump’s first term, he aggressively pursued ISIS, resulting in the destruction of 98% of its territorial gains in 2018. Now that Trump is back in the White House, the gloves may again be coming off, this time against the Houthis.

“Terrorists who oppress and murder innocent people should never sleep soundly, knowing that we will completely destroy them,” Trump said announcing in 2019 the successful operation to kill then-ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “These savage monsters will not escape their fate, and they will not escape the final judgment of God.”

Under former President Joe Biden, military commanders had increased oversight from the administration on what strikes they carried out, which sometimes hindered their ability to act in a timely manner, Ledeen told the DCNF.

Trump, on the other hand, expanded the authority commanders have to pursue special operations and other strikes without having to consult the White House first, giving the military the ability to respond quickly and with greater autonomy to tackle the Houthis, Ledeen explained.

“The normal way that the military is meant to operate is to push approval down to the lowest possible level, because you trust your commanders to make the decisions,” Ledeen told the DCNF. “They’re the ones that are on the ground. They’re the ones who are seeing the reality. And in many cases, if you’re waiting for approval from the White House, if you have a fleeting target, you miss them.”

Trump announced on Truth Social Monday that he would hold Iran accountable for any further attacks from the Houthis. Additionally, his administration re-designated the rebels as a foreign terrorist organization on March 4, after Biden removed the designation during his term.

“Within one month of taking office, the Biden administration reversed the Houthis’ designation,” the White House wrote in a January statement regarding the re-designation. “As a result of the Biden administration’s weak policy, the Houthis have fired at U.S. Navy warships dozens of times, launched numerous attacks on civilian infrastructure in partner nations, and attacked commercial vessels transiting Bab al-Mandeb more than 100 times.”

“Let nobody be fooled!” Trump said in his post on Monday. “The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN.”

Gabriel Noronha, executive director of Polaris National Security, told the DCNF that Trump’s threat puts the Houthis in a bind where they may unintentionally drag Iran into conflicts it may not necessarily want.

“One of the most important things was President Trump’s statement that said he will hold Iran accountable for future Houthi attacks,” Noronha told the DCNF. “Part of Iran’s strategy is where it uses its proxies to carry out attacks in Iran’s interest, and it tries to pretend they’re separate, distinct actors doing it, and they don’t bear responsibility.”

Most recently, the State Department announced additional sanctions against Iran on Thursday, targeting a China-based oil terminal responsible for enabling Iran to trade oil under the radar despite prior sanctions. Iran’s oil trading is a major source of its government revenue, earning the country $53 billion in net oil export revenues in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Houthis present a unique challenge for the U.S., Noronha told the DCNF, because they are not primarily an ideological terror organization, but rather a product of the Houthi tribe, a distinct people group in Yemen.

“They’re a lot harder to wipe out because it’s less of an invasion and more of a continuation of tribal politics into a radicalization, so they’re a lot more like the Taliban than they are like ISIS,” Noronha told the DCNF. “Military strikes can degrade their capabilities and certainly their ability to project force, to attack national shipping and to use drones and missiles. But I don’t think the goal here is to eliminate the Houthis, it’s to deter and degrade them.”

However, some critics expressed fears that the renewed strikes on the Houthis may bog down the U.S. in another war, Annelle Sheline, research fellow in the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, told the DCNF.

“Even if Trump were to launch a full-scale war, Yemen’s terrain and history of successful resistance to occupation make it unlikely that U.S. military intervention will succeed in ‘wiping out’ the Houthis,” Sheline told the DCNF. “Such an invasion would unify Yemen, which at a population of almost 40 million, would embroil the U.S. in yet another unnecessary and endless war in the Middle East.”

Despite these concerns, Trump has long advocated for ending so-called forever wars, saying in a speech on national security in his 2016 campaign that he would “avoid the endless wars” that marred previous administrations. In his second term, he has aggressively pushed for an end to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.

U.S. Central Command deferred to the press briefing, and the White House did not respond to the DCNFs request for comment.

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