Gustavo de Arístegui,
September 18, 2026
I. INTRODUCTION
Three key issues, discussed in depth today, allow us to understand with unusual clarity the power reorganization that the Gulf War is causing. The first is diplomatic and features Beijing as an unexpected protagonist: Saudi Arabia has asked China for help, and China has asked Iran to stop the Houthi terrorists, that terrorist and mafia-like organization that in twenty-five years has gone from being an armed group in the mountains of northern Yemen to controlling the eastern shore of one of the major bottlenecks of world trade. The second is military and doctrinal: Ukrainian and Western officers consulted by Reuters state unequivocally that the Atlantic Alliance is not prepared for the war that is already being waged. The third is industrial and bureaucratic: Washington has authorized the sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia for $24.3 billion, eighteen months after Riyadh requested them, with deliveries not expected until well into the next decade.
All three share a common key to understanding them: time. The West’s adversaries operate with clocks of weeks; our democracies, with clocks of five-year periods. This temporal asymmetry, not the arithmetic of budgets, is today the primary strategic vulnerability of the free world.
II. NEWS FROM THE LAST 24 HOURS
1. Beijing enters the scene: China pressures Tehran to stop the Houthi terrorists
Facts
Reuters revealed yesterday, citing three Iranian sources familiar with the matter and reporting from Dubai, that China has privately asked Tehran to help curb the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. This request came after Riyadh appealed to Beijing for assistance in the face of the terrorist organization’s rapid advance along the Red Sea coast and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which has severely jeopardized Saudi oil exports and maritime traffic. Publicly, Chinese diplomacy has limited itself to calling for restraint, dialogue, and the restoration of navigational safety; the private message, according to these sources, went considerably further. The Chinese Foreign Ministry also stated its opposition to the spread of tensions to Yemen and the Red Sea, that the sovereignty and security of all countries must be respected, and that vital infrastructure should not be attacked.
Tehran’s response, according to the same sources, was that regional stability and peace depend on an end to the war the United States and Israel are waging against Iran. The Chinese interlocutors made no explicit threats or hinted at economic retaliation if the Iranian regime did not use its influence over the Houthis.
China’s leverage is considerable and worth quantifying. For over a decade, China has been Iran’s largest trading partner and the main buyer of its oil: according to the commodities analysis firm Kpler, Chinese purchases accounted for more than 80% of Iran’s seaborne crude oil exports in 2025, averaging approximately 1.4 million barrels per day. Beijing also boasts a significant diplomatic track record, having brokered the 2023 agreement that restored relations between Riyadh and Tehran. This influence, however, has well-known limits: within Iran, the relatively modest volume of non-oil Chinese trade and investment since the signing of the 25-year cooperation agreement in 2021 has been criticized for years, especially when compared to the investment commitments Beijing has made in the Gulf Arab monarchies.
Anatomy of a threat: from tribal armed group to terrorist organization with quasi-state capabilities
It is worth pausing, without summarizing, to examine the trajectory of this terrorist organization, because it explains much of what is happening today in the Red Sea. The Houthis emerged in the late 1990s as a movement to revitalize Zaidi Shiism in northern Yemen, under the leadership of the family that gives them their name. They waged six successive wars against the Yemeni government and in the process built a solid and cohesive tribal armed force. When the central Yemeni state disintegrated during the Arab Spring of 2011, they knew how to exploit the vacuum: they gained ground and developed their relationship with Iran and their Lebanese ally, the terrorist organization Hezbollah. In 2014, they seized the capital, Sana’a, overthrew the government, and thwarted the political transition sponsored by the Gulf states, which provoked the Saudi-led military intervention and years of civil war that ultimately resulted in a strategic stalemate and the 2022 ceasefire.
During the Gaza war, between 2023 and 2025, they launched missiles and drones against Israel and Red Sea shipping, presenting it as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. Since the United States attacked its main ally, the oligarchic-jihadist regime in Tehran, on February 28 of this year, they have again targeted shipping in the Red Sea and energy facilities inland from Saudi Arabia.
The internal ceasefire has collapsed in recent weeks, and fighting has resumed on the usual fronts: the northern governorates of Marib and Al Jawf, the city of Taiz in the southern highlands, Dali in the center of the country, and the Red Sea coastal strip known as Tihama. Last week, the Houthis advanced rapidly through southern Tihama, first capturing the port of Mocha and then the rest of the coastline and islands, so that their weapons now cover the entire shore of a strait twelve miles wide, barely nineteen kilometers across. These territorial gains allow them to block shipping on a vital route for Saudi oil exports to Asia and, even more worryingly, provide them with a launching pad for a potential ground offensive toward Aden. Saudi Arabia is bombing from the air in support of government forces.
Their ability to strike at long range with increasing accuracy is the reason why this organization matters far beyond Yemen today. Their ballistic missiles have hit targets in Israel at a distance of over 1,800 kilometers, and one of them struck near the perimeter of Israel’s main airport in 2025. They strike Saudi Arabia much more frequently, targeting both cities and critical infrastructure. Their anti-ship missiles have even brought traffic in the Red Sea to a standstill. Drones, meanwhile, are now being used massively on the battlefield, a substantial change from the pre-2022 civil war phase. Videos released by the organization itself since early September show unmanned aircraft launching various types of mortar shells and bombs at vehicles and fighters, precision munition impacts on buildings and trucks filmed by high-resolution drones, and equipment captured from Riyadh-backed forces in Tihama: armored and combat vehicles, a tank, an artillery piece, a satellite dish, and drone jamming equipment, although this equipment is not shown in use.
The 2025 report by the UN (United Nations) expert group is the definitive document on how these people are arming themselves. The Houthis have developed their missile and drone technologies by combining foreign technical assistance with domestic manufacturing. Arms smuggling has been widespread despite the UN embargo, both overland across the Omani border and by sea. Seized items include drone control devices, equipment for receiving navigation data from ships, drone motors, and missile components. A previous report, from 2023, documented the interception of complete drones, chemical precursors for ballistic missiles, and Iranian-made anti-tank missiles. Iranian sources have acknowledged supplying weapons and experts, while Tehran officially denies arming the Houthis in violation of the embargo. The IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies) concluded in 2025 that, despite its progress in its own production, it continues to depend on Iran for key technologies and advanced capabilities.
The same group of UN experts estimates its fighters at 350,000, a force obtained in part through the recruitment of minors under eighteen, a fact that must be emphasized in all its starkness because it constitutes a clear war crime. Its tactics rely on infiltration, drone attacks, artillery harassment along the lines of contact, and the planting of mines and explosive devices. Baraa Shiban, a research associate at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, maintains that Iranian and Hezbollah training began shortly after the Arab Spring and was decisive in transforming that tribal force into a structured military organization, with changes in its organization and procedures. United Nations experts document the presence of Hezbollah missile and drone operators alongside the Houthis in 2025, as well as the presence in Yemen of General Abdolreza Shahlaei, of the Quds Force (Nirú-ye Qods) of the IRGC (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).
To this military dimension must be added another, much less frequently mentioned, yet inseparable from the former: the mafia dimension. The Houthis finance their war machine with methods akin to those of organized crime. They tax port traffic and goods in the territories they control, impose extortion and protection rackets on merchants, transporters, and shipowners, control the smuggling of fuel and weapons across the Omani border and by sea—as documented by the UN expert group—and have systematically diverted humanitarian aid in a country where the population depends on imports for food. The naval blockade they have imposed on Saudi ports follows this same logic of extortion: whoever controls a strait sells passage rights. It is the same system Tehran employs in the Strait of Hormuz, transposed to the other end of the Arabian Peninsula. Terrorism in its aims, mafia-like methods, and an Iranian franchise in its command structure: all three simultaneously, and not incidentally.
Implications
The first conclusion is terminological, and therefore doctrinal. Calling those who recruit children, mine roads, fire anti-ship missiles at civilian merchant vessels, and bomb Saudi cities “rebels,” “militia,” “insurgent movement,” or “non-state actor” is a methodological error rather than a stylistic one, and we cannot let our guard down on this for a single day, because linguistic precision is the first line of defense for any analysis. The Houthis are a terrorist and mafia-like organization, endowed with quasi-state capabilities and integrated into the network of proxies (intermediary organizations) of the oligarchic-jihadist regime in Tehran—that is, of a terrorist state and exporter of instability—along with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Hamas in Gaza, and the pro-Iranian organizations in Iraq. This is how they must be designated in international forums, how they must be treated in practice, and how we will continue to refer to them in this report. Six hundred years ago, in his Muqaddimah , Ibn Khaldun explained that tribal cohesion, asabiyya , is the driving force that allows mountain and desert peoples to conquer settled civilizations. The Houthis have added to this ancestral cohesion the technology of a sponsoring state, and the result is a formidable hybrid: the clan solidarity of Zaidi Yemen with the ballistic missiles and drones of Tehran.
The second conclusion concerns the regional order. The fact that Riyadh has sought help from Beijing, and not exclusively from Washington, is a highly significant development. It doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia is abandoning its alliance with the United States, as demonstrated by the F-35 operation we analyze below, but rather that it is deliberately hedging its risks, turning to each power for what each can offer: from Beijing it seeks influence over Tehran, from Washington it seeks technology and deterrence. This diversification is a direct consequence of a widespread perception throughout the Gulf of American unpredictability and strategic fatigue.
The third conclusion concerns China itself. Beijing is today a consumer of stability that does not want to be a producer of security. It exerts pressure, but does not threaten; it mediates, but does not deploy resources. Its interests are strictly commercial: almost 90% of the crude oil that passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war was destined for Asia, and China buys Iranian oil at a discount. A prolonged crisis at the two gateways to the Arabian Peninsula harms it more than any other major importer. Hence, its approach is sincere in substance and lukewarm in form: without threats of economic retaliation, the message has the value of a friendly warning, not an ultimatum.
The fourth conclusion is the most revealing. The Iranian response—that regional stability will come when the war against Iran ends—is, in reality, a form of blackmail. Tehran presents the Houthis as a key that only it can turn and sets a price for doing so. This confirms our recurring thesis: the ruling elite that currently dominates the Iranian security apparatus deliberately maintains hostilities because the war serves to consolidate its internal power. The Houthis are not an inconvenient ally that Tehran cannot control; they are an active negotiator.
The fifth conclusion concerns Europe, and it’s simple to state: it’s absent. Throughout this entire diplomatic sequence—Riyadh requests, Beijing negotiates, Tehran responds—not a single European capital appears, despite the fact that trade passing through Bab el-Mandeb and the Suez Canal is vital to our economies, since the additional freight and insurance costs are ultimately borne by European consumers. The European Union is the main victim of a crisis in whose management it is not participating.
Perspectives and scenarios
- Baseline scenario (most likely): Tehran offers Beijing cosmetic and time-limited moderation, without relinquishing the Houthi instrument. Chinese pressure produces gestures, not structural changes, as long as the war continues.
- Adverse scenario: The Houthis consolidate the coastline, launch the offensive towards Aden and de facto close Bab el Mandeb, with a clash of freight and insurance of global scope and risk of famine in a Yemen dependent on imports.
- Favorable scenario: Beijing turns the warning into real leverage —conditioning crude oil purchases— and, together with Omani mediation and Turkish contacts with Iran and the Emirates, a limited maritime truce is reached that reopens navigation without resolving the underlying political issues.
2. Is NATO prepared to fight? The West’s doctrinal and industrial gap
Facts
Reuters published an investigation yesterday from Kyiv, authored by Daniel Flynn, Max Hunder, and Olena Harmash, which bluntly poses the uncomfortable question: Is the Alliance prepared for the next war it may have to fight? Five senior Ukrainian and Western defense officials argue that battlefield events are moving so rapidly that some NATO weapons and tactics risk becoming obsolete. Ukraine adapts in weeks; the Alliance buys and develops systems over years, and sometimes decades.
The data presented in the report is telling. Denys Shtilerman, co-owner and chief designer of Fire Point, one of Ukraine’s leading manufacturers of missiles and drones, claims that tanks are now “useless” because a drone costing around $5,000 can destroy them, while Europe continues to spend lavishly on tanks. Numerous military analysts rightly counter that tanks retain an essential role in future battles. Cheap drones have also transformed the geometry of combat: troops in groups or large vehicle convoys have become easy targets. Oleksandr Pivnenko, commander of the Ukrainian National Guard, bluntly summarizes his impression of the allied soldiers his units trained last year: they assault positions very well, but if there’s a drone overhead and no one is looking up, the squad’s fate is sealed.
In June, Reuters attended a NATO exercise near Paldiski, Estonia—a Baltic country that is fortifying its 340-kilometer border with Russia—in which US and European troops treated dozens of simulated casualties in wartime field hospitals. The exercise, however, assumed NATO would control the airspace above these hospitals, something that is no longer guaranteed in the era of cheap, stealthy, long-range drones.
Ukrainian officials describe their country’s growing role as a teacher within the Alliance, not just a recipient of training and assistance, but warn that the allied military bureaucracy is having serious difficulty absorbing these lessons. A Ukrainian officer who attended a NATO psychological operations course in Romania told the agency that some of the training material still relied on World War II case studies. The Alliance did not respond to Reuters’ questions about these criticisms.
The report highlights a vulnerability that even allied officials consider far more difficult to address: air and missile defense. Russia’s relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities has underscored Europe’s dependence on US systems, particularly the Patriot, first deployed in the 1991 Gulf War. Ukraine suffers from a critical shortage of interceptors. Fearing that this dependence could become a strategic vulnerability, Europe is building non-US alternatives: Ukraine is awaiting delivery of the new Franco-Italian SAMP/T-NG system, designed to intercept ballistic missiles, whose deployment France has promised to expedite and which European diplomats had anticipated by next spring. In July, Ukraine and nine European allies launched an air defense coalition that includes the joint development of a new anti-ballistic missile system, called Freyja, a consortium of about a dozen companies with Fire Point as the main private partner. The goal is a system that is cheaper and faster to manufacture than the Patriot, and industrially controlled by Europe. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, in a statement, says that its soldiers and those of the Alliance have much to learn from each other and describes Ukraine’s use of drones and electronic warfare as unparalleled in the world.
It’s worth adding to the picture an industrial detail that the report omits but which is essential: the U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin signed a multi-year agreement this year, expanded in July to approximately $58.6 billion, to triple production of the PAC-3 MSE (Missile Segment Enhancement) interceptor, increasing it from about 600 to 2,000 missiles annually. However, the goal won’t be reached until 2030, and the supply chain involves fifteen sites in eleven states and some 13,000 suppliers. Just this week, Lockheed touted as an achievement the delivery, in twenty-two days, of the first batch of components manufactured in a new partnership with General Motors.
Implications
This is, in our view, the most important article of the day, because it touches on the crux of the Western problem: the lack of preparedness for 21st-century warfare, particularly within the Atlantic Alliance. The issue is not one of money—spending has grown considerably under the combined pressure of Russian aggression and President Trump’s admonitions—but rather of speed of adaptation. Ukraine redesigns a drone in weeks because the enemy forces it to; NATO takes years to approve an operational requirement and decades to move a program from paper to an operational unit. The Corinthians warned the Spartans, as Thucydides recounts in the first book of his Histories, that the Athenians were innovative, quick to conceive and execute, while they were distinguished by preserving what they had and always arriving late. The West has, without realizing it, settled into the role of Sparta.
The second implication is cost asymmetry. A $5,000 drone destroys a multi-million dollar tank; a swarm of $2,000 drones necessitates the expenditure of interceptors costing between four and five million dollars each. No economy, however powerful, can indefinitely win a war in which the defender pays a thousand times more than the attacker for every exchange. The answer is not to abandon high-end systems—the thesis that the main battle tank is “useless,” put forward by a drone manufacturer with a vested interest, is clearly excessive and refuted by analysts—but rather to build inexpensive and abundant layers of defense: anti-aircraft artillery, low-cost interceptors, electronic warfare, jamming, and directed-energy weapons, integrated with the expensive systems that should be reserved for high-end threats.
The third implication is the demise of the assumption of air superiority. All of the Alliance’s logistical, medical, and rear-echelon planning rests on a premise inherited from the expeditionary operations of the last thirty years: that the skies are ours. On the eastern flank, that premise is obsolete. Field hospitals, rail junctions, ammunition depots, and command posts must now be designed to operate under constant observation and fire.
The fourth implication is directly linked to the first point in this report and to the Gulf crisis. The shortage of interceptors that leaves Saudi Arabia defenseless against Houthi drones and missiles, and the shortage that leaves Ukraine vulnerable to Russian bombing, stem from the same industrial base and the same bottleneck. Two theaters of conflict, a single supply chain, and a production rate that will not catch up until 2030. That is the strategic fact of the year, far more important than any summit or solemn declaration.
The fifth implication is institutional and is indeed the direct responsibility of the European political classes we have been criticizing in this report. The fact that a NATO psychological operations course in 2026 is taught using World War II case studies while the first industrial drone war in history is being waged just 600 kilometers away is not a mere anecdote: it is symptomatic of a bureaucracy that has confused procedure with effectiveness. Ukraine should now be institutionalized as a NATO doctrinal laboratory, with joint training centers, mixed drone units, and an emergency wartime procurement mechanism.
Perspectives and scenarios
- Baseline scenario: spending continues to rise and doctrine continues to lag; Freyja and the SAMP/T-NG suffer delays and dependence on the Patriot lasts throughout the decade.
- Adverse scenario: Moscow tests the eastern flank with a hybrid action or an incident in the Baltic before the new anti-aircraft capabilities mature, coinciding with a reduction of the US military presence in Europe resulting from the Pentagon’s ongoing review.
- Favorable scenario: the Euro-Ukrainian anti-aircraft coalition accelerates, war contracts with compressed deadlines are adopted, and the Alliance formally incorporates the Ukrainian experience into its doctrine and training.
3. Washington authorizes the sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia: $24.3 billion and a lesson in slowness
Facts
The U.S. State Department announced yesterday its approval of a potential foreign military sale (FMS) of 48 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, along with 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, secure communications equipment, spare parts, and support equipment, for an estimated $24.3 billion. Formal notification to Congress was submitted through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). The State Department maintains that the transaction will enhance the Kingdom’s ability to deter current and future threats by strengthening its territorial defenses and asserts that it will not alter the military balance in the region.
If production and delivery are completed, which would take years, Saudi Arabia would become the second F-35 operator in the Middle East after Israel and the first Arab country to acquire the fifth-generation fighter jet. Riyadh requested it directly from President Trump in early 2025, and the deal was reaffirmed during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington in November of that year, as part of a major military procurement package. The proposal was referred to two congressional committees in June 2026 for informal consultation, and authorization has now been granted, eighteen months after the initial request.
The announcement came a day after The New York Times reported on concerns within the U.S. intelligence community—particularly in a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report—about the possibility of China obtaining or stealing technology from the aircraft, given that Beijing is the Kingdom’s largest trading partner and due to safety concerns at the facilities where the fighters would operate. There is an uncomfortable precedent: the Biden administration let the F-35 sale to the United Arab Emirates, which Trump had announced in 2020, lapse precisely because of the ties between Abu Dhabi and Beijing.
The second obstacle is Israeli. Since 2008, the US Congress has enshrined in law the obligation to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME), meaning the qualitative superiority of its forces over any combination of regional adversaries. Israeli officials have expressed their concern, although they expect Washington to guarantee their access to superior capabilities. According to various reports, the Saudi aircraft would receive a deliberately limited configuration, without access to the source code or the ability to integrate their own weaponry. It is important to emphasize that an approved sale is not a signed sale: the congressional review period, the letter of offer and acceptance, production slots, and industrial offsets remain to be determined.
Implications
The underlying lesson, and the one we find most relevant, has nothing to do with the Gulf, but rather with how the West wages war: even in wartime, negotiations for urgent weapons systems contracts are exasperatingly slow. Eighteen months passed from the Saudi request to authorization; the conflict has been open since February 28th; deliveries, in the best-case scenario, will be staggered toward the end of the decade. Napoleon is credited with replying to a marshal who asked for extensions: “Ask me for whatever you want, just less time.” The quote is of dubious attribution, but the principle is irrefutable, because time is the only resource no power can manufacture.
The second implication is the mismatch between the object of the sale and the nature of the threat. What Riyadh needs today, while its cities and oil terminals are receiving drones and ballistic missiles, is not stealth fighters that will arrive in the 2030s, but interceptors, radars, sensors, and anti-drone systems that will arrive this fall. An illustrative calculation, although the items are not interchangeable, helps to measure the discrepancy: the $24.3 billion package would be equivalent, at the unit prices used by the U.S. Army for the PAC-3 MSE, to an order of magnitude of between 4,500 and 6,000 interceptors. No figure better expresses the gap between the logic of large-scale acquisition programs and the logic of the war being waged.
The third implication is strategic and positive, and it’s important to state this clearly to avoid a one-sided judgment. The operation reaffirms Saudi Arabia as a key US ally at a time when the Kingdom is under siege from Iranian proxies, and it’s consistent with the position we held regarding the civilian nuclear agreement in July: Riyadh is a pillar of regional stability and a solid partner, and it deserves different treatment than a state sponsor of terrorism. The message to Tehran is unequivocal. There’s also a cover calculation at play, and this brings us full circle with the first piece of news in this report: on the same day that Riyadh asks Beijing to pressure Tehran, Washington offers it the most advanced fighter jet in its arsenal. The Kingdom is diversifying its strategies; the United States is striving not to lose its own.
The fourth implication is one of prudence. The DIA’s objections should not be dismissed as a mere bureaucratic hurdle. The transfer of fifth-generation stealth technology to a country whose primary trading partner is China, and in a context of systematic and documented Chinese industrial espionage, demands exceptional security guarantees regarding the facilities, maintenance, supply chain, and personnel. Safeguarding Israel’s qualitative military advantage is not a political concession: it is a U.S. legal obligation and a stabilizing factor in itself, because predictability in the regional balance reduces incentives for military adventure.
The fifth implication is industrial in nature and affects Europe equally. Arms export control procedures exist for excellent reasons: proliferation, end use, human rights, and technological protection. But a system designed for peacetime, applied without adaptation to wartime, produces the worst possible outcome: slow and politically costly decisions. The West needs fast tracks for urgent defensive capabilities—interceptors, anti-drone systems, sensors—while reserving lengthy procedures for offensive capabilities with a high proliferation risk. In short, it is a matter of distinguishing between what saves lives tomorrow and what disrupts the balance of power a decade from now.
Perspectives and scenarios
- Baseline scenario: Congress does not block the operation; the letter of offer and acceptance is signed in 2027 and the deliveries, with a degraded configuration compared to the Israeli one, are staggered towards the end of the decade.
- Adverse scenario: the leak of the DIA report fuels resistance on Capitol Hill and a joint resolution of disapproval, supported by the pro-Israel lobby and by Republican sectors concerned about China, freezes the sale as happened with the Emirates.
- Favorable scenario: the sale fits into an integrated regional air and missile defense architecture, is linked to normalization with Israel, and is accompanied by an accelerated delivery of interceptors and anti-drone systems that addresses the Kingdom’s real urgency.
III. MEDIA RACK
Reuters sets the agenda for the day with three original pieces: the exclusive from Dubai on Chinese pressure on Tehran, the report from Kiev on the preparations of the Atlantic Alliance and the information from Washington on the authorization of the sale of the F-35s, to which it adds a detailed analysis —the explainer— on the military metamorphosis of the Houthi terrorists.
The New York Times was a day ahead of the curve in revealing US intelligence reports about the risk of China gaining access to stealth fighter technology, a fact that will condition the entire debate in Congress.
The Jerusalem Post reports the reaction of Israeli security analysts, who demand that any sale preserve the qualitative military advantage and be integrated into a regional architecture; Yedioth Ahronoth , in its digital edition, emphasizes that Israel expects Washington to guarantee the preservation of superior capabilities and recalls the previous request to link the sale to the normalization of relations with Riyadh.
The Japan Times and the Asian press widely reproduce the analysis on the Houthis, a symptom of the nervousness of the major oil importers of the Far East in the face of the double blockade of Hormuz and Bab el Mandeb.
In the field of research centers, RUSI provides the key to Iranian and Hezbollah training in the transformation of the Yemeni terrorist organization, and the IISS maintains its 2025 assessment: there is local production, but dependence on Tehran for critical technologies remains decisive.
IV. RISK TRAFFIC LIGHT
● Very high / critical ● High ● Medium ● Ordinary
| Risk | Level | Trend | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Houthi terrorist control of the Bab el Mandeb riverbank | ●Critical | ↑ | After the capture of Moca and the coast and islands of the southern Red Sea, their weapons cover the entire eastern shore of a strait 19 kilometers wide. |
| Houthi ground offensive towards Aden | ●Very high | ↑ | Southern Tihama is now the starting point. The fall of Aden would eliminate the recognized government and complete the Yemenization of the conflict. |
| NATO doctrinal and industrial gap | ●High | ↑ | Ukraine adapts in weeks what the Alliance acquires in years or decades. Training material with cases from World War II. |
| European dependence on the Patriot and shortage of interceptors | ●High | → | Monthly consumption exceeds annual production. The expansion to 2,000 CAP-3 MSE per year will not be completed until 2030. |
| Risk of F-35 technology transfer to China | ●High | ↑ | The DIA warns of espionage or leaks originating from Saudi facilities. The Emirati precedent of 2021 resulted in the sale being frozen. |
| Washington’s displacement by Beijing as interlocutor of the Gulf | ●Half | ↑ | Riyadh is asking China for what it previously asked of the United States. Beijing is managing stability without incurring security costs. |
| Erosion of Israel’s qualitative military advantage | ●Half | ↑ | Legal requirement since 2008. Foreseeable technical degradation of the Saudi configuration to preserve it. |
| Euro-Ukrainian defense industrial cooperation | ●Ordinary | ↑ | Freyja, the SAMP/T-NG and the July anti-aircraft coalition are all pointing in the right direction, albeit with still slow timelines. |
V. EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
Machiavelli dedicated Chapter XIII of *The Prince* to auxiliary weapons, those borrowed by a prince from a more powerful one, and declared them useless and dangerous, because if they lose, one is ruined, and if they win, one is taken prisoner. Five hundred years later, Europe is fighting the war in Ukraine with borrowed interceptors, and Saudi Arabia is defending its cities with air defense ammunition that depends on an external and overburdened supply chain. The Florentine’s lesson has not aged a day: he who does not build his own defense does not decide his own destiny.
Today’s three news stories paint the same picture from different angles. A terrorist organization that twenty years ago fought with rifles in the mountains of northern Yemen now controls the shore of a strait through which a tenth of the world’s maritime trade passes, and to negotiate with it, you have to call Tehran, and to call Tehran, you have to ask Beijing for a favor. A military alliance that won the Cold War without firing a shot is conducting training exercises based on eighty-year-old cases, while the first industrial drone war is being waged on its eastern flank. A superpower takes eighteen months to authorize the sale of fighter jets that won’t arrive until the next decade, while its ally is currently being hit by drones that cost less than a small car.
Once again, our thesis on the Iran war is confirmed: tactical and military-strategic success is countered by an unmitigated geopolitical failure, aggravated by the lack of post-conflict planning. A regime has been decapitated without dismantling its network, and that network has learned to operate independently with the tools its leader provided.
From all this emerges an agenda that requires neither solemn summits nor new declarations, but rather low-key yet highly effective administrative decisions: fast-track procurement processes for urgent defensive capabilities, inexpensive and abundant layers of air defense, the formal designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization—which they are, and also a mafia-like organization franchised by Tehran—with all the legal, financial, and operational consequences that entails, an integrated regional architecture in the Gulf, and the institutionalization of Ukraine as a doctrinal laboratory for the Alliance. None of this requires heroic courage: it requires common sense, vision, and the will to break with procedures designed for a world that no longer exists. That something so modest is so difficult today describes the state of our leadership better than any analysis.