The Houthis Are Not Deterred

In early January, following a monthslong campaign of aggression and piracy in and around the Gulf of Aden, the Biden administration finally responded to the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist group’s attacks. A series of U.S. strikes inaugurated what has become a sustained effort to preempt Houthi attacks on Western naval and merchant vessels in the region. In a statement at the outset of that campaign, Joe Biden claimed that U.S. and coalition efforts were aimed at “deterring Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.” But today, more than a month later, the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors are not deterred.

“The situation in the Red Sea is dramatically escalating,” Fox News Channel national-security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported on Tuesday. Indeed, the flurry of Houthi activity off the coast of Yemen rivals the intensity of terrorist operations that provoked Biden’s reluctant kinetic response in the first place.

This week, a U.K.-registered cargo ship reportedly sustained “catastrophic” damage and is at risk of sinking. Two U.S.-owned vessels suffered “minor damage” as a result of Houthi ballistic-missile attacks, one of which carried grain destined for the Yemeni port of Aden “for the benefit of the Yemeni people,” a statement by U.S. Central Command read.

“In just 24 hours, U.S. and coalition warships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden shot down ten one-way attack drones during a four-and-a-half-hour relentless attack by the Houthis,” Griffin added. The Houthis fired a cruise missile at a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser, which was destroyed by the ship’s defensive ordnance. “This is the first time ballistic missiles have been used like this, fired by the Iran-backed proxy at specific sea targets, including U.S. Navy ships,” Griffin said. She added that if the Houthis had succeeded in hitting a U.S. ship and killing American sailors, the ongoing proxy war between Western coalition powers and Iran would enter a new and far more terrible stage.

“It’s been reduced, on any given day, sometimes 40 percent,” Admiral Brad Cooper said of commercial traffic through the Red Sea in a recent interview on 60 Minutes. When asked how long it has been since U.S. Navy vessels were forced to engage in combat operations for months on end, Cooper speculated that “you’d have to go back to World War II.” But America’s naval forces cannot keep up that pace indefinitely. The defensive munitions the U.S. is expending in the effort to interdict Houthi attacks and preemptively strike staging areas inside Yemen are costly — more so than the offensive weapons the Houthis are deploying against regional maritime traffic. The Biden administration’s plan seems to be to keep up this cat-and-mouse game in perpetuity, but it will soon encounter prohibitive material obstacles.

If the Biden administration’s goal was to restore stability in the Red Sea and to preserve the U.S.-led regime that guarantees the free navigation of the seas, it has not been achieved. If this revelation does not force the Biden administration to change its tactics, we are left to conclude that it does not seek success.