A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
For more on the fight over Red Sea shipping lanes, we've called up Ambassador Michael Ratney. He served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Biden administration and is now a nonresident senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ambassador, we are reaching you in the Saudi capital of Riyadh this morning. And Aya Batrawy just told us that the Houthis have been attacking Saudi Arabia, including the airport in Riyadh. How is all of this being felt where you are?
MICHAEL RATNEY: I mean, it's a funny thing because life here - I just got here a couple of days ago - looks perfectly normal to me. Although normal doesn't always include a very loud boom everyone heard last night near the airport, which was apparently a Houthi rocket getting intercepted, probably by Patriot interceptors, fortunately.
MARTÍNEZ: OK. So to the eye at least, things don't look that bad.
RATNEY: No. Not in Riyadh. Apparently, in the southwest, in the area of Jazan and Najran, closer to the Yemeni border, the Houthis have been really kind of upping their attacks on airports, military infrastructure and so forth, and energy infrastructure as well.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. How have the Houthis been able to gain so much ground recently? I know for more than a decade, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of nine countries against the Houthis. So how are they able to do this?
RATNEY: So the Houthis get a lot of support from the Iranians, obviously - weapons, financial support and so forth. But they're also just a remarkably tenacious and resourceful group. They started basically as a tribal insurgency, and now they control large swaths of the country, including the capital. And they have been able to innovate, to develop weapons, to defy many, many efforts - U.S. efforts, Saudi efforts - to defeat them. And they still pose a significant threat not just to the Saudis, but to shipping throughout the Red Sea.
MARTÍNEZ: You mentioned the Houthis depending on support from Tehran. If they didn't have that support, would they be able to do any of this?
RATNEY: So it's become sort of a symbiotic relationship. Once upon a time, they were a proxy of the Iranians, like Hezbollah or these militias in Iraq. They have an independent streak as well, and they've become quite resourceful and innovative. And it's sort of a two-way innovation now. The Iranians help them. They now, in some ways, help the Iranians. I think if the support was cut off completely - no financial support, no weapons flows, no advisers - they would have a harder time of it. But they have been just crazy tenacious.
MARTÍNEZ: One thing, Ambassador, because Saudi Arabia has one of the world's largest military budgets, so I think people are wondering - why has it been so difficult for them to defeat the Houthis?
RATNEY: So some of it's just the nature of the Houthis. They're not a conventional army in the sense that many militaries are trained and equipped to deal with. They started as an insurgency, and they still behave like one. They are sort of this region's Viet Cong, if you will. But also, you know, the Saudi military - the whole structure of it was built on partnership, principally with the United States. And I think this is a moment when they were hoping the United States would get involved in a more muscular way.
MARTÍNEZ: So about that - is it in the U.S.'s interest to join this latest offensive? Because we heard Saudi Arabia getting help from the U.K. and France, and they have that new defense agreement with Pakistan and Turkey. So what about the U.S.'s interest? Is it there for them to help them?
RATNEY: Yeah, clearly the calculation in Washington is it's not. And, you know - and on the one hand, I sort of understand a reluctance to what would seem to be opening another front in a war, just as seemingly the sort of central conflict with the Iranians is petering out. But that said, the Houthis aren't going anywhere.
And if you think about it, it's not really just about Saudi or just about oil. Something like a quarter of global container traffic goes through the Red Sea, through the Bab el-Mandeb and up to the Suez Canal. And although the Houthis aren't targeting that now - they're sticking to targeting Saudi ships and Saudi infrastructure - leaving them in the control that they've had really, I think, poses a danger to global commerce in the long run. It's something that eventually - maybe not now - eventually we're going to have to deal with.
MARTÍNEZ: You recently wrote a piece titled "Is The U.S. Abandoning Saudi Arabia In Its Moment Of Need?" So I'm going to throw the question that you posed back at you. Is it?
RATNEY: Well, we have had a partnership with Saudi Arabia for decades - not just arms sales, but training exercises. They're totally knitted into the CENTCOM planning process. That's the U.S. military command that deals with the Middle East. And all of it was geared towards being ready when they're attacked - to be a partner for them when they're attacked. And this is kind of full-on warfare at this point. Their enemies - not just the Iranians, but the Houthis - are striking them in a tenacious way. And I think their hope and expectation that - was we were there to help them. And in many ways, we're not.
MARTÍNEZ: Michael Ratney served as the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Biden administration. Ambassador, thanks.
RATNEY: Any time. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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