Houthis, F-35s, and the Diplomatic Web Knotting Around Iran
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Houthis this week claimed strikes on the Yanbu oil facility on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast — an Aramco installation — and on Khamis Mushait air base, describing the attacks as retaliation for what they characterized as more than 450 Saudi airstrikes on Yemen. Whether the damage claims are accurate, the targeting ambition is real and the regional geometry is shifting fast.
The State Department approved a $24.3 billion F-35 sale to Saudi Arabia in this exact context — the single largest US arms package to the kingdom in recent memory. The F-35 is a fifth-generation platform integrating stealth, advanced sensors, and real-time data sharing with other F-35 fleets globally; selling it to Riyadh means integrating Saudi Arabia more deeply into US military logistics and intelligence networks. Selling it while Saudi infrastructure is under active Houthi missile attack is a deliberate statement about Washington's alignment in the regional conflict.
Iran connects almost every thread in this crisis. Its threatened Hormuz blockade is strangling its own economy in unexpected ways: overland trade workarounds through Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan have faltered, reportedly due in part to bureaucratic red tape imposed by Tehran itself, leaving truck drivers stranded at crossings. President Pezeshkian delivered a defiant speech declaring that the US failed to topple Tehran and that Iran will not surrender — but defiant speeches and economic reality are different things.
China's role in the week's diplomacy was genuinely striking. Beijing privately urged Tehran to rein in the Houthis after Saudi Arabia appealed to China for exactly that kind of diplomatic intervention — the Gulf states turning to Beijing rather than Washington as a lever on Iranian behavior. The United States, meanwhile, was holding its own secret talks with Houthi representatives in Oman following a Red Sea seizure, simultaneously arming Saudi Arabia against Houthi attacks and maintaining direct back-channel negotiations with the Houthis. That is standard coercive diplomacy in structural terms, but it is a complicated posture to sustain publicly.
Russia and China's joint veto of the UN panel monitoring Iranian sanctions removed the primary multilateral mechanism for tracking sanctions compliance — institutional visibility into how Iran finances the Houthis, acquires weapons components, and moves money. The veto represents a significant degradation of the monitoring architecture in place since 2015. Separately, a UN mission found that US strikes on an Iranian school constitute war crimes — an accusation the US will contest, but one that creates legal and diplomatic exposure that does not disappear simply because Washington disputes the conclusion.