The conflict that Donald Trump has repeatedly proclaimed an unequivocal American victory keeps spiraling out of control.
Flames rise above a state-owned Aramco oil facility attacked under unclear circumstances outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earlier this month. (AFP via Getty Images)
The Houthis, an Iranian ally vying for control of war-torn Yemen, hit the headquarters of the Saudi state oil company Aramco in Dharan on Tuesday night. That attack came just days after they fired ballistic missiles into the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 12 and further puncturing the regime’s carefully cultivated image of competence amid a sea of instability. These market-rattling attacks unfolded just weeks after an Iraq-based militia struck and damaged a critical east-west Saudi oil pipeline.
This sudden demonstration of Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability is the latest bout of regional fallout from President Donald Trump’s impulsive and failed war against Iran. The conflict hasn’t accomplished any of Trump’s war aims—to the extent that he’s able to articulate them—but it is clearly destabilizing the entire Persian Gulf region with consequences that will extend far beyond the time horizon of the upcoming midterm elections or even this disastrous presidency. And if Trump can’t bring himself to somehow come to terms with an emboldened Tehran, it’s far from clear that the chaos now enveloping the Gulf can be stopped at its frontiers.
Riyadh is under siege from all directions in what amounts to a dizzying reversal of fortune. Just a year ago, Saudi Arabia was riding high, having greased enough palms inside the Trump family syndicate to ensure that the Kingdom wouldn’t be the target of confiscatory tariffs or some other sudden spasm of incoherent, late-night rage from the president himself.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom’s longtime rivals in Tehran were on their heels, having allowed the joint Israeli-American 12-Day War in the summer of 2025 to degrade Iran’s nuclear program and military readiness without any meaningful retaliation. Riyadh also had significant leverage to deploy, given that Trump was desperate for the Saudis to abandon the Palestinian cause, join the Abraham Accords, and come to a diplomatic accord with Israel.
Today the Saudis’ decades-long security and development strategy is in deep crisis, thanks to an American war that Riyadh very much egged on. There’s never been any reason to support America’s alliance with the corrupt, despotic Saudi regime. But the sudden unraveling of the Saudi economy would have knock-on effects that would be unpleasant for everyone. And it’s now clear that the shortage of critical munitions plaguing the US military extends to regional allies who seem to be close to defenseless against missile and drone strikes.
The fact that the Houthis, who control barely a third of one of the poorest countries on Earth, can almost effortlessly bring a wealthy, advanced society like Saudi Arabia to its knees with the flick of a switch is genuinely unnerving. It suggests, among other things, that no structure in the Gulf region that doesn’t have its own battery of Patriot missiles is safe from attacks from Iran and its allies. This is but the most recent indication that Trump’s repeated claims to have obliterated Iran’s military-industrial base are utterly unfounded.
Iran is not a puppeteer of the Houthis, but Houthi forces are more than willing to play the part of chaos agent in Tehran’s quest to cleave the Gulf Arab monarchies from their security alliance with the United States. That maneuver is calculated to tighten the economic vise on Trump, which would further the Houthis’ ambitions to secure the permanent eviction of Saudi forces from Yemeni territory as part of the settlement.
The Iranians are, in effect, trying to supplant America’s dominant position in the regional balance of power by making the US military response look shambolic and inadequate. So far, they’re succeeding. Iran is acting as an entity that, in Charles Tilly’s famous description of European state transformation, “produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it”—-in other words, a protection racket.
This leaves the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies in a bind. Rather than banking on a distant, unreliable ally in Washington that’s tailing off into imperial madness, they are being asked to accept Iranian hegemony in the Gulf at gunpoint in exchange for peace. If they ever want their reputations as slick oases of oligarchic capitalism back, they may have to do exactly that.
A turn toward the Iranians would of course mean relinquishing decades of close collaboration with the still-powerful United States—and it might be too fraught and costly for the Kingdom to consider seriously. But at minimum, Iran has punctured the myth of American supremacy in the region and made it very uncomfortable for the Gulf monarchies to simply return to their prior security strategies if and when the war ends.
Today, risks abound where none appeared to exist eight months ago. Repeated attacks on soft Saudi targets raise the prospect of virtually unlimited mayhem—including bombing attacks on data centers, pipelines, airports and the target-rich environments where the Gulf’s premier cities have erected their gleaming vertical palaces. This isn’t the first time that Tehran or its allies have targeted Saudi infrastructure, but it is their first effort to use airstrikes as part of a concerted strategy to drive the United States out of the region.
And the airport attack is just the latest in a series of setbacks and humiliations for the vaunted American military. It followed up last week’s fiasco in which the United States had to evacuate a dozen B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford airbase in the United Kingdom in light of a terrorist threat. Exactly what spooked the Pentagon enough to prompt this rushed and embarrassing withdrawal has yet to be revealed.
America’s network of military bases in the Gulf is also in ruins. The high-cost, around-the-clock effort to steward oil out of the Strait of Hormuz is working for now, but it is neither sustainable nor capable of achieving a return to the prewar status quo in the Strait At best, it’s an attempt at economic triage disconnected from any plausible theory of victory.
Clearly, Trump and the war planners in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon never seriously reckoned with the possibility that Iran would emerge from a months-long aerial pummeling with not only its regime intact but also the capability to strike targets far and wide around the region. In any functional administration capable of experiencing and acting on shame, Hegseth would have resigned months ago. Instead, he has accepted zero responsibility for the deepening quagmire and still spends most of his time on political photo-ops and his deranged crusade to drive any career military officials capable of independent thought out of their jobs.
Even today, the administration is committed to what looks like an unworkable strategy of waiting for the Iranian government to collapse under the weight of the US naval blockade and economic sanctions. That’s merely a variation on a strategy that has failed for 25 years to bring about the regime change that America wants in Iran. Instead, as Narjes Bajoghli and Vali Nasr wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, it is Iran suddenly dreaming of “evicting U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf, forcing Washington to remove all its sanctions, and getting the United States to accept that Iran is a great power.”
George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003 ultimately led to a host of negative, unforeseen consequences including the rise of ISIS and the destabilization of multiple countries in the Middle East. Now Trump’s own unforced Middle East blunder has set into motion a chain of events that the United States seems both unable to control and uninterested in comprehending. The Houthis certainly won’t be the last player to use the security vacuum created by America’s bumbling war to achieve its own goals.
It’s astonishing that after a quarter century dominated by ruinously expensive and tragic overreach in the Middle East, the United States has had to once again learn that it cannot remake distant societies with the blunt instrument of military force. And now the lesson looks to be more costly than ever.
David FarisDavid Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly. You can find him on Bluesky at @davidfaris.bluesky.social.