The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Iran Snuggles Up with the Houthis in Yemen || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Yemen, despite all the odds being stacked against it, has recently become strategically significant.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/iran-snuggles-up-with-the-houthis-in-yemen

Hello from Dead Horse Point State Park in Utah, and this is Peter Zion coming to you from 2,000 feet above the Colorado River, and today we're going to talk about why anyone cares about Yemen. Now, Yemen is one of those places that I've gone out of my way to denigrate. I've called the Houthis, which are the primary militant group there, the most incompetent terrorists and alive today. So why does anyone care? Why should anyone care? Well, the topic, of course, of the moment is that the Houthis are using Iranian

missiles in order to target shipping in the Red Sea as part of their effort to show solidarity with the Ghazans. But the history of Yemen is more than just that. Basically, if you wonder, I understand why anyone has ever cared about this zone, you just have to look at a precipitation map. Most of the Middle East is, shockingly, a desert. Most of the places in the Middle East that were, we're familiar with the history is because, put simply, you can have civilization. There's water. So you have the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, you have the Levant, maybe the Hatte going up into Anatolia, and of course the Nile. These are the places where civilizations can exist. Well, Yemen is a little pocket. Basically, you've got this knot of mountains that rises up at the southwestern point

of the Arabian Peninsula that gets just high enough to wring a little bit of moisture out of the air. And as a result, you have a sea of desert with this island of green in the middle, and that green is Yemen. And so whenever any regional empire rises up and starts to establish themselves, they look around for the parts that are worth conquering. And Yemen, because it actually has green, makes the list. The problem is twofold. Number one, there's a lot of brown around Yemen, so you have to project a lot of power just to get to it. And then second, there's nothing near Yemen, so you can't really project from Yemen anywhere else. Actually, let me throw in a third one, mountains.

Mountain people are ornery. And the same thing happens in Yemen as happens in West Virginia or Chechnya. They become tribal, almost Scottish. Actually, it's a lot like Scotland, but surrounded by brown. So if you can actually project power there, you then spend all of your time at the end of a very long supply line trying to maintain control. And it has never worked out well for anyone. You can go back to the time of the pharaohs when the Egyptians first tried and basically got a finger cut off. Then the Romans tried. They got some fingers cut off. Later on, the Arab Empire is based out of Damascus or Baghdad tried. Didn't end up very well for them either, although they did at least nominally maintain control. Then the Ottomans, then the Brits. Everyone has basically gone through who has tried to build an empire in the region. None of them have had a great time. What is different this time around is that no one is trying to control Yemen. Someone is trying to use Yemen as a lever. And so, Iran, Iran, having lost in Gaza, having lost in Lebanon, having lost in Syria, losing very quickly in Iraq, is discovering that most of its tools for triggering paramilitary operations throughout

the region have collapsed in on themselves and they don't have much left. But then there's Yemen. The Iranians don't care at all what happens to the Yemenis, but if you provide them with a little technical equipment and some hardware, they can cause some problems. and anyone who wants to then subdue the Yemeni discovers just as many problems as everybody else. So what's happened most recently is the Iranians have basically provided missiles, a little bit of anti-aircraft, and the technologies of how to dig a hole in order to build bunkers, and the Yemeni are proving sufficiently entrenched that an air campaign cannot root them out.

So the Trump administration comes in is looking for quick and easy. military operation, and Trump gives the U.S. military 30 days to get results. Well, shocker, if after 2,500 years no one has functionally subdued Yemen, it wasn't going to happen in 30 days by air. So the Trump administration has declared a truce, and the real talks with Iran are progressing. Whether or not they'll succeed in anything, too soon to know. The talks, however, are real, and the Yemeni are nothing but a tool for the Iranians, and so something that without Iranian support, the Americans can simply ignore.

And that's where we are now.