Protect the Red Sea

National Review Online

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

 

Preserving the free and open navigation of the seas for the commercial traffic from which Americans benefit is literally the reason the U.S. Navy was launched. A series of attacks on American shipping interests compelled Congress to consent in 1794 to the commissioning of six frigates tasked with putting an end to the Barbary pirates’ marauding. The U.S. Navy assumed responsibility for the preservation of the maritime-trade regime from the British at the end of the Second World War, and it has done a commanding job of maintaining that lynchpin of the global economy. Until now.

 

Since the October 7 massacre, the Iran-backed Houthi militia group in Yemen has engaged in a reckless campaign of militarism with utter impunity. Missiles and drones originating from Houthi-controlled Yemeni territory began sailing “potentially towards targets in Israel,” according to the Pentagon, within a little over a week after Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians. They haven’t stopped since.

 

Houthi militants have reportedly fired ordnance in the “general direction” of U.S. naval ships in the Red Sea. They have targeted commercial-shipping vessels with high explosives. They attempted to seize container ships in raids from the sea using fast boats and from air via helicopter. They took down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone valued at over $30 million. The minimal consequences the Houthis experienced as a result of this campaign are sufficient to explain why it has only grown more brazen.

 

The White House’s failure to contain the Houthi threat has allowed it to metastasize into a global crisis. Over the weekend, two container vessels were hit by Houthi rockets and set ablaze. The unacceptable threat to their assets compelled multinational shipping giants such as MSC, Maersk, and British Petroleum to reroute their ships away from the Houthis’ reach. But avoiding the Bab el-Mandeb Strait — a narrow waterway between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that leads into the Red Sea and, eventually, the Suez Canal — is no minor inconvenience.

 

The firms that have already announced they are steering away from the strait account for roughly 60 percent of global maritime trade. Even before those firms rerouted their vessels to longer transit routes, the Houthis’ attacks pushed ocean-freight costs up by about 5 percent. Those costs are only going to grow. Hundreds of billions of dollars and the stability of the global supply chain are now in the balance. The past three years have graphically illustrated the extent to which global supply chains and shipping costs are a kitchen-table issue for the cost of living in modern America.

 

So far, the Biden administration has treated the Houthis’ disruptions like a nuisance. U.S. Navy vessels in the region have served admirably, responding to distress calls from commercial interests with all due alacrity and intercepting drones and rockets insofar as it is possible. But this response is insufficient, as the Biden administration now tacitly admits.

 

On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced that it was creating a new multinational task force with the goal of protecting ships transiting through the Red Sea. That sounds like a valuable enterprise save for the fact that it is a redundancy. The U.S., British, and other Western naval assets in the region busily defending themselves from Houthi attacks are already engaged in that very mission. They are part of Combined Task Force 153, which was established in 2022 to provide for “international maritime security and capacity building efforts in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden,” according to the Navy. More defensive operations in the strait aren’t going to restore deterrence. What is needed now is offense.

 

What has stayed Joe Biden’s hand? If Politico’s reporting is to be believed, the administration’s apoplexy is attributable to pigheaded ideological convictions shared by the president’s key advisers. On December 6, the outlet revealed that the Pentagon “has neither briefed President Joe Biden on options to strike Houthi targets nor recommended that he do so.” The rationales on offer for this act of insubordination were positively craven. Biden-administration officials insisted that the Houthis were only targeting vessels with ties to Israeli firms — a claim that is both untrue and irrelevant. They insisted that the Houthis’ rockets weren’t “overly precise,” which is betrayed by the number of commercial ships this terroristic organization has managed to hit. Lastly, Biden aides fretted that attacking the Houthis directly risks putting America on the same side as Saudi Arabia in its conflict with the militia group, scuttling the White House’s efforts to isolate Riyadh.

 

The Biden administration’s solipsism has allowed the crisis in the Red Sea to spiral out of control. The Pentagon has all the assets in place to execute a retaliatory response against Houthi targets, but a slap on the wrist will not revive the status quo ante. Like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis are attacking Western interests at Iran’s behest. The Middle East is alive with military activity because Tehran desires it. Iran will continue to test its freedom of action until its campaign of provocations draws an unacceptably high cost. The time in which a tailored response to Iranian aggression might restore deterrence has passed. Instead, it is now time for a meaningful strike on Iranian and Houthi assets in the region that is closer in scale to the 2020 killing of their terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani than to the recent bombing of empty warehouses.

 

The test the Iranians and their proxy forces are presenting to the Biden administration cannot be understated. What is American hegemony if not global-maritime-navigation rights guaranteed by U.S. naval power? What cues will America’s adversaries take if an Iranian satrap is allowed to establish an inviolable sphere of influence off Yemen’s coasts? How will the Russians and the Chinese respond to the perverse incentives the Biden administration is encouraging?

 

The British understood that their rule of the waves was the key to preserving the global order. Joe Biden’s predecessors understood that, too. But on his watch, this president is sacrificing that vital U.S. strategic interest. In the process, he is earning for himself an ignominious place in the history books.