Trump Is Right to Target the Houthis

National Review Online

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

 

Watching the Biden administration agonize over the seemingly intractable conundrum represented by Houthi militants firing on commercial and naval vessels along the coast of Yemen, you might have thought this ragtag terrorist outfit was an unmanageable menace. President Trump wants to put paid to this ridiculous notion.

 

Within days of taking office, Trump brought a new attitude to this threat. Biden had undertaken a strategically unsound effort to penalize Saudi Arabia for its conduct in its war against the Houthis, and he lifted the designation of the Houthis — or “Ansar Allah” — as a foreign terrorist organization. Trump redesignated the Houthis.

 

For a time, the threat implicit in that act had its intended effect, with the Houthis signaling “they would limit their attacks in the Red Sea corridor to only Israeli-affiliated ships,” the Associated Press reported shortly after the Trump administration’s change.

 

The Houthis and their Iranian benefactors saved face by insisting that the reduction in the attacks was inspired by the temporary cessation of hostilities between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. Israeli efforts to pressure Hamas into releasing the remaining October 7 hostages have supposedly compelled the Houthis to abandon their relative restraint. Last week, the terrorist group threatened to resume its campaign of attacks on shipping heading into the Gulf of Aden and toward the Suez Canal. The Trump administration responded with force.

 

Over the weekend, the president ordered a variety of precision strikes on Houthi targets, striking both military and command-and-control elements. U.S. military officials signaled that the strikes should be seen as the opening salvos of a sustained campaign. “Some of the key people involved in those missile launches are no longer with us,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of the Houthis following the operation, “and I can tell you that some of the facilities that they used are no longer existing, and that will continue.”

 

Critics of the Trump administration’s long-overdue attempt to degrade the Houthis’ capacity to disrupt international shipping (a terrorist initiative that is occasionally quite deferential to the West’s enemies in Beijing and Moscow) have made a variety of tendentious claims. The first is that the Trump administration’s strikes are destined to be as ineffectual as Joe Biden’s. After all, between January 2024 and Inauguration Day, the U.S. military and its allies conducted over 260 strikes on Houthi targets, but the attacks on merchant and naval assets kept coming. At one point, Biden himself admitted that the strikes had not deterred Houthi aggression but said they would continue in the same vein nonetheless. That concession should have led Biden and his war planners to conclude that purely retaliatory strikes on sites from which attacks on foreign ships were launched would not deter the militant group.

 

Fear of escalation and lending credence to Houthis’ claim to be at war with America — thereby inflaming regional tensions and potentially boosting Houthi recruitment — stayed Biden’s hand. The Trump administration is not bound by these psychological shackles. If he follows up, Trump’s broader targeting strategy may yield very different and welcome results.

 

The second claim opponents of Trump’s actions occasionally retail is the dubious notion that the United States is not defending a core interest in executing strikes on Houthi targets. The strikes are only a means by which the “D.C. War Machine” ensures that its “coffers” are “always full and its own authority is always increasing,” read the vulgar Marxian analysis provided by Glenn Greenwald. The so-called “restrainers” in Trump’s Pentagon might agree with this critique, skeptical that Yemen represents an important interest of the United States.

 

To the contrary, Joe Biden’s lethargic response to Ansar Allah’s Iran-backed terrorist campaign, which forced shipping companies to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid the Suez, truncated global trade and put upward pressure on prices. Protecting foreign trade from harassment by pirates is as American as apple pie. In addition, the obligation to guarantee free maritime navigation rights is one the U.S. inherited from the British, and there are no practical or plausible alternatives to the U.S.-led order on the high seas save one that would be administered by its foreign enemies, or descend into chaos.

 

Indeed, the Houthis’ relatively unmolested campaign of hijacking, marauding, and terrorism has provided us with yet another edifying glimpse of what a post-American world would look like. It would be a poorer and more dangerous world.

 

The Trump administration deserves credit for grasping the nettle here. We’ve seen what “restraint” got us in the Red Sea. Good old-fashioned deterrence is an improvement.