The U.S. Must Restore Deterrence in the Red Sea

By Noah Rothman

Monday, December 18, 2023

 

Deterrence doesn’t restore itself. It breaks down when an adversary determines that the costs of its behaviors are outweighed by the potential rewards. Iran and its proxy forces have paid almost no price for their attacks on the U.S. and the international order America maintains. They are undeterred.

 

Iran and its pawns in the Middle East are responsible for nearly 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since the 10/7 massacre. Tehran’s puppets controlling Yemen have launched dozens of drones and rockets at ships passing through the vital Bab al-Mandab Strait. The costs of this campaign have, so far, been absorbable. The Biden administration retaliated against Iran’s puppets only thrice, mostly targeting lightly manned facilities adjacent to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps around the region. By contrast, Iran’s campaign has produced outsize rewards — the most recent of which is to significantly disrupt global maritime trade.

 

The Houthi militia has spent the last two months brazenly attacking Western commercial vessels off Yemen’s coast with relative impunity. It rains rockets and drones down on its targets. It dispatches shock teams from the air and sea in raids, capturing cargo vessels and taking their crews hostage. It downs multi-million-dollar U.S. aerial vehicles without so much as a slap on the wrist from American forces in the region. The USS Carney has intercepted dozens of attacks on marine targets in the Red Sea originating from inside Houthi-controlled Yemen, but its success rate is not 100 percent. Some Houthi ordnance found its marks with spectacular effect.

 

Over the weekend, two container ships were struck by Houthi missiles, setting them ablaze. The attacks were sufficient to force multinational shipping giants to announce that they had no choice but to steer their vessels clear of the strait that leads to the Suez Canal. MSC, the world’s largest container line, and Maersk were joined on Monday morning by the British Petroleum oil company. The “deteriorating security situation” in the Red Sea’s most dangerous chokepoint has closed off an irreplaceable channel though which international commerce flows.

 

This is an unacceptable threat to the U.S.-led international order — one to which the Biden administration closed its eyes in the hopes that it would go away on its own. In early December, Politico revealed that senior officials within the Pentagon had withheld from the president and his senior appointed officials options for retaliating against the Houthis in their fear that Joe Biden may implement one of them. Their stated rationale for this grotesque insubordination was twofold: Not only were the Houthis thought to be simply targeting “assets with ties to Israel” — an excuse that is both not true and irrelevant — but it was also believed that a U.S. strike on Houthi positions would scuttle the White House’s effort to engineer a peace agreement between the militia and the Saudi Kingdom.

 

One might reasonably assume that the White House would conclude that its peace overtures had been rejected by the Houthis when that terroristic outfit started firing missiles and drones at U.S. assets and those of its allies. Old, fatuous dreams die hard. The administration seems now to be coming to terms with the undesirable circumstances with which the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors have confronted them, but too late to avert disaster.

 

What is American global hegemony if not the free and open navigation of the seas? If an Iranian pawn can close off maritime trade at will, functionally establishing an inviolable sphere of influence in the Middle East, what is to stop Russia and China from doing the same in their neighborhoods? By allowing the Houthi threat to metastasize, the Biden White House has put billions of dollars of global commerce on the line — a pain that will be felt by global consumers. That cannot stand.

 

Deterrence will not be restored through proportionality. The Biden administration tried that, and it failed. Deterring Iranian proxies will involve deterring Iran, likely with a direct response against its assets. The White House is understandably wary that such an action will spark a spiral of escalating reprisals that could devolve into an all-out war. That’s a real concern, but Iran has a history of backing down when the stakes associated with taking on the United States directly become terrifyingly clear.

 

At least, that option has the potential to reimpose the terms of a status quo acceptable to Western powers on Iran. The alternative is to allow the threat environment in the Middle East to degrade further, sacrificing international shipping to a ragtag terrorist militia and hastening the decline of American influence abroad at a time when America’s adversaries are on the march.

 

For all the apprehension around preemptive military action in more jittery quarters, the wages of inaction are just as high if not higher. The administration’s apoplexy has brought us to the point of crisis. The Biden White House must now act boldly, decisively, and in a fashion that communicates precisely the peril the Iranian regime has brought upon itself.