The Middle East’s Next Aftershocks

In early December 2023, I interviewed a retired senior Israeli intelligence official about Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and the swiftly changing dynamics in the Middle East. Oct. 7, he explained, “was an earthquake, and the entire region will be dealing with the aftershocks for quite some time.”

While he didn’t predict where the aftershocks would occur, his overarching forecast of profound tremors proved remarkably clairvoyant. A little more than a year later, Hamas has been decimated as a fighting force, its senior leadership assassinated; Hezbollah has been seriously bloodied, its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and much of its high command killed; and the Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, its longtime dictator exiled. Indeed, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has been transformed as a result of these aftershocks.

But with a cease-fire in place in Lebanon, looming prospects of one in Gaza, and Syria’s new leaders busy consolidating their country, the question today is whether the Oct. 7 aftershocks are coming to an end at last. After all, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to “to get rid of the wars” swiftly, even before he gets into office, and incoming senior defense officials have signaled a desire to reorient the United States to the Indo-Pacific. But in practice, disengaging from the Middle East may prove more difficult than they anticipate. As the region heads into 2025, the aftershocks are all but certain to continue, threatening U.S. interests for some time to come.

The first tremor is likely already underway in Yemen. For well over a year, the Houthis have preyed on international shipping in the Red Sea, despite the efforts of a U.S.-led coalition to stem the attacks. Over the last several weeks, though, the Houthis have stepped up their targeting of Israel, launching more than 200 missiles and 170 drone strikes. While Israel and the United States have blunted most of these attacks, they are getting through with increased frequency, which raises the pressure on the Israeli government to mount a more forceful response. Unsurprisingly, Israeli warplanes have struck Yemeni ports and other infrastructure in an attempt to deter further Houthi missile barrages. But the Houthis seem uncowed by Israeli retaliation, and Israeli leaders are not backing down, either. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently vowed, “The Houthis will also learn what Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Assad regime, and others learned.”

Such bellicose rhetoric is quickly going to run into military reality. After all, during the Yemeni civil war, the Houthis withstood a yearslong air campaign led by Saudi Arabia. Yemen is more than 1,300 miles from Israel, making a sustained air campaign far more logistically complicated for Israel than in neighboring Gaza or Lebanon. More to the point, Israel has considered Hezbollah as its primary adversary since at least 2006 and spent more than a decade preparing to fight it. This preparation paid off, as attested by Israel’s dramatic attacks based on meticulous infiltration of Hezbollah’s walkie-talkie and beeper supply chain. By contrast, Israel has not viewed the Houthis as an imminent threat until recently—and presumably now has fewer tricks up its sleeves. A campaign against the Houthis may not be as quick or spectacular as the decimation of Hezbollah.

But just because Israel faces longer odds in its campaign to destroy the Houthis does not mean that it will not try. Most immediately, renewed strikes will destroy much of what is left of Yemen’s battered infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes have thus far focused on the Houthi-controlled ports of Hodeidah, Al-Salif, and Ras Qantib, as well Sanaa International Airport, all in an effort to sever the delivery of Iranian weapons to the group. Israel has also vowed to target the Houthi leadership, a step both Israel and the United States have thus far avoided. If these efforts are successful, Houthi military capabilities may eventually be reduced, albeit not eliminated entirely. In the short run, though, even some Israeli analysts recognize that Israel will need U.S. assistance in countering Houthi missiles and drones, and international shipping will need to rely on the U.S.-led naval coalition for safe passage through the Red Sea.

At the same time, renewed military action could have ripple effects across the Arabian Peninsula. In 2020, the United Nations estimated that 70 percent of all of Yemen’s imports and 80 percent of all humanitarian assistance—including much of its food—flowed through the same ports as Iranian weapons. Considering that roughly 21 million Yemenis—two-thirds of its total population—depend on this assistance, severing Iranian weapon flows might also mean destabilizing an already precarious humanitarian situation. Even if the Trump administration is unmoved by humanitarian plight, it will still need to consider the chance that conflicts in Yemen spill over into neighboring Saudi Arabia and, in turn, threaten global energy supplies.

If the Houthis represent one of the aftershocks, then Iran is another—and a potentially far more consequential one. Israel and Iran have long fought a shadow war, but after Oct. 7, that war burst into the open. In addition to arming a host of proxy groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, Iran has twice launched major missile and drone attacks on Israel directly, and Israel has struck military facilities in Iran in return. Indeed, the Israeli security establishment—in a series of interviews from November 2024—frames Oct. 7 and the wars that followed as one grand war against Iran, with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis merely pawns in the greater clash with Tehran’s regime.

Iran has had a disastrous year as one proxy after another suffered defeats and Israeli airstrikes stripped it of some its most advanced air defenses. But a weakened Iran is, in some ways, no less dangerous. Iran has responded to what it sees as its deteriorating security situation by doubling down on its nuclear program. That sets Iran on a collision course with not only Israel, but also with the United States and other Western powers. While the Trump administration has signaled a return to its maximum pressure campaign of sanctions against Iran, the regime may be only a few weeks away from a bomb, raising the question of whether sanctions can work fast enough to forestall a nuclear breakout.

As if the Houthis and Iran were not enough, there are any number other regional fault lines that are softly but audibly rumbling. Syrian politics are still far from settled, with the possibility of renewed sectarian tension. Along the Mediterranean coast and in Damascus, members of the Alawite minority protested against rule by the Sunni Arab majority, and Syria’s new rulers are clashing with former regime elements. In northern Syria, fighting between Turkey-supported forces and the Kurds has intensified, and the renewed Turkish-Kurdish conflict risks bleeding over into Iraq.

And if NATO ally Turkey fighting the United States’ longtime Kurdish allies was not sufficient to keep Washington involved, the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces are still holding thousands of Islamic State prisoners. Should they be released, the ranks of the Islamic State would swell. That would be an immediate problem for Iraq, Jordan, and the rest of region, but given the group’s nature as a global terrorist organization, its reemergence would ultimately be a problem for the United States, as well.

This gets at the fundamental challenge for the incoming U.S. administration. Much like the first Trump administration—and the Obama and Biden administrations, for that matter—the incoming team wants out of the Middle East. But getting out comes at a cost. Leaving the Houthis unaddressed risks ongoing attacks in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, missiles raining on Tel Aviv, and a potential violent spillover into Saudi Arabia. Ignoring the Iran problem risks letting a state that inaugurates its president to chants of “death to America” and “death to Israel” possess nuclear weapons, not to mention setting off more nuclear proliferation in the volatile Middle East. Completely disengaging from Syria risks a return of the Islamic State and jihadist terrorism.

That’s the problem with earthquakes and aftershocks: In the best case, you can capitalize upon the devastation to hopefully build something better in the aftermath, or you can simply try to mitigate their harm. You can even ignore their effects entirely and accept the consequences. But at the end of the day, you cannot stop the tremors from happening.

The same goes for the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East policy. Like its predecessors, it can choose how it responds to the Middle East’s ongoing turmoil—with greater or lesser effectiveness—but it cannot end the tumult by presidential edict any more than an incantation can stop an earthquake.