In the summer of 1936, a number of Central European writers, almost all of them Jewish, gathered in the coastal Belgian town of Ostend. They had left Germany fearing Nazi persecution, and in Belgium found a measure of tranquility—at least until the breakout of war in 1939. Volker Weidermann describes this moment in European literary history in Summer Before the Dark, a book that, according to Adam Kirsch, provides rich detail but misses something important:

A book about [Joseph] Roth and [Stefan] Zweig—and [Irmgard] Keun and [Ernst] Toller and Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg—is necessarily a book about despair. Yet if there is an objection to be made to Summer Before the Dark, it is that Weidermann turns what ought to be a wretched, wrenching experience into one that is merely melancholy, and not without a kind of glamor. He does not omit the grim details of the émigrés’ lives: we see Roth’s “badly swollen” feet, the stigmata of advanced alcoholism, which make it hard for him to wear shoes. Yet the whole approach and tone (and title) of the book are intent on turning Ostend 1936 into a kind of late-afternoon idyll of European civilization. From our point of view, it is all so “interesting”—the brilliant minds, the political drama, the friendships and love affairs. Only by turning to Roth’s letters, or the essays of Walter Benjamin, can we begin to grasp what it really meant to be exiled and waiting for death in an indifferent world—as millions of people are in our own time.

Last Tuesday, the Houthis—the faction now ruling much of Yemen—said that they intend to renew attacks on international shipping through the Red and Arabian Seas. They had for the most part paused their attacks following the January 19 Israel-Hamas cease-fire, but their presence has continued to scare away maritime traffic near the Yemeni coast, with terrible consequences for the global economy.

The U.S. responded on Saturday by initiating strikes on Houthi missile depots, command-and-control centers, and propaganda outlets, and has promised that the attacks will continue for days, if not weeks. The Houthis responded by launching drones, and possibly missiles, at American naval ships, apparently without result. Another missile fired from Yemen struck the Sinai, but was likely aimed at Israel. As Ari Heistein has written in Mosaic, it may take a sustained and concerted effort to stop the Houthis, who have high tolerance for casualties—but this is a start. Ron Ben-Yishai provides some context:

The goal is to punish the Houthis for directly targeting Western naval vessels in the Red Sea while also exerting indirect pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program. . . . While the Biden administration did conduct airstrikes against the Houthis, it refrained from a proactive military campaign, fearing a wider regional war. However, following the collapse of Iran’s axis—including Hizballah’s heavy losses in Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria—the Trump administration appears unafraid of such an escalation.

Iran, the thinking goes, will also get the message that the U.S. isn’t afraid to use force, or risk the consequences of retaliation—and will keep this in mind as it considers negotiations over its nuclear program. Tamir Hayman adds:

The Houthis are the last proxy of the Shiite axis that have neither reassessed their actions nor restrained their weapons. Throughout the campaign against the Yemenite terrorist organization, the U.S.-led coalition has made operational mistakes: Houthi regime infrastructure was not targeted; the organization’s leaders were not eliminated; no sustained operational continuity was maintained—only actions to remove immediate threats; no ground operations took place, not even special-forces missions; and Iran has not paid a price for its proxy’s actions.

But if this does not stop the Houthis, it will project weakness—not just toward Hamas but primarily toward Iran—and Trump’s power diplomacy will be seen as hollow. The true test is one of output, not input. The only question that matters is not how many strikes the U.S. carries out, but whether the Red Sea reopens to all vessels. We will wait and see—for now, things look brighter than they did before.