Houthis seize Mayun Island as US and Saudi Arabia fail
By Ruth Behrens · Reporting from Newell, Iowa ·
If you want to know the price of a mistake made by people in air-conditioned offices who have never seen a basis chart or a dry well, you don’t look at a press release.
If you want to know the price of a mistake made by people in air-conditioned offices who have never seen a basis chart or a dry well, you don’t look at a press release. You look at the pump and the grocery bill. When oil climbs over $100 a barrel and the cost of shipping 12 percent of the world’s goods goes up because a few thousand people on a volcanic rock decided to close the gate, that is a tax on every working family in this country.
Last Friday, the Iran-backed Houthis confirmed they had seized Mayun Island—a tiny, thirteen-square-kilometer scrap of land that splits the Bab al-Mandeb Strait into two channels. According to reporting from Al Jazeera, this wasn't a standalone raid; it followed the seizure of the port city of Mocha on Thursday. The Houthis now hold the Red Sea coastline of Yemen and a strategic chokehold on one of the world's most vital arteries.
A Five-Square-Mile Noose
The Houthis aren't just playing soldier; they are practicing a cold, calculated geometry. By taking Mayun, they’ve moved their weapons closer to the target. As Wolfgang Pusztai noted in Al Jazeera, the group can now use shorter-range missiles instead of long-range artillery to harass ships, making the strait a "very risky endeavour" for anyone the Houthis don't like.
Their spokesman, Yahya Saree, calls this "siege for siege" and "escalation for escalation." It is a strategy of asymmetric leverage that we have seen before. It is the same logic used in the 2023 Israel-Hamas war to disrupt trade and challenge global security, and it mirrors the 2014 Annexation of Crimea, where a proxy-backed force seized a maritime chokepoint to dictate regional security.
The Houthis have stated that navigation is safe for everyone except Saudi vessels. That is not a peace offering; it is a selective blockade. When you control the ground, you control the terms. This is the same mechanism we saw in the Falklands War, where a regional power seized a remote, strategic island to leverage geopolitical influence and provoke a global power into a corner. In 1982, Argentina thought they could use the islands as a bargaining chip; the Houthis are doing the same, betting that the world is too tired or too divided to push them off the rock.
The Price of a Broken Promise
The tragedy of this seizure is that it was paved with betrayal. For ten years, Saudi Arabia relied on the Southern Transitional Council (STC) as the backbone of the force deterring the Houthis. But the Saudis eventually turned on them, bombing STC troops and detaining their leaders in Riyadh.
Amr al-Bidh of the STC put it plainly in The Guardian: the betrayal of promises left the southern population unwilling to fight for Saudi interests. It is a lesson any farmer knows: you cannot expect a man to defend your fence if you’ve spent the last year burning down his barn. This created a power vacuum that the Houthis were happy to fill, a pattern we recognized during the Withdrawal from Afghanistan when the sudden exit of a foreign military left the keys to the kingdom on the table for a non-state actor.
Now, Saudi Arabia is scrambling, assembling a 14-country naval coalition to protect the strait. But as Andreas Krieg pointed out to Al Jazeera, retaking the island would be a "high-risk operation." You cannot bomb a coastline into loyalty, and you cannot replace 80,000 disillusioned STC troops with a coalition of nations that would rather be anywhere else.
The Delusion of the Handshake
Then we have the American approach. President Donald Trump says the Houthis "called us" and that they "don’t want to fight us." He believes that because he is "good friends" with Mohammed bin Salman, everything will "work out fine."
There is a certain comfort in believing that a phone call can override a missile battery. But the long record of the 21st century—from the Russo-Georgian War to the present—shows us that territorial gains are not erased by diplomatic warmth. A ceasefire deal, like the one the US and Houthis reached in May 2025, is only as good as the ground it covers. The Houthis didn't take Mayun because they were confused about the US position; they took it because it was undefended and strategically priceless.
The strongest case for the President's approach is that it avoids a direct American war in a region already bleeding out. His advocates would say that by keeping the Houthis from feeling cornered, he prevents a total shutdown of the strait. But that is not diplomacy; it is managed decline. You do not "straighten out" a blockade by pretending the blockaders are your friends.
We are watching a slow-motion surrender of the commons. When we allow strategic chokepoints to fall to proxies because we prefer a handshake to a hard line, we aren't choosing peace—we are choosing a future where the price of our bread and fuel is decided by whoever is willing to hold a volcanic island hostage.
The Houthis will hold Mayun because the Saudis have alienated their allies and the Americans have mistaken a tactical pause for a permanent peace. We have traded sovereign security for the illusion of a deal, and the bill is coming due at the pump.