Whoever finds peace alienating seeks solace in war; whoever chafes at partnership, even the partnership of sharing the earth, yearns for solitude. After pleading for a truce in his hour of weakness, he now rejects it, deluding himself into believing he is strong, prompted by external influences and steeped in a spirit of hatred.
That is the state of one who falls short of full responsibility and seeks to exclude everyone who differs with him, to the point of denying their very existence as a party to the equation. He persists in insolence and provocation toward those who extended to him the hand of good-faith mediation. He then accuses everyone else of what his own hands commit, labels them as enemies, and at the same time expects them to submit to him and his conditions. How astonishing.
The Ansar Allah group, or the Houthi militia, thinks and behaves in precisely this way. Its pattern has become exposed and plain to see, to the point that its imitation of the Iranian revolutionary approach, manufacturing excuses, stalling, and, most recently, threatening the straits, is no longer hidden from anyone.
To understand the background to this behavior and its motives, both hidden and overt, it is useful to listen to those who lived alongside the group and know its affairs from within, such as Yemeni politician Ali al-Bukhaiti in his latest interviews with Al Hadath and Al Arabiya, in which he explained how its leaders think and what he expects will become of them.
Nothing the militia produces, then, is new to anyone in Yemen, the region, or the world: its claims, threats to vital interests, openly acknowledged violations through the launching of drones and missiles, the wounding of Yemeni soldiers and civilians on land, at sea, and in the air, and its threats to civilian and economic facilities in Saudi Arabia in early August 2026.
Nor is there anything innovative in its reliance on military and media escalation to consolidate its presence and strengthen its standing, not to mention its application of the old proverb, “She threw her affliction at me and slipped away.” The militia attributes to others what it itself commits, while the qualities it has acquired have become an affliction that has defeated anyone who might seek to cure it.
Nor is it strange to find the military commanders of the Yemeni leadership among their soldiers, particularly on the West Coast and in other areas where Yemeni army units are deployed. It is entirely natural for senior commanders to be occupied with communications, meetings, and issuing the necessary directives before heading, at the appropriate and inevitable moment, to where they ought to be, whether inside Yemen or outside it.
Are these not the requirements of wars that are supposed to reach their end? Perhaps the world will now see something new in the face of an old Yemeni predicament, brought about by those for whom war is the fitting remedy, so long as peace, forbearance, truces, initiatives, and mediation have yet to yield any results.
What history has established is now becoming evident in practice: any militia or religious-political group created by war lives in the shadow of war and cuts its own path to extinction through war. The Houthi militia is no exception to this rule, whether the end of its dominance is near or merely postponed for a while.
The established rule has long been that there is nothing new under the sun in Yemen. Perhaps what is new now is that the parties to “Yemenization” have begun to chart the end of the war as a path toward peace.
But what kind of peace are we talking about?
A peace for Yemen that everyone can accept, in Yemen, in the region, and in the world. A peace in which no militia possesses any weapon, so that no militia can hold the present and the future captive in the caves of its own past, or plant an extremist ideology in the minds of coming generations. A peace that prevents national forces from becoming estranged from their own country, and creates security and stability under which Yemen, by virtue of its crises, is neither a burden on anyone nor a nagging headache for anyone.
Is this not the new thing to be hoped for and awaited, so that Yemen’s condition may no longer remain one in which there is never anything new?
