A New Balance of Power in the Middle East After the Iran–US War

Spread the Word

By Dr. Sadek Alsalemi

The Houthi escalation — whether the media campaign against Saudi Arabia or the military push on Yemen’s western coast — is no coincidence at this particular moment. It is best read as an extension of the war among Iran, the United States and Israel. After a memorandum of understanding and the ceasefire that ended the Twelve-Day War between Iran and the United States in June 2025, Iran was no longer in a position to close the Strait of Hormuz. Yet even as Tehran insisted the truce should cover every front, including Lebanon, it could neither persuade nor pressure Washington into forcing Israel to accept it. The ceasefire therefore never took hold everywhere. Hezbollah remained fully exposed to Israeli fire, its members vulnerable to targeted killing around the clock.

Israel openly declared it would not abide by the truce, toward neither Iran nor Hezbollah. To counter that rejection, the argument here runs, Iran needed a parallel front capable of restoring balance across the theatres. It could no longer shield Hezbollah as it had during the war, when Tehran warned that striking Beirut’s southern suburb, the Dahiyeh, would count as a violation and invite an Iranian response. Trump’s success in dissuading Netanyahu from hitting the suburb stripped Iran of that pretext and, at the same time, freed Israel’s hands in southern Lebanon.

That, in this reading, returned Hezbollah to the situation it had endured before 2 March — the older rules of engagement, under which Israel periodically operated inside southern Lebanon without a matching military response, while Hezbollah largely held to the truce that had prevailed for roughly fifteen months since the November 2024 agreement. That agreement, signed on 27 November 2024, quieted the Lebanon front until the fighting resumed in late February 2026, which is why 2 March is the decisive turning point in this account. The pre–March 2 order carried both military and political meaning. Militarily, Hezbollah had not mounted a broad surge; it adhered to the terms that followed the November 2024 memorandum, so 2 March became the point that broke the equation.

Politically, the author contends, that earlier phase reflected an arrangement Hezbollah viewed as unjust — one that granted Israel unilateral freedom of movement without deterrence, left civilians poorly protected, and stripped the group of any credible means of response. Hezbollah’s insistence on “no return to before March 2” is thus a demand that any future settlement preserve the right of reciprocal response and deterrence; absent that, the movement claims the authority to retaliate in order to protect its sovereignty and Lebanese civilians. Yet for all those declarations, and for all Iran’s insistence on the ceasefire, both found themselves besieged within precisely the pre–March 2 conditions they had rejected.

Leaving matters there, the argument goes, would gradually hollow out Hezbollah’s role in southern Lebanon and drain it of the very power that makes it a threat to Israel. The group’s real strength lies in the south, not in the Dahiyeh. Even if its capabilities in the southern suburb remained intact and untouched, they would pose little danger, because Hezbollah cannot meaningfully strike Israel from the suburb. The suburb’s importance is political rather than military: it is the movement’s popular stronghold in Beirut, a refuge for its political and military leaders, and the seat of its economic infrastructure.

The war, however, exposed the limits of that sanctuary. Israel demonstrated that it could reach the group’s leaders wherever they were, in the south or in the suburb alike, from the secretary-general down to field commanders of every rank. The Dahiyeh, in other words, lacked the strategic weight Hezbollah had ascribed to it; it was a political capital and a fortified shelter, but not the shield against military defeat that the movement had assumed.

The ceasefire, and the implicit “the suburb for northern Israel” equation that came with it, unleashed Israel while binding Iran and Hezbollah. That, the author argues, is what made a new front necessary — one that would give Tehran room to maneuver against Washington and, through it, leverage to press for a halt to the campaign against Hezbollah. Iran turned to the Houthis, the last card in its hand and, on the evidence of the so-called Gaza-support campaign, an effective one: the group had already shown it could disrupt navigation across the Red Sea. Though Iran did not deploy the Houthis in its own recent war, holding them in reserve signaled the role they might play. Tehran brandished them for deterrence in the final days of the fighting, and the group announced it would close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait if the United States and Israel struck Iran’s vital economic and oil facilities.

If Hezbollah is Iran’s deadliest weapon against Israel, the author writes, the Houthis are its deadliest weapon against the wider world. Before the recent war, Tehran may well have underestimated the group, much as it long underestimated — or declined to use — the leverage of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had threatened to close Hormuz since the earliest days of the revolution but never actually did so, not during the tanker war with Iraq in the 1980s, and not during the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, when the United States bombed its nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Closing the strait was never truly an option — neither a serious political maneuver nor a usable military tool. Talk of it was generally confined to populist hardliners with no official standing, whose statements were taken seriously neither inside Iran nor beyond it.

Had Iran’s older political, military and religious leadership survived, the author suggests, Hormuz would never have been closed. Those figures, in his telling, were marked by governing experience, political flexibility and a regard for international norms — the same instincts that kept them from building a nuclear weapon, a restraint he attributes to a deliberate political decision by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rather than to any technical barrier. The killing of that older generation, the argument continues, cleared the way for newer leaders less concerned with international law, with neighborly relations, or with the costs their choices impose on ordinary Iranians.

In this view, inexperience and recklessness — not necessity — drove the decision to threaten the strait at all. Worse, the argument runs, the new leadership seemed almost gratified to discover that closing Hormuz could inflict serious harm on the global economy; if shutting one strait wounds their adversaries, the reasoning went, shutting two would wound them more. Hence the Houthi threat to close Bab al-Mandeb should Iranian facilities be hit. In the event, neither came to pass at that stage: Iran’s facilities were not bombed then, and the strait stayed open. But as the war in southern Lebanon ground on, Iran pressed the Houthis to escalate in Yemen.

That escalation, the author argues, is not only about rescuing Hezbollah. It is also a demonstration of power — the announcement of a new balance commensurate with the standing Iran believes it earned in the war. For all of the American president’s repeated boasts that Iran had been destroyed and decisively beaten, the facts on the ground, in this reading, suggest Tehran emerged the stronger party, since the stated American and Israeli war aims were not achieved. On that basis, the argument goes, a newly confident Iran now seeks to impose itself on its neighbors — and no instrument suits that purpose better than the Houthis.

The group has proved harder to break than Iran’s other proxies, weathering blows that battered both Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias, and it showed in 2019, with the drone-and-missile attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais, that it could rattle global energy markets. So Iran, the author contends, handed the Houthis a dual mission: relieve Hezbollah, and unsettle energy markets enough to push Washington toward ending the Lebanon war, while prompting Gulf states to lobby the United States for flexibility on releasing Iran’s frozen funds.

The Houthis chose the western coast for their push because that front holds a strategic prize. A breakthrough there could hand them full control of Bab al-Mandeb, the choke point they were denied after their earlier defeat and withdrawal at the hands of the National Resistance forces led by Tariq Saleh, nephew of the late president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose troops hold much of Yemen’s southern Red Sea coast, including the port of Mocha. Whether the group can now reverse that outcome will help decide not only the course of Yemen’s war but the security of one of the world’s most important maritime corridors — and, with it, the shape of the new power relationship the author sees taking form across the region.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Yemen Herald News.