The path to resolving the Houthi threat to the Red Sea and Saudi Arabia does not necessarily pass through Iran.

Since the Houthis began striking Red Sea shipping in 2023, the Yemeni militant group has proved that it is no longer just a regional nuisance. Last week, the Yemeni militant group’s strikes on  Saudi Arabia and its oil pipelines, as well as its capture of the Mokha port and several islands near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, underlined the genuine threat it poses to international trade and energy. Yet Washington’s default framing has stayed remarkably simple: the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, so pressure on Tehran is pressure on Sanaa.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced this view after Houthi missile strikes wounded 73 people in Saudi Arabia, calling the group “agents and proxies of the Iranians” with “the Iranian hand” behind it. That framing is comforting because it fits a familiar analytical template, namely the one built for Hezbollah and Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force militias, and it lets policymakers treat Yemen as a subplot of the broader Iran file. 

But this framing is wrong, and a sound US policy cannot be built on it. Iran arms, trains, and coordinates with the Houthis, and that relationship indeed deserves scrutiny. Yet the group has independent origins, an autonomous decision-making structure, its own revenue base, and a track record of acting against Tehran’s preferences when its own interests demand it. Treating it as a mere instrument of Iranian will misreads the threat and points US policy toward the wrong levers.

Iran’s Support for the Houthis Is Real, But Not Absolute

The Council on Foreign Relations notes that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) supplies weapons, training, and intelligence, and that a July 2025 seizure alone intercepted roughly 750 tons of Iranian munitions, including drone components, missile warheads, and radar systems, destined for the group. This support has been decisive in enabling the Houthis’ longer-range missile and drone strikes into the Red Sea and against Israel. 

The International Crisis Group likewise describes the Houthis as an integral part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” coordinating with Tehran on timing and messaging, including their March 2026 entry into direct strikes on Israel after judging that Iran’s regional position had weakened.

None of this, however, adds up to a Hezbollah-like proxy relationship between Iran and the Houthis. Crucially, CFR notes that Iran did not create the Houthis and that they follow a different strain of Islam (Zaydi Shiism, as opposed to Iran’s Twelver Shiism). Consequently, they are best understood as an “informal partner” to Iran rather than a direct subordinate.

A 2020 RAND Corporation study reached a similar conclusion after examining the relationship’s trajectory. Even after Iran’s investment in Yemen surged from 2015 onward, the tie remained “largely transactional.” When Hussein al-Houthi founded the group in the 1990s, its priorities remained largely domestic and focused on fighting Zaydi political marginalization under President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Since then, the group has shown little interest in imitating Iran’s revolutionary ideology.

The Evidence for Houthi Autonomy

The clearest case against the proxy framing comes from Brookings scholar Allison Minor, who argues directly that calling the Houthis an Iranian proxy “fundamentally misrepresents the threat they pose” and undermines effective policy. She points to episodes of Houthi autonomy such as when the group declared a unilateral ceasefire with Saudi Arabia in 2019 even as Iran preferred escalation, and when the Houthis reportedly informed Iran of their July 2024 drone strike on Tel Aviv only after the fact. 

The Houthis also diversified their weapons pipeline by acquiring Chinese components and establishing indigenous manufacturing rather than relying solely on Iran. Minor also stresses structural resilience, since the Houthis sit inside a decentralized network of over a dozen aligned groups, coordinating directly with Iraqi militias and even Somalia’s al-Shabaab, that can generate instability no single Iranian directive could orchestrate alone.

This independence extends to the economic base that lets the Houthis act without asking Tehran’s permission. Reporting this month on Iran’s “proxy money machine” nonetheless documents that the Houthis have built a multibillion-dollar financial network of their own, through fuel taxation, port revenues, and smuggling, that has proven durable despite years of US sanctions. RAND’s analysis makes the same point: independent revenue from port taxation and rent extraction has historically given Houthi leadership autonomy that a true proxy force, wholly dependent on its patron’s purse, would not have. 

Perhaps the most policy-relevant evidence is behavioral. The Houthis have shown they will not simply stand down when Iran asks them to. A 2025 Reuters investigation reported that Houthi officials told the outlet directly they would not “dial down” attacks in response to either US military pressure or appeals from Iranian intermediaries, tying their campaign to their own reading of the Gaza War. Minor adds a structural version of the same argument: the 2023 Saudi-Iranian normalization deal, often treated in Washington as a way to defang the Houthis by fixing things with Tehran, did essentially nothing to reduce Houthi attacks in the Red Sea later that year. What actually worked for the Saudi intervention in Yemen was a separate, 2022 UN-mediated truce negotiated directly with the group. If Iranian diplomacy could not move Houthi behavior, US policy premised on pressuring Iran to rein them in rests on a false lever. 

The same logic applies to Rubio’s “Iranian hand” reading of the recent Saudi strikes. The Houthis need no Iranian order to hit Saudi targets, given that the Saudi-led coalition has bombed Yemen since 2015, alongside a crushing maritime blockade. A decade of war fought against them on their own soil is motive enough to act. Treating every such strike as Iranian direction erases the Houthis’ own war and their own reasons for still fighting it.

The group’s deeper roots reinforce this picture. It is a home-grown response to Yemeni state marginalization leading up to the series of wars between them and the Yemeni state, not an import from Tehran. AEI’s Michael Rubin makes this the center of his argument that the Houthis would outlast the Islamic Republic itself: he describes a movement resting on “a tribal and Zaydi sectarian group” with centuries of history, now reinforced by indigenous drone and missile production and, to some extent, even Chinese assistance. Whether or not one credits every element of that argument, it captures a real risk in Washington, namely the assumption that Iranian regime collapse or exhaustion would automatically neutralize the Houthi threat.

Factoring Houthi Autonomy into US Policy

If the Houthis were simply Iran’s hand puppet, the policy prescription would be straightforward: deal with Tehran, and Sanaa falls in line. But that is precisely the theory the 2023 Saudi-Iran détente tested, and the evidence above says it failed. A sound US approach instead must run on two tracks. It should keep degrading the specific supply chains, namely the IRGC shipments of missile components and radar systems, since these genuinely expand what the Houthis can hit and how far. But it also has to engage the situation in Yemen on its own terms, by reinforcing the UN-mediated truce architecture that has actually curbed violence, addressing the group’s independent finances and smuggling networks, and taking non-Iranian patrons, particularly China, seriously.

Seeing the Houthis clearly, as a Yemeni movement with its own history, economy, and calculus that happens to draw real benefits from an Iranian partnership, is not a softer view of the threat. It is the more accurate one, and one that can form the basis of a durable US Yemen policy.

About the Author: Ivar Jansen

Ivar Jansen is a graduate student pursuing a double master’s in International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously a summer intern at the Center for the National Interest’s Middle East Program. He holds a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) in Law in Society from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

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