The Houthis Are Humiliating Us

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

 

The world’s lone superpower has been unable to protect one of the most important commercial arteries on Earth from a band of third-world rebels.

 

Welcome to the latest humiliation of a Biden-administration foreign policy premised on not being overly provocative toward our enemies.

 

After a sustained campaign of attacks from Houthi fighters in Yemen, shipping companies have announced that they are going to avoid the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, a narrow strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.

 

This is a blow to freedom of navigation — one of the jewels of the U.S.-led order — and a tremendous success for the Iranian-aligned Houthis, who have leveraged drones, missiles, and attempted seizures of ships to gain the upper hand over the world’s foremost navy.

 

We are not talking about a backwater, but a key passageway for East-West commerce. Nearly 12 percent of global trade passes through the Red Sea, as well as a prodigious amount of oil from the Persian Gulf.

 

Disrupting this trade allows the Houthis to have, in effect, global reach. Insurance rates for shipping are going up, and companies are forswearing the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, that great shortcut connecting Europe and Asia. Instead, they are adding significant time — and expense — to their journey by going around the Cape of Good Hope.

 

Eventually, additional costs will be passed along to consumers.

 

In short, the Houthis are punching above their weight. They are a combatant in a yearslong Yemeni civil war, not a state actor with significant naval capabilities like, say, the Chinese in the South China Sea. That the U.S. Navy can’t, or isn’t being allowed to, suppress cut-rate acts of banditry with outsized economic effects should be a cause of national embarrassment.

 

The Houthis maintain that they are only going after ships heading to Israel, but if so, they have not been particularly discriminating.

 

The attacks have also been escalating. Just over the weekend, the U.S. destroyer Carney shot down 14 drones. Obviously, the Houthis believe that they either won’t pay a price, or a very limited one, for their brazen aggression.

 

Who can say they are wrong? The Biden doctrine, whether it comes to arming Ukraine, responding to attacks on U.S. bases by Iranian proxies, or protecting shipping in the Red Sea, is to stop short of decisive action lest the other side escalates. So instead of malign actors fearing what we will do, we constrain ourselves out of fear of how they will respond to us.

 

The legendary nuclear strategist Herman Kahn came up with a 44-rung so-called escalation ladder during the Cold War. The Biden administration evidently prefers not to get on the ladder at all, since it represents a risk of falling. Or it is content to stop somewhere between rung two, “political, economic and diplomatic gestures,” and rung three, “solemn and formal declarations.”

 

Sure enough, we are asking the Houthis to stop.

 

We are also forming a multinational coalition to patrol the Red Sea, called Operation Prosperity Guardian. This is fine as far as it goes, but is no substitute for sending an unmistakable, material message that targeting shipping is intolerable. We should launch attacks against Houthi stores of missiles and their missile launchers. If that doesn’t work, we should hit Iranian targets directly.

 

The stakes ultimately involve our modern way of life. The navalist Jerry Hendrix wrote a piece in the Atlantic earlier this year in which he noted, “Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it — if we think of it at all — as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.”

 

The title of the essay was, “The Age of American Naval Dominance is Over.” The Biden administration shouldn’t act like it is trying to prove him right.