The United States has started what might well prove to be a long – and probably doomed – campaign of air strikes against Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, in Yemen.
Since October 2023, the Houthis have been very successfully disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, firing missiles and launching drones at cargo ships, oil tankers, passenger vessels: hitting a few, sinking fewer, and inconveniencing millions. While few ships have been hit, fewer sunk, and even fewer people killed by this campaign, the numbers speak for themselves. Fewer and fewer ships are transiting the region, including using the Suez Canal to cut journey times between Asia and Europe. World shipping costs have risen fast. Supply chains took an initial shock and kept taking shocks as the Houthi campaign continued and broadened.
Every conflict which the US has been involved in since 2001 has ended before America achieved its goals
The Houthis claimed that all of this was in protest at the Israeli bombing and occupation of Gaza, and that it only targeted ships going to and from Israel, or which were owned by Israeli companies, or which carried Israeli goods or Israeli insurance. This was never true – although the Houthi campaign did decrease traffic to and from the Israeli port of Eilat. Instead, the Houthis targeted everyone opportunistically – with missiles, from what felt like an endless supply, with drones, and with the type of fast attack boats familiar to anyone who has studied piracy in the Horn of Africa in this century.
Houthi propaganda, meanwhile, has included footage of small teams of black-clad ‘special forces’ descending onto Red Sea shipping by helicopter, in a parody of similar operations carried out by the Special Boat Service and others.
Some shipping companies appear to have been able to pay the Houthis off. But this is technically unconfirmed. And it is the logic of piracy. It’s not in the rich world’s interests that it continues.
In December 2023, the US Navy and the armed forces of a number of countries both local and more distant formed Operation Prosperity Guardian, which patrolled the Red Sea and its surrounds. Hundreds of Houthi missiles and drones were shot down, with the hope of shepherding ships through those waters. That campaign, although it did not suffer many losses (only a little friendly fire), was a resolute failure. Houthi missile stockpiles did not seem to decrease, and the Houthis were not given up by their Iranian sponsors and patrons. Worldwide shipping remained expensive and traffic around Yemen remained small.
A campaign of airstrikes and interceptions has been waged against the Houthis by America and Britain since January 2024. There have been hundreds of strikes on targets across the country but significantly around the western port cities like Hodeida. British Typhoons scrambling from Cyprus have joined American carrier aviation in a series of attacks on missiles and radars. The American campaign before March 2025 was consistent but not heavy. Largely, according to the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, it was retaliatory: a Houthi barrage targeted shipping or the American naval presence; the Americans would then hit pre-arranged targets – airports under military control, suspected warehouses for the Houthi missile programme and so on.
This campaign did not work. America believed that it reduced the Houthi capacity to destroy shipping and likely saved quite a few lives of those transiting the Red Sea; but it did not bring trade back. Incremental strikes can be matched quite easily. The Houthis would lose people and materiel, but they could harden their defences, learn lessons about dispersing their bases and their people, and keep fighting almost indefinitely.
If the Americans really cared, they would be pounding Yemen with constant strikes designed to keep the Houthis suppressed, with the ultimate goal of doing to the Houthis in Yemen what Israel did to other Iranian proxy forces in Gaza and Lebanon, as against Hamas and Hezbollah: killing their entire leadership, destroying their missile stockpiles, compromising their command and control so effectively that fighting back becomes costly and futile.
But this has been tried before by a large-scale international coalition in the 2010s, when a Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in support of the UN-recognised government (backed by the United States and, to a much lesser extent, by Britain) poured munitions into the country. That campaign simply did not succeed and, after years of fighting, the Saudis effectively withdrew. The Houthis, meanwhile, used the period to assimilate Iranian missile and drone technology, and to fire missiles at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, at the Saudi oil industry, and at the United Arab Emirates — almost all of which passed without serious response from America or anyone in the region.
The Houthis are a menace and perhaps deserve a campaign against them as destructive as the one Israel is waging against Hezbollah. For the moment, the Houthis’ Iranian masters seem afraid, saying that the Houthis are not really their clients but independent (a lie) and that Yemen has the right to decide its own future.
But can we really believe, after the century we have seen, that the United States has the intelligence, and the commitment, to keep up such a course? It has won no sustained campaign this century. Every conflict to which the United States has been involved since 2001 has ended before America achieved its goals — after its leaders got bored and betrayed its local allies, contenting itself with lobbing a few missiles and drone strikes to maintain an illusion of control.
The United States could cripple the Houthi movement like Israel has temporarily crippled Hezbollah. But will it do so? Some in Washington are confident. But I am not. Why would it work this time if not before?
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