The conflict in Yemen has cycled back to its early dynamics. Beginning in 2015, Washington supported Saudi Arabia in a proxy confrontation against Iran-aligned rebels in the country. After years of brutal fighting, a fragile cease-fire was brokered in 2022, but the arrangement collapsed this summer as the broader confrontation between the United States and Israel over Iran spilled into the region.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump ordered a strike in Yemen but held off at the last moment. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have pressed the administration along two tracks: either toward direct involvement or toward stepping back. While hawkish voices are a minority and not broadly popular among the Democratic base, they do enjoy the backing of party leadership.
“The Trump administration is not backing the fight against one of the largest terrorist militant groups in the Middle East,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D–Fla.) lamented during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Yemen earlier this month.
His critique came with an implicit nod from Democratic leadership, which had just named Moskowitz the ranking member of the Middle East subcommittee. It signals how Congress might shape foreign policy if Democrats win a majority in the upcoming midterms.
In 2014, Ansar Allah—better known by the surname of its leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi—staged a coup in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. The United Nations quickly recognized a rival government in Aden, and a Saudi-led coalition invaded Yemen in support of the Aden government, with U.S. backing. The resultant war is estimated to have claimed about 233,000 lives.
Despite a 2022 truce, both sides began flexing their muscles again. The Houthis started harassing international shipping and clashing with the U.S. Navy in the name of the Palestinian cause. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, crushed an attempted secession movement against Aden backed by the United Arab Emirates in January 2026.
The two sides finally came to blows in July 2026, after the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran. Saudi Arabia fired warning shots at the airport in Sanaa to stop the Houthi delegation from returning from Iran with Iranian advisers, and Houthi forces struck back hard, sweeping Yemen’s coast while bombing Saudi oil infrastructure.
The U.S. military has sent around 100 advisers to Saudi Arabia in support of the campaign in Yemen. France is also sending troops to defend the most important Saudi pipeline, and Britain has offered an aerial tanker for refueling Saudi fighter jets.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Aden government have both been lobbying Trump to get more directly involved. House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks (D–N.Y.) gave those efforts a boost on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month, meeting with a delegation from Aden to discuss “how the United States Congress can support Yemen’s government against the Houthis,” according to Meeks’ statement.
From the other side of the aisle, Rep. Joe Wilson (R–S.C.) has already put in an opening bid. He has proposed a bill to provide the Aden government with $100 million in military aid, $100 million in economic aid, and $100 million for anti-Houthi propaganda.
But the war-weary Democratic base doesn’t necessarily want deeper U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars. (Nor does the Republican base, portions of which increasingly regret the confrontation with Iran.) After all, one of the major Democratic foreign-policy pushes during the early Trump administrations was to pull U.S. support from the Saudi war in Yemen.
Shortly after the State Department announced a $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighters and a $5 billion sale of bombs to Saudi Arabia last week, Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) proposed a resolution to block them. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) joined him as cosponsors. Markey tied the arms sale to the recent U.S.–Saudi nuclear cooperation agreement proposed by Trump—which Meeks also opposes.
“The United States must not send thousands of conventional weapons to Saudi Arabia or allow it to develop a nuclear program. I am deeply concerned by the Kingdom’s human rights abuses, the security of the region as the war in Iran rages on, and the proxy war that is escalating between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen,” Markey said in a statement. “Further escalation in the Saudi–Iran proxy war will worsen an already dire humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and risks triggering a nuclear arms race between Iran and Saudi Arabia.”
Democratic suspicion of Saudi Arabia may be a silver lining from the dove perspective, limiting how much Democrats are willing to back a Saudi campaign in Yemen. In the same meeting with Aden’s representatives where he urged U.S. support, Meeks also called for “revitalized dialogue and diplomacy.” It served as an implicit nod to the Trump administration’s direct talks with Sanaa.
Of course, the whole situation flows from Trump’s decision to attack Iran. And back then, Democrats exhibited the same mix of hawkish and dovish reactions, with some trying to restrain Trump and some encouraging him.
“Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism, and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) said in his first statement on the war, but then urged Trump “to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East.”
