🇸🇦 🤔| Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Failure in Yemen

Dear Saudis, who told you that capturing Bab al-Mandeb would be like throwing a hot knife through butter?

Saudi Arabia is likely to pay a far greater price in this war because the strategic reality today is completely different from the earlier war against Yemen. During the previous aggression, Saudi Arabia failed to impose its will on AnsarAllah even when the Yemeni resistance was still developing, expanding, and shaping its military and political capabilities. Today, AnsarAllah is far more experienced, organized, battle-hardened, and capable than it was at the beginning of the previous war. The Saudis continue to behave as though the old formulas of sectarianism, anti-Iran propaganda, and the Shia-Sunni narrative can once again deliver the same results. But those formulas have already been exposed and weakened by decades of bloodshed and resistance.

Saudi Arabia tried repeatedly to frame the war against Yemen as a sectarian confrontation, but the Yemeni political and social reality makes that narrative increasingly difficult to sustain. The situation today is fundamentally different. AnsarAllah does not represent the Twelver Shia framework that Saudi propaganda could easily portray as an Iranian project. Yemen has its own ideological framework, theological traditions, political history, and system of governance. Neither AnsarAllah nor the broader pro-Sanaa camp can simply be reduced to one sect or social class. The AnsarAllah Yemeni landscape includes Hanafi Sunnis, Zaidis, Jaroodiya, Ismailis, and other Islamic schools, with even elements of Salafi society existing within the broader Yemeni social structure. Yemen also has a strong tradition of pan-Islamic political thinking, which makes attempts to reduce the conflict to a simple sectarian confrontation far less effective than Saudi Arabia would like.

Saudi Arabia later attempted to use the Makkah attack narrative as another political and psychological weapon, but that strategy also failed to produce the desired outcome. The ideological and political positions of AnsarAllah are now far better understood internationally than they were years ago. Even many of Saudi Arabia’s own supporters understand that Riyadh’s attempts to weaponize these narratives have repeatedly backfired. The propaganda has increasingly returned to its source, exposing Saudi Arabia’s own strategic vulnerabilities rather than weakening Yemen.

Now, as the military situation develops, Saudi Arabia appears increasingly dependent on attacks against civilian and economic targets. But this creates another strategic problem. The Yemeni armed resistance has demonstrated an increasing awareness of Saudi Arabia’s vulnerabilities, particularly its energy infrastructure. If Yemeni attacks continue to strike key Saudi economic and energy assets with precision, the consequences will extend far beyond the immediate physical damage. The real battlefield will increasingly become Saudi Arabia’s economic resilience.

If Saudi Arabia fails to find a swift political or technical solution to protect its energy infrastructure from repeated strikes on critical assets such as the Shedgum gas plant, the consequences could develop into a devastating macroeconomic cascade. Damage to major gas-processing and oil-separation facilities can constrain crude production from strategic reserves and processing networks, including those connected to the Ghawar field. A sustained reduction in production and export capacity would place immediate pressure on state revenues, widen fiscal deficits, and increase the financial burden of emergency repairs and expanded defense spending.

The damage would not stop at oil exports. Downstream industries would face feedstock shortages, affecting electricity generation, petrochemical production, manufacturing, and wider domestic economic activity. At the same time, prolonged military uncertainty would increase maritime insurance premiums and regional shipping costs while weakening international investor confidence.