On October 12, JINSA President and CEO Michael Makovsky, PhD, spoke to Fox News about the latest Houthi attacks, including the group’s October 10 drone and missile strike on Riyadh’s international airport. That attack was the deadliest on Saudi soil since 2015 and killed a U.S. citizen. Dr. Makovsky noted that Iran is the Houthis’ main funder and arms supplier, a role which enables Houthi aggression. He observed that the Houthi slogan is “God is the greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam,” and commented, “It’s not exactly a Disney slogan.”

Noting that Saudi Arabia made a strategic mistake by alienating its key allies in recent months, Dr. Makovsky discussed the way forward, including the possibility of an international counter-Houthi coalition. He also argued that the Iranian and Yemeni fronts cannot be separated: “The more we can weaken the regime in Tehran … the more that’s going to weaken the Houthis.”

The post JINSA President Dr. Michael Makovsky on the Houthi Quandary (Fox News) appeared first on JINSA.

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Ari Cicurel, associate director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said the recent developments have challenged assumptions about how effectively Iran could use the strait to constrain international commerce.

“I think some in the foreign policy community underestimated the U.S. ability to break Iran’s effective hold over the strait, particularly the logistical capacity to sustain an alternative shipping route and protect commercial traffic,” Cicurel said. “Iran can impose costs on shipping, but the U.S. response has shown that the regime cannot translate those costs into a sustained blockade that preserves the same level of economic leverage as U.S. operations.”

The shift has reshaped Tehran’s relationship with the companies that depend on the waterway, Cicurel said, making it harder for Iran to dictate who can use the strait and on what terms. “The Navy’s blockade and protection of commercial shipping have shifted the cost of disrupting the strait onto Iran, which has lost most of its exports while its Gulf neighbors have increased their oil shipments,” he said. “Shippers now have a route through the strait that does not depend on Tehran’s permission” — eroding Iran’s leverage in negotiations.

But Cicurel said Iran can still attempt to influence decisions by creating enough uncertainty around the safety of the strait to deter companies from using it.

“Even with its leverage diminished, the Iranian regime has repeatedly withstood economic pressure by diverting money from the Iranian people to its military, and it will likely continue to do so to keep funding attacks as its revenue shrinks. Iran will likely keep launching calibrated attacks to extract as much of its remaining leverage as possible and to convince insurers and shipping companies the strait remains unsafe,” Cicurel said.

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Meanwhile, Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow at JINSA, said the “real underestimation” was on the part of the Trump administration. He noted that while the oil is “flowing again,” Washington should have heeded presumptions that Tehran could potentially close the strait during the conflict.

“The real underestimation was the Trump administration’s failure to anticipate and preempt Iran’s initial efforts to threaten the strait. Extensive U.S. war plans built this exact scenario into their assumptions, but it was discounted,” Ruhe said. “The U.S. military, particularly the Navy, always had the ability to counter Iran’s unconventional maritime threats, but doing so became a lot harder once Iran dropped its first mines in the water and scared off commercial shipping with its opening drone strikes. Only recently have those mines, radars and other Iranian military assets been degraded, enabling the tough work of naval escorting to begin belatedly.”

Ruhe explained that while the flow of oil presents several diplomatic and economic benefits for the U.S. in its confrontation with Iran, he warned that Tehran’s leverage in talks may not shift.

“There are many diplomatic, economic, and operational benefits to getting oil flowing again. Yet it’s hard to imagine how any of this meaningfully changes Tehran’s negotiating posture,” Ruhe said. “Tellingly, Iran’s recent seven-day plan offered no concessions compared to the June MOU, when traffic through Hormuz was much lower. For all the military and economic pounding it has taken, the regime has been predictably stubborn in resisting Trump’s demands.”

“If the recent upsurge in Hormuz traffic proves sustainable, and if the U.S naval blockade on Iran remains effective, the regime could see diminishing downside in restarting attacks upstream from Hormuz, targeting the Arabian Gulf, commercial vessels, and energy sites with mines, drones, and missiles,” Ruhe continued. “Those strikes proved incredibly successful early in the war, and Iran currently has no reason to believe that’s no longer the case.”

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Read the full piece in JNS. 

The post U.S. Protection Revives Hormuz Oil Traffic as Debate Shifts to How Long It Can Last appeared first on JINSA.

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Read the full piece in the Financial Times.

The post ‘MBS Will Not Forget’: Donald Trump’s Reluctance to Fight Houthis Rattles Saudi Arabia appeared first on JINSA.

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Read the full piece in the Jerusalem Post.

The post How Arab-Israeli Air Defense Coordination Is Developing into a Regional Security Shield appeared first on JINSA.

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John Hannah, the Randi & Charles Wax Senior fellow at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America and a former national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, said the devastating loss of Qatar’s LNG revenues could force Doha to reconsider its international investments.

“Hopefully, Qatar’s decades-long project to advance pro-Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israel causes will be one of the first casualties of the devastating loss of its LNG revenues,” Hannah said.

Hannah said the collapse of Qatar’s gas export income has left the ruling royal family facing an unfamiliar set of constraints.

“For the first time in a long time, Qatar’s leaders have to make hard choices on how they are going to keep their domestic economy afloat, their Western partners happy, and the ruling family in power without the LNG golden goose providing endless mountains of cash for massive welfare benefits, payoffs and strategic foreign investments,” he said.

According to Hannah, the fiscal reckoning facing Doha should extend beyond domestic austerity and into a fundamental reassessment of Qatar’s international posture.

“They are being forced into a major belt-tightening and part of that reckoning should be a decisive turn away from the two-faced foreign policy that had them playing all sides of the Middle East’s divide between pro-Western pragmatic modernists and anti-Western extremist Islamists,” he said.

Hannah argued that Doha’s long-running strategy of simultaneously courting Washington and accommodating Islamist actors across the region has now visibly failed.

“That’s the strategy that came crashing down on their heads when the same Iranian regime they’d spent years seeking to accommodate and appease didn’t think twice to devastate Qatar’s LNG lifeline in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field that Qatar had nothing to do with,” he said.

He added that Western governments now have an opening to press Doha toward a genuine policy shift.

“Ensuring that reckoning happens and gets reflected in Qatari policy should be a priority for the U.S. and its allies in their engagements with Doha going forward,” he said.

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Read the full piece in JNS. 

The post Qatar’s Propaganda Machine Could Be ‘First Casualty’ of LNG Collapse appeared first on JINSA.

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Jonathan Ruhe, a Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) fellow for American Strategy, argued the U.S. is going with the strategy to strangle the Iranian economy, depriving it of funds to pay soldiers and keeping the repressive apparatus of the regime alive, because the administration has “run out of other options” and it marks “an admission of failure” that does not have “any real prospects for success.”

“The Iranian regime is more than happy for Trump to focus just on sanctions and blockade. They certainly feel they can ride that out, and their clock in that sense, has more time on it than Trump’s own clock,” Ruhe said in an interview.

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Read the full piece in The Hill. 

The post Iran War Puts Future US Military Presence in Middle East in Question appeared first on JINSA.

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Read the full piece in the Jerusalem Post.

The post Any Saudi F-35 Sale Must Safeguard Israel’s Military Edge, Expert Tells ‘Post’ appeared first on JINSA.

The State Department announced Thursday it has approved the possible sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia at an estimated cost of $24.3 billion.

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“It’s a categorically bad idea, until and unless the U.S. and [Saudi Arabia] agree to some concrete guardrails on Riyadh’s defense and technological cooperation with China more generally — the F-35 is a microcosm of a much larger problem in the relationship,” Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told Axios.

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Read the full piece in Axios. 

The post State Department Approves Potential F-35 Sales to Saudi Arabia appeared first on JINSA.

Saudi Arabia’s escalating conflict with the Houthis has revealed just how challenging it has become for the U.S. to deter the Iran‑backed terrorist group, former officials and regional experts say, as Houthi gains along the Red Sea raise alarms about global shipping and give Tehran fresh leverage.

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“The Houthis have exploited the lack of a cohesive opposition inside Yemen to prepare for this situation, Iran has resumed aiding them with weapons and advisors, and they benefit from only having to fight one foreign enemy at a time,” Jonathan Ruhe, a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, told JI.

“The Houthis are also very risk-acceptant and willing to tolerate losses that have compelled Iran and other proxies into ceasefires. U.S.-Israeli operations could likely exploit the Houthis’ latest advances, but Saudi air and naval power have never shown any serious capacity to degrade the Houthis militarily.”

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Ruhe agreed that the advances near Bab el‑Mandeb “give Iran indirect leverage by rattling global markets and threatening the best energy export alternative to Hormuz.” But he emphasized that the Houthis are “far more independent of Tehran than Hezbollah or other proxies,” adding that “they are focused on expanding control inside Yemen and fighting the Saudis, so they prefer not to risk direct U.S. and Israel involvement for the time being, even if Iran might press them.”

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Read the full piece in Jewish Insider.

The post Houthi Gains Leave Saudi Arabia Short on Options and Looking to Washington appeared first on JINSA.

For thousands of years, Tyre in southern Lebanon was one of the most important cities in the Phoenician world. Ships set sail from here to establish colonies across the Mediterranean, including the famous Carthage. Today, it is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site featuring impressive archaeological remains, one of the largest Roman hippodromes in the world, and a sandy coastline considered one of the most beautiful in Lebanon.

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Read the full piece in the Jerusalem Post.

The post The City Across Our Border That Turned UN Soldiers into Its Tourists appeared first on JINSA.