The Trump administration is threatening direct US airstrikes on Yemen in a major new escalation of the war that US imperialism has been waging alongside its ally Saudi Arabia for more than a decade.

Asked Saturday outside the White House whether he was going to join the Saudi strikes on the Houthis, the movement that controls Sanaa and Yemen’s Red Sea coast, US President Donald Trump said: “We may. ... We move very quickly.” Asked Tuesday whether the United States would join the Saudi campaign, he said: “I can’t tell you that.”

The statements followed a declaration by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on October 5: “The United States has a defense and security agreement with Saudi Arabia, and we intend to live by it.”

The active US discussions of a direct intervention against Yemen accompany ongoing plans to attack Iran. NBC News reported October 7 that the military had prepared options “for a possible resumption of major combat operations in Iran ... including the option of launching strikes before the midterm elections next month.” The Associated Press (AP) reported October 2 that three aircraft carriers could be in the region “as early as the end of October.”

Saudi Arabia bombed Sanaa and the provinces of Dhamar and Saada on Tuesday. Spokesman Turki al-Maliki said the strikes were on facilities used to “supply the war effort.” The Sanaa health ministry said a strike killed two people at an oil facility near the port of Ras Isa, the AP reported Wednesday.

UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg told the Security Council Friday that Yemen had returned to “full-scale war.” UNICEF said September 25 that nearly 130,000 people had been displaced in three weeks.

The pretext for direct US intervention is the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. On Saturday, a Houthi missile strike on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300, NBC News reported Sunday, citing Saudi civil aviation authorities. Rubio wrote on X after the attack that the dead included “an American citizen.” Overnight Tuesday, the Houthis attacked Dhahran, where the state oil company Aramco has its headquarters. The Saudi energy ministry reported Tuesday a “limited fire” in an administrative building.

Houthi forces took the port of Mocha and Perim Island on September 10 and 11, giving them “effective control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline,” Reuters reported September 15. On October 5, Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council, announced a ground offensive. Yemeni Foreign Minister Afrah al-Zouba told reporters Wednesday that her government was “not calling for starting any negotiations.”

The Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the United States into the war on March 25, 2015, announcing “logistical and intelligence support” for the Saudi-led bombing. The bomb the coalition dropped on a school bus in Dahyan on August 9, 2018, killing 40 children, was a 500-pound MK 82 made by Lockheed Martin, CNN reported August 17, 2018. Trump vetoed a congressional resolution to end US participation on April 16, 2019, and that in September a UN group of experts reported that the warring parties “may have used starvation as a method of warfare.”

President Joe Biden announced February 4, 2021 that “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen.” That November, a UN Development Program report projected that the war would have killed 377,000 people by the end of the year, 60 percent of them through hunger and preventable disease. On January 11, 2024, Biden ordered US strikes on Yemen “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”

The United States bombed Yemen again from March 15 to May 6, 2025, killing at least 250 people, Al Jazeera reported June 10, 2025. In May 2025, Trump signed an arms package with the kingdom worth nearly $142 billion and in November 2025 a Strategic Defense Agreement.

Saudi Arabia is already waging the war with American intelligence and American target selection. The State Department approved the possible sale of $5 billion in bombs to Saudi Arabia on September 4, and CNN reported September 10 that “More than 100 US military advisers are on the ground in Saudi Arabia providing intelligence and targeting support.”

The Yemen Data Project, which tracks the air war, recorded 253 Saudi air raids in September that left at least 66 civilians dead, eight or more of them children. A strike Monday on a health center and a girls’ school in Taiz killed at least five people, including a child, Antiwar.com reported Tuesday, citing the Houthi-run news agency SABA.

The US-Israeli war on Iran, begun February 28, is drawing in the whole world. French President Emmanuel Macron said on French television September 24 of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia’s oil terminal on the Red Sea: “We are going to send military resources, that is to say, soldiers, radar systems and defense systems, to protect this site.” British Prime Minister Andy Burnham agreed to send a Royal Air Force tanker to refuel Saudi warplanes, the Defense Post reported September 22.

Al-Monitor reported October 5 that Türkiye and Pakistan had pledged troops and other military support for quick dispatch to Saudi Arabia under the defense pact the three countries signed August 7. Pakistan’s military spokesman, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, told CNN, the Pakistani daily Dawn reported October 7: “I can confirm that the forces of Pakistan are already there.”