With Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthi militia escalating its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as a way of supporting its fellow Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, Washington has put together an international task force to protect commercial vessels in the area. Ari Heistein provides some important background about the ongoing war in Yemen, and argues that America and its allies will have to act aggressively if they want to succeed:
The challenges of devising an effective response to the Houthis are the result of a fundamental difficulty in influencing the decisions of an actor that is guided by a radical and paranoid ideology, possesses military capabilities that provide significant leverage, and has little to lose.
If the Houthis are searching for international prestige, the best way to convince them to stop doing so in destructive and dangerous ways is to create consequences that make them look foolish. For example, it might be well-advised to respond to Houthi attacks by launching airstrikes in Sanaa—but instead of hitting Houthi targets, aiming for Palestinian terror groups present in Yemen. In addition to creating a sense of embarrassment among the Houthis, who would be exposed as unable to protect their Palestinian “guests” in Sanaa, the absence of a direct strike on the group itself may reduce the risk of stumbling up the escalation ladder.
The Houthis appear poised to maintain some form of perpetual friction with external entities, as peacetime would prove a more challenging environment to justify their misrule over 20 million Yemenis than war has been.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deterring-the-houthis-requires-more-than-a-textbook-response/