Opinion: Washington Should Not Let Riyadh Write America's Next War

For the third time in a week, missiles found Saudi Arabia's busiest airport. On the afternoon of October 10, a ballistic warhead slammed into the terminal complex at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing at least 12 people and wounding more than 300, several critically. The dead included four Saudis, two Bangladeshis, and one citizen each of the United States, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Sudan. A day later, the airport was struck again, a fire tearing through a passenger hall. By the time a third missile was intercepted on October 12, Saudi authorities had extended the airport's partial closure for another week.

Asked by reporters outside the White House whether the United States would join Saudi Arabia's air campaign against the Houthi movement responsible, President Trump did not rule it out. "We may. We're going to look at it," he said, adding that he would "make a decision" quickly. That is a startling thing to leave to an aside before cameras: whether the United States enters a third Middle Eastern air war in a decade of intermittent Yemen fighting is not a question a president should answer off the cuff. It is a question for Congress, and Congress has answered it before.

A week of missiles, and a shrug from Washington

The scale of the past week bears stating plainly. Houthi forces claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on Saudi airports, including the group's own public claim that it had struck King Khalid repeatedly to "shut down" Saudi Arabia's aviation hub. Over six days:

• October 6–7: a combined missile and drone barrage killed one person at King Khalid and two at Abha International Airport, wounding 36.
• October 8: strikes destroyed a Saudia Airbus A320 and killed three Saudi nationals, including a pilot; several airlines suspended Riyadh service.
• October 10: a ballistic missile hit terminals 3 and 4 during peak travel hours, with no warning from the kingdom's air-defense alert system.
• October 11–12: a second strike on Terminal 4 and an attack on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam followed, along with an intercepted missile aimed at Riyadh.

Saudi aviation officials put the toll at 12 dead and 309 injured from the October 10 strike alone. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the attack "deeply shocking," and the UN special envoy for Yemen condemned it as a breach of the basic obligation to spare civilians. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a statement confirming an American had been killed, called the attacks "reprehensible."

"Attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are a violation of international law. These attacks must cease immediately."

That was Guterres's verdict on the Houthis. It is also an apt description of what a renewed air war waged with American assistance did to Yemen for seven years before a fragile 2022 truce quieted the guns. The question is whether Washington has learned anything from that history, or whether one catastrophic week is enough to erase it.

How Riyadh's war became Washington's problem again

The immediate spark lies outside Yemen altogether. Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa's airport in July to stop an Iranian aircraft from landing with mourners returning from the funeral of Iran's supreme leader, killed on the opening day of this year's wider Iran-Israel-US war. The Houthis, who had largely observed a 2022 truce for four years, declared it void, imposed a naval blockade on Saudi shipping, and resumed the cross-border bombardment that once made them one of the most sanctioned non-state actors on the Arabian Peninsula. A Congressional Research Service account of that reignition makes clear this was always a tinderbox: Riyadh and the Houthis had fought to exhaustion once, and neither side had settled the underlying dispute over who governs Yemen.

Into that vacuum, Saudi Arabia has twice asked Washington to fly combat missions against Houthi positions, and twice the administration has said no, limiting its role to intelligence and targeting assistance, the posture the United States held through most of the 2015-2022 war. That restraint was not incidental. It reflected a hard-won consensus that American fingerprints on the earlier Saudi bombing campaign bought Riyadh little while costing Washington dearly in Arab and European opinion, in congressional goodwill, and in the stubborn fact that none of it dislodged the Houthis from Sanaa. The European Union has stuck to that same model of pressure without participation: its own statement on the latest attacks condemns the Houthis while calling, as ever, for de-escalation rather than a wider war.

The stakes, and the case for joining anyway

The stakes extend well past Yemen's borders. A Nicaragua-flagged tanker was struck off Oman this same week, and the UK's maritime trade office reported a separate projectile strike in the Strait of Hormuz, a reminder that shipping lanes carrying roughly a fifth of the world's seaborne oil sit a missile's flight from this fight. Riyadh's main gateway has been closed or operating under emergency protocols for most of a week, with carriers from Lufthansa to Kuwait Airways suspending service. An American citizen is already among the dead. If Washington moves from sharing targeting data to flying strike missions, American pilots enter a conflict Congress has never voted to authorize.

That is not a technicality. In 2019, bipartisan majorities in both chambers passed a War Powers Resolution, S.J.Res. 7, ordering American forces withdrawn from "hostilities" tied to the Saudi-led Yemen campaign. President Trump vetoed it, and the override fell short in the Senate by a handful of votes. The substance of that fight, laid out in Brookings' account of the standoff, was never resolved, only vetoed. Congress asserted that backing a Saudi air campaign without specific authorization exceeded the executive's constitutional writ. Nothing about that legal landscape has changed. What has changed is that a president is now floating direct American participation without even the pretense of a congressional debate.

There is, admittedly, a real argument for a tougher posture. An American was killed. Saudi Arabia is central to any effort to contain Iran's regional proxy network, and the Houthis are that network's most reckless member, having fired on commercial shipping, allied warships and now repeatedly on a civilian airport. Advocates of intervention will say half-measures invited this escalation, that intelligence-sharing without strikes has not deterred anyone, and that a decisive American role could finally end a war that has ground on, with interruptions, since 2015.

But seven years of exactly that strategy, American backed, Saudi led, intensively bombed, argue against repeating it rather than for doubling down. The Houthis survived a far more sustained coalition campaign than anything Washington is now contemplating, and emerged from the 2022 truce stronger than when the war began. Direct American strikes did not break that pattern then; there is no serious case they would now. What they would reliably do is put American service members in an active war zone, hand the Houthis and Tehran a propaganda windfall, and foreclose the diplomatic channel Washington has kept open through back-door talks with Houthi officials in Oman even as this crisis unfolded.

Let Congress decide, not a reporter's question

None of this means Washington should abandon Saudi Arabia to absorb missile strikes alone. The United States can continue sharing intelligence, help Riyadh harden its air defenses, press allies for a unified diplomatic front through the UN envoy's office, and use the Oman channel to demand the Houthis stand down from targeting civilian aviation, exactly the kind of civilian infrastructure Guterres said must be spared. What it should not do is let a president decide, unilaterally and in response to the week's worst headline, to put American pilots into Yemen's skies. That decision carries the weight of a formal war power, and the Constitution, not to mention the 2019 vote Congress already took on this exact question, says it belongs to the legislature.

If the administration believes conditions have changed enough to justify direct American strikes, it should make that case to Congress in open session, not to reporters on the White House lawn. Lawmakers who meant what they said in 2019 about keeping America out of Yemen's war should say so again now, before the next missile lands and the decision gets made by default.