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The Incredible Shrinking Superpower

The failing war with Iran marks a dramatic retreat by the U.S. from the Middle East.

Just after taking office in 2025, President Donald Trump picked a fight with Yemen’s Ansarullah, whom Americans routinely call “the Houthis.” Trump got a refresher in the limits of American military power, a lesson reinforced from Korea, Laos, and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. The U.S. military can cause a lot of damage, but it can’t win wars unless it beats up on weaklings like Grenada and Panama. After U.S. forces killed many civilians but failed to break the resolve of the Yemeni forces, a chastened Trump called it quits.

Trump then fought a short war with Iran and claimed to have “obliterated” their nuclear facilities before employing the full might of the U.S. military to kill scores of unarmed civilians in so-called drug boats and kidnap Nicolás Maduro, the president of the poor, weak country of Venezuela.

In February, Trump launched a second Iran war because the U.S. military failed. He now claims that Iran was, despite the 2025 conflict, just two weeks away from developing a nuclear missile. Trump’s second Iran war followed a predictable pattern. The U.S. was able to wipe out an elementary school and wreck hospitals and apartment buildings with no problem. But in the process, its major military bases in the Middle East — the keys to decades of American power projection in the region — were (truly) obliterated; its inability to protect itself or its allies were laid bare; and the vulnerability of its archipelago of bases around the world, including inside the U.S., was exposed.

After twice failing to defeat Iran, an economically strapped regional power, Trump is now mulling a third Iran war. If he goes ahead with it, the conflict is likely to ignite an even greater conflagration in the region where Ansarullah has been battering Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil infrastructure, as well as its proxies in Yemen, for weeks.

To understand the forces that fought Trump to a standstill in 2025 and those he has been unwilling to engage on behalf his Saudi allies in 2026, TomDispatch regular Juan Cole — who writes the indispensable Informed Comment — offers the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen of the forces that the mainstream press continues to call the “Houthi militia” and how they’ve exposed American weakness to an extent not seen in generations.

— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

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The Limits of American Might

The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. 

The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen’s Ansarullah, or “Helpers of God,” led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia’s own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia’s most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.

The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an “Iran-backed militia” is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen’s population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound “dumb” bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump’s war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran’s drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.

The Incredible Shrinking Superpower

The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid........

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