For more than two years, the 2023 Beijing-brokered agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran seemed to mark a shift in Gulf politics: Away from confrontation and towards managed coexistence. The agreement neither ended strategic rivalry nor sought to do so. Its significance was more limited but still consequential: It created political space for competition to…

United States officials met Houthi representatives at the US embassy in the Omani capital, Muscat, over the weekend after the Iran-aligned movement seized thousands of square kilometres of territory in just a few days. With strategically important islands and large stretches of Yemen’s Red Sea coast now under Houthi control, the group has tightened its…