How Trump’s team flipped on bombing the Houthis

Before the Trump administration began striking targets across Yemen to reopen global shipping, before many of its top officials included a journalist on a group chat to plan those strikes, in fact even before Donald Trump took office this January, many in his administration didn’t think attacking the Houthis was such a good idea.

“We are burning readiness to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for what really amounts to a ragtag bunch of terrorists that are Iran proxies,” then-Rep. Mike Waltz, now the president’s national security advisor, told Politico last year. “Iran is the core of the issue.”