The Blockade That Isn't Working Is Still Killing People: Yemen's War Restarts to Bankroll Washington's Iran Adventure

Six months into the United States' war on Iran, the Congressional Budget Office has finally put a number on it: $38 billion and climbing at $2–3 billion a month, mostly for missiles Washington now has to replace. That figure landed the same week the Houthis fired ballistic missiles and drones at four Saudi cities, and government forces abandoned the port of Mokha, edging Yemen's civil war back open after more than three years of fragile truce. These are not two separate stories. They are the same war, told from the ledger and from the rubble, and the ledger is the only one Washington is reading.

The mechanics are ugly and simple. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz months ago, so Saudi Arabia rerouted its oil exports through the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait — straight past a Yemen that never actually finished its war, just paused it. The Houthis, who spent a decade fighting a Saudi-backed government to a stalemate, saw the chokepoint and used it: a naval blockade against Saudi shipping, then, when that failed to move Riyadh, strikes on Saudi oil facilities and military bases in Abha, Jizan, Khamis Mushait and Najran. Government forces have now retreated from Hodeidah's approaches; Yemen's presidential council is talking about marching on Sanaa again. A truce that held since 2022, however badly, is coming apart because a much larger power's war made the strait valuable again.

Nobody arguing about the CBO's $38 billion figure in Washington this week is going to mention that 40 million Yemenis — the population of a war that already killed 150,000 people and pushed the country to the edge of famine — are the ones absorbing the restart. That absence is not an accident. It's what happens when a war's costs are tallied exclusively in the currency of the state waging it: munitions replaced, flying hours logged, missile-defense interceptors reordered. The CBO report is candid that it excludes the cost of Iranian strikes on U.S. bases and doesn't touch what happens to the people underneath any of it. A dead Yemeni port worker or a family fleeing Taiz doesn't show up on anyone's balance sheet, because the balance sheet was never built to hold them.

This is the shape imperial war economics always takes: a great power picks a fight, a regional client absorbs the blowback, and a smaller, poorer population gets to fight a proxy war for a strait they don't control and an outcome they don't choose. Saudi Arabia isn't a passive victim here either — it spent a decade bombing Yemen into the truce that's now collapsing, and its own $2.8 billion arms purchase from Washington this month, alongside a $3 billion transfer of bombs to Israel, keeps the entire regional machine running on money that could not plausibly buy anything except more of this. When Congress debates the $38 billion line item, what it's really debating is whether the war is affordable for the state that started it. Whether it's survivable for the state that didn't is not on the agenda.

None of this is abstract to the people who will be shelled in Hodeidah or displaced from Taiz in the coming weeks. The lesson from six months of Iran-war accounting is that the number that gets published is never the number that matters — it measures munitions, not mortality, and it treats a resumed Yemeni civil war as a footnote to an interstate ledger rather than what it actually is: a war whose costs a poor country pays so a rich one's can look survivable in a committee hearing. Solidarity here doesn't mean picking a side in Riyadh vs. Sanaa. It means refusing to let the arithmetic of empire decide whose deaths count.

Sources

Roll Call: Iran war has cost $38 billion and counting, CBO says
CNBC: Iran war has cost Pentagon $38 billion and depleted missile stockpiles, CBO says
TIME: Iran War Has Cost U.S. Nearly $40 Billion and Fueled Inflation, CBO Finds
Institute for the Study of War: Iran Update, September 8, 2026
Telangana Today: Iran seeks end to Saudi blockade of Yemen after Houthi rebels take key port