President Trump, for the first time, is threatening the Islamic Republic of Iran with “consequences” for the ongoing aggression of one of its proxies, the Houthis of Yemen. The new threat, following significant military strikes in Yemen over the weekend, could shake up the region. Will it be followed through?

The president’s warning comes after a two-day campaign against Houthi targets. Now Mr. Trump is making clear that the Yemeni terrorist militia is intimately tied to Iran. The Islamic Republic, therefore, will “suffer consequences” for “every shot fired by the Houthis,” the president writes Monday on Truth Social. 

“This is a form of coercive diplomacy,” the United Against Nuclear Iran policy director, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun. “The president is making a threat, and he has to be prepared to follow through on that threat if the Iranians and the Houthis keep defying him. He is not afraid to be direct and threatening in a way that President Biden was.”

Mr. Trump’s warning to Iran follows his recent announcement that he has sent a letter to Iran’s leader urging negotiation on a new nuclear deal. The president will prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon, his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told CBS News on Sunday, including “the missiles, the weaponization, the enrichment. They can either hand it over and give it up in a way that is verifiable, or they can face a whole series of other consequences.”    

Across the region, though, there is some doubt regarding Mr. Trump’s threats: Are they mere rhetoric, or do they represent an opening shot in a sustained effort against Iran and the Houthis? Administration officials vow to maintain the pressure on Yemen until the Houthis end their attacks on ships in the Red Sea. 

“The minute the #Houthis say we’ll stop shooting at your ships, we’ll stop shooting at your drones,” Secretary Hegseth writes on X. “This campaign will end, but until then it will be unrelenting.”

Since President Jefferson sent Marines to fight pirates at the Barbary coast, America has considered freedom of navigation on the high seas a fundamental tenet of its foreign policy. For more than a year and a half, though, the Houthis were able to impose a partial blockade on the Red Sea, forcing ships to navigate around Africa at significant cost to global trade.    

The weekend strikes in Yemen were much more extensive than earlier ones. For the first time Houthi leaders were targeted, including a top commander, Hassan Asharaf al-Din, who was killed when his house at Sanaa was struck, according to unconfirmed reports from the region. Now, Mr. Trump is upping the ante. 

Linking Iran to Houthi aggression could be a game changer. In the last decade a Saudi-led regional coalition attempted to squash the Houthi rebellion in Yemen. America and other allies pressured Riyadh to end its assault, which has exacted a high humanitarian toll on the impoverished country. 

“Perhaps the Americans are now attempting to finish the job they prevented the Saudis from completing,” an Israeli Yemen watcher at the Regional Thinking Forum, Inbal Nissim-Louvton, tells the Sun. The Houthis are much more powerful now than a decade ago, she says, but “blocking rearmament routes from Iran could weaken them significantly.” 

Similarly, striking Iranian spy ships that have long been known to help the Houthis identify and attack military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea could reduce the Houthis’ military abilities.

Some 20 percent of world commerce normally connects Asia and Europe in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. An estimated 70 percent of that traffic was forced to reroute since the Houthis started targeting shipping after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel. 

Secretary Rubio said over the weekend that U.S. Navy vessels were attacked 174 times during that time, as were 145 commercial ships. “So we basically have a band of pirates with guided precision anti-ship weaponry exacting a toll in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world,” Mr. Rubio told ABC News. “We are not going to have these people controlling which ships can go through and which ones cannot.”

These attacks, Mr. Trump writes on Truth Social, “all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN.” The Iranians are “dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘Intelligence.’”

Therefore, the president writes, “Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!”

Tehran officials have claimed the Houthis are completely independent, as did the Yemeni group’s spokesmen. Either way, and unless the attacks cease completely, America will now be tested by making good on Mr. Trump’s threats.