U.S. Orders Some Personnel to Leave Saudi Arabia as Houthi Attacks Escalate

When a government pulls the spouses and children of its diplomats out of a country, it is telling you something it hasn't said out loud: it expects things to get worse. The State Department has now done that in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile the president says he is "in contact" with the Houthis and hasn't ruled out military action. The country should be asking who authorized any of this.

Start with the dead. At least 13 people were killed at Riyadh's airport, one of them an American, and more than 300 were wounded. That is a real atrocity, and no one on the Left needs to pretend the Houthis are anything other than a brutal armed movement that has fired on civilians. But grief for the victims is not a strategy. The question is what Washington does next, and who gets to decide.

We have seen this movie. In 2019, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and Trump vetoed it. That war, fought with American weapons, intelligence and refueling, helped create one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the century and gave the Houthis a decade of grievance, battlefield experience and a stockpile of drones. The movement that hit Riyadh is not a force that appeared from nowhere. It is, in part, the product of a war Washington underwrote.

Then came the 2025 bombing campaign against the Houthis. It ended not in victory but in an Omani-brokered understanding: the Houthis stopped targeting American ships, and the U.S. stopped bombing. The group's capacity survived. Everyone involved knew the bombs hadn't broken it. If the administration is now flirting with a second round, it should explain what is supposed to be different this time other than the body count.

The larger problem is the way this administration treats war as an executive-branch improvisation. "Contact with the Houthis" is a diplomatic channel. "Not ruling out military action" is a threat. Neither has been put before Congress, and the Constitution gives that body the power to take the country to war. Strikes on Yemen were never authorized by a vote. If the president wants to resume them to defend Riyadh, he should have to say so in public and ask for approval.

There is also an uncomfortable contradiction in the Gulf pitch. The White House has spent the past year selling the Gulf monarchies as partners, investors and buyers of American arms and aircraft, with security supposedly the dividend. Yet when the missiles come, the first move is to send U.S. families home and thin out regional bases. Fine, that is prudent. But it shows that the "partnership" has no clear answer for who protects whom, or at what price. Americans are being asked to accept an open-ended security commitment to a monarchy that has never signed a treaty with us, in a region where our last experience of open-ended commitments should have taught us caution.

My own side deserves criticism too. Too many Democrats treat war powers as a cause to invoke when a Republican is in office and forget when the target is politically convenient. A Congress that cannot muster a vote on whether to bomb Yemen has no business complaining about presidential overreach. Reclaiming that authority is a duty that doesn't depend on who holds the White House.

The stakes are not abstract. Yemen's civilians have already paid for a decade of war, and Gulf workers, many of them migrants with no evacuation plan, will pay for the next escalation. American troops stationed at those bases will be the first targets of retaliation. The least the public can demand is a debate and a vote before the planes take off, not after.