Houthi and the Blown Ships

The standoff between Yemeni militants and the Biden administration

Last week, I wrote a piece for The Intercept about the Houthi rebel group, formally known as Ansarallah, and its campaign to attack merchant vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis have said that this campaign is aimed at forcing the Biden administration to end the conflict in Gaza and allow the free flow of humanitarian goods to the territory. This week. on the Intercepted podcast we will also be interviewing a guest to give us some more background on the group and its emergence in Yemen. I wanted to add some additional commentary here to what I wrote last week, which also gives me the chance employ the cheeky New York Post-style headline seen above.

First of all, the uncomfortable reality is that the Houthi intervention in the Red Sea has been profoundly effective. In the context of the global economy, international shipping supply chains are both vital to basic operations and hypersensitive to any sort of disruption. This sensitivity is not just about the ships themselves, or the goods that they carry, but the impact on global insurance rates when the perceived risk of loss goes anything above zero. The Houthis have not sunk any ships and the damage that they have caused to vessels or goods has been mostly superficial. Yet according to a report in the BBC this Sunday, shipping insurance rates have increased a staggering 70-fold since December as a result of these attacks. If they continue in the coming months, global inflation could increase an entire half percentage point. This hypersensitivity to disruption is why the Iran-Iraq War nearly resulted in the upturning of the global economy after a few tankers were hit by attacks in the 1980s, and forced the Reagan administration to intervene against Iran. Attacks on shipping are just something that cannot happen at all in the context of globalization.

Given their gravity, one would think that these attacks would impel the U.S. to simply crush the Houthis in defense of the global economy. But as I wrote for The Intercept, its not that simple. The Houthis have readapted their entire force posture to focus on evading and sustaining airstrikes after enduring years of U.S.-backed attacks by the Saudi and Emirati air forces. To really stop attacks, which are cheap, fast, and utilize the abundant manpower that exists in Yemen, the U.S. would effectively have to launch a regime change operation in Yemen. Even setting aside lack of domestic political will, such a campaign would take far too long to deliver immediate security payoffs and would have uncertain results. As such, its very unlikely to happen. The Houthis really have put the U.S. in a bind, in the sense that they need attacks in the Red Sea to completely stop, immediately, but the only way to do that is to accede to at least some of their demands related to Gaza. This defiant stance has made the Houthis popular in the region, where concern over the Palestinians in widespread. When I described this as an “uncomfortable reality,” it is because these violent disturbances have clearly been much more effective than various forms of controlled protest and fruitless diplomatic meetings in hotel conference rooms.

So are the Houthis “good”? I’ve always found the depiction by U.S. politicians and commentariat of the world as a battleground between Good Guys and Bad Guys to be quite asinine and cringeworthy. It makes international politics sound like an extension of the Marvel Comics Universe, and it is a worldview that even non-realist opponents of U.S. foreign policy establishment have sometimes regrettably adopted. There are many deeply negative things about the Houthis, who have a terrible bad human rights record inside Yemen, are abysmally anti-Semitic and radical in their ideology, and employ similar tactics of civilian siege in their own country that they chastise in the Gaza Strip. But while the Houthis are not the “Good Guys,” its not clear why the people engaging in mass killings and mayhem against civilians in Gaza should hold that title either. Armed conflict and politics in general is just an ugly business and no ones hands are really clean. Rather than moralizing or searching for camps, our focus should simply be on putting an end to conditions that foster violence and returning any conflicts that do exist to the realm of the political.

I do believe that the Israeli campaign in Gaza has lost its strategic mooring (arguably it never got off on the right foot in the first place) and efforts to force a ceasefire and return to a political process are warranted, especially to prevent an expansion of the war regionally. Preventing such a catastrophe will probably be more about coercion and power politics than sudden enlightenment or a love for peace for its own sake. The Houthi attempted blockade of the Red Sea will likely put a time limit on the duration of the conflict by making it clear that there will be economic costs to its continuation. In the long-term. I believe this will motivate the creation of land trade routes that bypass the Red Sea, and the application of greater pressure on the Houthis themselves to reduce their hold over Yemen. But immediately speaking, it really may compel the U.S. and Israel to bow to international opinion and wrap up the war in Gaza in the coming months, or at least lower its tempo to a level where it does not threaten to upend the regional order or the global economy.

I’d like to believe that the world runs on international law and morality, but the evidence suggests that brute force and interests are far more important. In that sense, the Houthis are merely dealing with reality as it exists. If the international community does not enforce its “Responsibility to Protect” civilians, otherwise unsavory armed militant groups may do so in the vacuum. It is a story that has played out in the Middle East many times over the past two decades of state collapse and civil war, and will continue so long as states and international organizations fail to live up to their stated roles.