President Donald Trump has, in the past, described America’s military involvement in the Middle East as “the worst decision ever made” and came into office vowing to to “end these endless wars.”

In some areas, the administration has followed through. The US has begun a major drawdown of US troops in Syria, following through on a goal dating back to Trump’s first term, and is threatening to “walk away” from its involvement in the war in Ukraine, with or without a deal to end the fighting.

But at the same time, the administration has quietly enmeshed US forces in yet another open-ended conflict in the Middle East, one that risks turning into exactly the sort of draining, distracting quagmire that Trump had pledged to avoid.

On March 15, the US began a campaign of airstrikes, known as “Operation Rough Rider,” against the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group that controls much of Yemen and has been firing at commercial ships and military vessels in the Red Sea since the beginning of the war in Gaza in 2023.

The Biden administration, as well as Israel’s military, also carried out a number of strikes against the Houthis, but the ongoing US campaign is far more extensive. There have been at least 250 reported airstrikes so far, according to open-source data collected by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute.

According to some reports, more than 500 Houthi fighters have been killed, including a number of senior commanders, though the group tends to be tight-lipped about its casualties. The Yemen Data Project, a monitoring group, also documented more than 200 civilian casualties in the first month of bombing. The largest strike so far, on a key oil terminal on Yemen’s coast, killed more than 74 people last week.

The strikes have destroyed “command and control facilities, weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations,” a US defense........

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