The Houthis, a rebel group in northern Yemen, have been fighting against the Yemeni government since 2004. But only recently, in the aftermath of the attempted Christmas day bombing by Yemeni national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has the conflict captured the attention of the Western world. Observers increasingly fear that the Houthi conflict has diverted Yemen’s limited resources away from combating al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in the Arabian Peninsula. Spectators also fear that the conflict may morph into a new front in the struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony.

This is not the first time that an internal conflict in Yemen has become the epicenter of regional power tensions between major Middle Eastern states. In 1962, a coup d’état carried out by republican forces in Yemen overthrew the ruling Zaydi imamate. This coup sparked a civil war that lasted until 1970 and drew in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the major Middle East powers of the day. While the scale of the present day conflict cannot compare to the Yemen Civil War, a vicious, drawn-out clash that resulted in over 100,000 deaths, policymakers would do well to study the lessons of Yemeni history. As the United States helps Yemen in its counter-terrorist campaign against al-Qaeda, it must pay close attention to these lessons to ensure that the country’s internal conflicts do not morph into a costly and destabilizing regional power struggle.

Yemen already shows signs of becoming a battleground for Middle Eastern powers. This past November, Houthi rebels crossed into Saudi territory and attacked a Saudi patrol, claiming that Saudi Arabia was assisting Yemen in its counter-Houthi offensive. This raid precipitated a wider Saudi campaign to crush the Houthi forces that has resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides. Saudi Arabia also fears that Iran is supporting the Houthis to undermine Saudi Arabia’s regional position. This belief is bolstered by the rebels’ sympathetic portrayal in the Iranian media and their use of Katyusha rockets, weapons Iran has also provided to Hezbollah and Hamas, its other proxy groups in the region. Al-Arabiya similarly reports that Yemeni authorities have captured unmarked ships with Iranian crews carrying weapons bound for the rebels.

Iran’s support for the Houthis is particularly significant because the rebels are Zaydis, a small, heterodox sect of Shia Islam highly distinct from the Iranian Twelver Shi’ism. Iran’s support of not merely the Houthi Zaydis but also radical Sunni groups like al-Qaeda and Hamas demonstrates that the nation’s policy choices are dictated not by only religious doctrine but by an attempt to undermine and destabilize competing governments of the region.

This provides a striking parallel to the Civil War in North Yemen. Then, as now, Yemen served as a battleground for regional hegemony. Egypt, under the leadership of Abdel Nasser, sought to extend its influence over Saudi Arabia by supporting the republican forces in Yemen. These forces overthrew the Zaydi royalists, who received support from Saudi Arabia despite the clear doctrinal differences between the faith of the Zaydis and Saudi Arabia’s conservative Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam. Ultimately, religious considerations took a backseat to the threat posed by revolutionary Egypt to the Saudi monarchy. Though the current Yemeni conflict has not yet resulted in war, Yemen continues to serve as a crucial hot spot for regional power struggles, and the United States must understand that forces greater than religion are at play.

The past conflict also provides important lessons about how impermanent and tenuous alliances in the region can be. In the past war, the Houthi rebels, now viewed as an Iranian proxy, received support from Saudi Arabia. Iran also supported the Zaydi royalists, sharing the Saudis’ fear of the growing power of revolutionary Egypt. Because alliances in this troubled area are clearly motivated by strategic convenience rather than, as some in the West believe, religion, these alliances can change radically over the course of mere decades.

The potential danger of growing Iranian influence is perhaps the greatest specific lesson for the US. At the beginning of February, the Houthi rebels and Yemeni government signed a cease-fire. While this cease-fire has admittedly been breached on occasion, the United States now has an opportunity to capitalize on the relative lapse in violence and take steps to prevent Iran from turning the conflict into a proxy war that could disintegrate into a second Yemeni civil war. One important step that the US can take in order to prevent the Yemeni conflict from becoming part of this growing trend is to devote its naval resources in the Gulf of Aden to assisting the Yemeni government in preventing Iranian weapons from reaching Houthi rebels. A concurrent effort to convince Saudi Arabia, a nation in which the US stations troops, to lessen its direct involvement in Yemen could also have important long-term consequences in lessening the scope of the conflict.

US policymakers must recognize that, as in the past, the alignments between regional powers and their proxies in Yemen are not based primarily on a religious Sunni-Shia divide but are instead grounded in strategic concerns. While current regional alignments in the Middle East may seem to be set in stone, they in fact may undergo dramatic and unexpected shifts as the strategic environment on the ground fluctuates. Therefore, when US policy makers confront Yemen and the Middle East as a whole, they must strive to remain a step ahead of the game, drawing lessons from the North Yemeni Civil War about the mutability and ever-changing nature of alliances and hostilities in the region.