Twenty years ago, inspired by Hizballah’s success in driving the IDF from southern Lebanon, Palestinian leaders unleashed the second intifada—a campaign of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks intended to drive Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, and eventually to bring about its collapse. A year later, Americans saw al-Qaeda visit similar tactics on New York City and Washington, DC. Jonathan Spyer sees these events as ushering in an age of Islamist insurgency that, as the century enters its third decade, has finally come to an end:

From 2010 to 2014, Islamist popular mobilization and insurgency arrived in mass form in the heartland of the Arab Islamic world itself. This was evident in the rapid takeover of the Syrian rebellion by Sunni Islamist militias, in the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief triumph in Egypt, and reaching its purest, most unalloyed expression in the shape of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate.

Look around the Arabic-speaking world today. Where does one find an insurgency led from below—a jihad, a popular revolt—of the kind premiered by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad during the second intifada and then witnessed on a vastly larger scale by the Syrian Sunni Arab rebellion and Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Islamist-dominated insurgency against the former Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi, and the mass civil revolts in Egypt and Tunisia? Nowhere.

The main legacy of Islamist insurgency’s tearing asunder of the Arab world, paradoxically, is the terminal weakening of a number of Arab states, and their penetration by a variety of regional and global non-Arab powers. These powers—Iran, Turkey, Russia, and the United States—make use of the remnant organizations of the insurgents as contractors and cannon fodder for their own designs.

Political Islam, meanwhile, has itself entered a new phase. No longer an insurgent banner, it is now a decoration used by powerful states as part of their justification of themselves. Today, it is borne along by Turkey and Iran, and this is its main remaining relevance. . . . The states have returned. The Middle East is entering a phase of great-power competition.

For more than a year, the Iran-backed Houthis have been launching drones and missiles at ships traversing the Red Sea, as well as at Israeli territory, in support of Hamas. This development has drastically curtailed shipping through the Suez Canal and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, driving up trade prices. This week, the Trump administration began an extensive bombing campaign against the Houthis in an effort to reopen that crucial waterway. Burcu Ozcelik highlights another benefit of this action:

The administration has a broader geopolitical agenda—one that includes countering China’s economic leverage, particularly Beijing’s reliance on Iranian oil. By targeting the Houthis, the United States is not only safeguarding vital shipping lanes but also exerting pressure on the Iran-China energy nexus, a key component of Beijing’s strategic posture in the region.

China was the primary destination for up to 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports in 2024, underscoring the deepening economic ties between Beijing and Tehran despite U.S. sanctions. By helping fill Iranian coffers, China aids Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in financing proxies like the Houthis. Since October of last year, notable U.S. Treasury announcements have revealed covert links between China and the Houthis.

Striking the Houthis could trigger broader repercussions—not least by disrupting the flow of Iranian oil to China. While difficult to confirm, it is conceivable and has been reported, that the Houthis may have received financial or other forms of compensation from China (such as Chinese-made military components) in exchange for allowing freedom of passage for China-affiliated vessels in the Red Sea.