On Jan. 3, the United States and 13 other nations delivered an ultimatum to the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group that has turned into the country’s de-facto authorities: Stop attacking civilian vessels in the Red Sea or face the consequences. The group has been carrying out the attacks in part to compel Israel to cease its war against Hamas in Gaza, now in its fourth month. The Houthis didn’t heed the warning. Six days later, they conducted their most complex attack to date, forcing U.S. fighter aircraft in the area to shoot down 18 drones and three anti-ship missiles. Two days later, yet another Houthi missile splashed into international waters.
If eight years of heavy, indiscriminate Saudi bombing wasn’t enough to get the Houthis to back down, it’s beyond delusional to think one night of U.S. and U.K. strikes will do the trick.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden finally lost his patience. The U.S., in coordination with the United Kingdom and a multinational coalition, launched a series of strikes against a dozen Houthi targets across four Yemeni cities. The operation, conducted by U.S. aircraft, surface ships and submarines, targeted sites designed to degrade the Houthis’ ability to execute similar attacks in the future. Radar systems and facilities associated with the movement’s drone and missile programs were hit. “These targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes,” Biden said in a late-night statement. “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”
While the strikes created a lot of headlines, they weren’t surprising. In fact, given the hole the Biden administration dug for itself with last week’s ultimatum, military action might have been inevitable. U.S. defense officials were reportedly debating targets set weeks in advance, which suggests that Biden and his military advisers understood that Operation Prosperity Guardian, the multilateral maritime coalition established in December, was not having the desired effect. After 27 Houthi attacks since mid-November, the White House clearly felt that shooting down missiles and drones every few days wasn’t a sustainable course of action.
But military action isn’t the solution either. In fact, it’s likely to create more problems.
First and foremost, we need to remember what the U.S. seeks to accomplish with these strikes: prevent the Houthis from launching similar attacks in the days and weeks to come. This may sound like a fairly simple objective. But in reality, it isn’t as straightforward as wiping out the group’s military infrastructure, killing its fighters and destroying its fleet of missiles. It also involves the difficult psychological component of changing the Houthis’ decision-making calculus. The group has to reach the point where its leadership concludes that additional attacks on vessels in the Red Sea aren’t worth the costs.
Achieving such a feat is harder for nonstate actors like the Houthis than it is for presidents, prime ministers and even dictators, who by and large seek to defend their territory, protect their citizens, maintain a favorable balance of power in their neighborhoods and perpetuate their regimes. The fact that states have so much to lose can be a restraining influence on their behavior. Nonstate actors, however, have far less at stake, don’t have to concern themselves with the hassles of public administration and are accountable to nobody but themselves.
This doesn’t mean that nonstate groups are irrational — only that it might take a greater amount of violence to get them to re-evaluate their policies and stop their nefarious activities. This presents a whole new set of risks for the U.S., increases the chances of Houthi retaliation and over time can snowball into a wider escalation the Biden administration would rather avoid. The U.S. learned this the hard way in Iraq and Syria, where U.S. airstrikes against Iran-backed militias have done nothing to protect U.S. bases in those countries and, if anything, have encouraged them to respond with even more strikes. The result is a practically endless tit-for-tat scenario.
Yemen holds other complications for U.S. policy. First, the Houthis aren’t push-overs. The movement has fought numerous wars over the last two decades against the Yemeni government as well as a multinational military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — two of the wealthiest states in the Middle East. Despite the disadvantages in firepower and financial resources, the Houthis have managed to survive all of those conflicts and are arguably in their strongest position since the group was established three decades ago. Saudi Arabia in particular has been humiliated by the Houthis; a war launched in 2015 that was supposed to last weeks has instead dragged on for nearly a decade and has long since become a quagmire for the kingdom. The Saudis have spent more a year trying to extricate themselves from the war through a diplomatic process and have now accepted the fact that the Houthis will be a permanent fixture on the Yemeni political scene.
If eight years of heavy, indiscriminate Saudi bombing wasn’t enough to get the Houthis to back down, it’s beyond delusional to think one night of U.S. and U.K. strikes will do the trick.
The Houthis have pledged that drone and missile attacks in the Red Sea will continue until the siege of Gaza is lifted or a cease-fire is in place. Ideally, the Biden administration would have spent more time and energy on fulfilling either of these two scenarios, not because the Houthis demanded it but because it was the most peaceful and efficient way to avert a wider conflict that has the potential to draw U.S. troops further into the region.
Instead, the U.S. has opted for military force, setting itself up for an even more extensive bombing operation after the Houthis inevitably retaliate. In seeking to defend the right to navigation, Biden may have sacrificed his wider policy goal of preventing escalation at the alter.