Houthi attack on Riyadh airport will force rethink of Donald Trump’s strategy

The reckless missile attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday did not just export the death and misery inside Yemen to Saudi Arabia, it also left Donald Trump forced to reconsider his diplomatic and political strategy designed to take him into the midterm elections next month.The US president’s plan had only been unveiled on Saturday. It was to blame what he described as “a world problem” – spiralling diesel prices – on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying his attacks on Russian oil refineries were the cause. He was going to keep the political temperature down on his war of choice in Iran and its spillover in Yemen until after the midterms.In pursuit of this strategy, he claimed the Iranian blockade in the strait of Hormuz was in effect broken, producing figures on daily oil barrel exports to assuage the markets. As a further insurance he also claimed it was impossible to negotiate with the Iranians since there was no single leadership in Tehran.Saudi Arabia, in conjunction with Turkey, and Pakistan, were largely to be left to sort out the Houthis along the Red Sea. The fate of Yemen, the poorest country in the world according to the International Monetary Fund, was not going to shift votes in Kansas or Alaska.Now, after the Riyadh airport attack, it is doubtful, for a basket of reasons, that this anyway threadbare strategy, largely born of desperation, can hold.For all the talk of the Gulf becoming responsible for its own security, it is doubtful that Saudi Arabia can be left to fend for itself after the carnage in Riyadh. One of the the 12 dead is an American and there may be more among the severely injured. Something is clearly wrong with Saudi defences since the Houthis are firing rockets from 500 miles away, and they are reaching their target too often.The US has had a unilateral ceasefire with the Houthis since 2025, and once the hostilities between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis recommenced in the summer, the pact was quietly renewed. Trump has twice rejected Saudi appeals for help. Can he spurn them three times? The pressure to act as allies are expected to may prove overwhelming.But “the blame Zelenskyy, trade with Russia” strategy is anyway unlikely to work. The amount of additional diesel Vladimir Putin will put on the market is not enough to bring down prices at the pump. Russia accounted for about 12% of global diesel shipped by sea. Exports have fallen by about a third, according to calculations by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.The deal has also reawakened Europe’s worst fears about Trump’s relationship with Russia only weeks after Congress had passed a sanctions package against Moscow authorising Trump to penalise buyers of Russian energy.Europeans know full well that the inflation problem helping to drive populism is caused by the Iran war and not by Zelenskyy’s tactics. The only question is who will say so. The former UK Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson did not hold back, writing: “It is sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel, and transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the strait of Hormuz. Putin is murdering innocent Ukrainian civilians every day. The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. And yet the White House is apparently determined to force American drivers to bankroll Putin’s slaughter.”The German education minister and a member of the CDU, Karin Prien, said: “For a few litres of diesel. What moral bankruptcy.”Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general and Trump ally, will this week travel to Estonia, one of the countries most supportive of Ukraine. He will have some explaining to do. Estonia’s foreign minister, Margus Tsahkna, vowed that EU foreign ministers on Monday will impose the biggest package of sanctions in its history, and he, along with Sweden, now wants to revisit using frozen Russian assets to help Ukraine.What is worse, it looks as if the political damage to the Republicans caused by the Iran war is irrecoverable. Polls show the ship has sailed. The war has already been weaponised as a pocketbook issue by every Democratic candidate in every TV debate. Republican candidates, challenged to disown the war, are scrambling for the relative safety of identity politics.The Iranians are also trying to maximise the damage they cause in the strait of Hormuz, countering the Trump narrative that the blockade has been broken. Scenes of tankers on fire are proliferating.So Trump post-Riyadh needs to rethink. He can rejoin the war against the Houthis, ending the unilateral US ceasefire, but, if so, he knows from experience this will be costly. The first three weeks of the war against Iran cost $1n a day. Many of the US president’s advisers say he may as well also attack Iran, the Houthis’ backers, as Tehran expects him to do. The Iranian military nevertheless still believes it has escalation dominance, and what happened in Riyadh can be repeated across the Gulf.The alternative is that his team can negotiate discreetly and indirectly with Tehran as is occurring in Doha. Some Iranians are urging their leadership to seize the chance, arguing Trump is uniquely vulnerable in the run-up to the midterms.A deal could be done, including on uranium enrichment, but it would not be palatable for the US – or for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election chances.China and Russia are trying to sort out the Houthis diplomatically, but the Houthi objectives are broadening, while the south of Yemen is split about its future inside the country, a division that harms the country’s ability to be the ground component that Saudi Arabia needs to supplement its air-power dominance. Taiz, the third city of Yemen, is struggling to overcome a Houthi siege. The Saudis can deliver retribution, but retribution is not a solution to a decade-long civil war.So for the moment the twin Trump strategy – to park the Iran and Yemen conflicts while blaming Zelenskyy – is now so transparent, so morally craven, and in its own terms so ineffective, that it looks unsustainable. The only question is whether the strategy will be jettisoned by the president or instead just rejected by the American people at the ballot box.