My inbox has been flooded with people wanting to know why the United States has not retaliated against Houthi forces in Yemen after repeated anti-ship attacks near the Bab el-Mandeb strait — the critical funnel that connects the Red Sea with the Gulf Of Aden. It’s an entirely fair question and the answer is not as simple as some would make it seem. So let’s dig into it.
One prevailing viewpoint is that the Houthis will ‘only understand force’ and that the United States needs to hit them back. Some declare that this should have happened after the first weapons were launched at ships, but especially now.
The blanket notion of ‘hitting them back’ includes a huge spectrum of potential responses. These range from reactive, proportional responses to much more comprehensive and prolonged campaigns, with various velocities of escalation that can be overlaid on such operations. It’s not like the United States hasn’t done exactly this before and American forces have been kinetically engaged in Yemen on and off for many years. In addition, the U.S. military has provided other forms of support to the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in the past. So there is a clear precedent for some sort of military response.
But, at the same time, the current circumstances are certainly different than any in the past and are drastically more complex with much farther-reaching potential consequences. The entire region is on extreme edge. Iran and its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon have not yet entered the Israel-Hamas conflict with full force, but there is still the possibility they might. Attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria are also already a near-daily occurrence. The Houthis alone have the ability to drastically increase attacks on U.S. forces in the region, but more on that in a moment.
Simply put, one major spark could set off a much larger fire that could be very challenging to contain.
Hellbound and Down 