When Nothing Seems to Work: Houthi Edition
What is a country to do when military action and diplomacy are both presently hopeless? That is the situation the United States finds itself in today: Military escalation will not compel the Houthis to halt their anti-shipping campaign or attacks on Israel. Nor will diplomacy — at least not yet.
Intensifying the use of force will strengthen the Houthis’ regional legitimacy and their control over Yemen. At the same time, it will draw the United States further into a conflict it cannot win, thus making it harder to cut losses when the time comes. It will also incentivize Israel to deepen its own involvement, creating a negative feedback loop in which the United States gets even more bogged down. These risks far exceed the importance of the Red Sea to U.S. interests.
The Houthi challenge will eventually dwindle. The Gaza war will die down, enabling the Houthis to declare victory. In the meantime, Washington should set the stage for a diplomatic process that locks in a Houthi ceasefire and reduces the likelihood of a repeat performance. This will require Iranian and Russian cooperation or at least acquiescence. Their support for the Houthis, and whatever leverage it buys them, is collateral to their primary interests. They might be responsive to direct approaches by Washington (as the United States has already done vis-à-vis Iran), and Masoud Pezeshkian’s accession to the presidency in Iran might provide another opportunity. But the key intermediary, if there is one, would be China. Given the hazards that the Red Sea crisis poses, this issue should be a priority in U.S. talks with China. The bilateral agenda is, of course, already overloaded, and neither country might be able address this issue. And China’s interests will be divided, impeding its ability to make any hard decisions about this situation. For Washington, though, the stakes are high — avoiding the trap in which Yemen turns into the motel where you can check in, but you can’t check out.
U.S. interests in the Red Sea are straightforward: ensuring the security of this particular shipping route, which has an important place in global commerce. As a practical matter, this means suppressing the Houthi threat to vessels transiting the Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea. Thus far, the U.S. approach to these objectives has been primarily defensive, gearing cost to scale of interest.
Pressure, however, is mounting in Washington to shift to the offensive against the Houthis. Patience is wearing thin with an approach that is not producing the expected results. But compellence is the hardest trick to pull off in international relations, especially when it’s more costly for the actor attempting to compel the party than it is for the targeted party. One can understand policymakers’ frustrations. When the United States is so strong — America has a $27 trillion economy, an $850 billion defense budget, and a population of 330 million, and it occupies a good chunk of an entire continent with vast resources — while its adversary is so weak – a gross domestic product of $22 billion, where a large part of the population faces starvation — this irritation can turn into something worse. This sort of cumulative frustration transformed the U.S. policy of “keeping Saddam Hussein in the box” into regime change and all that ensued. But, of course, this exasperation tends to ignore the fact that these raw correlations don’t account for the Houthis’ political will, control of territory, and manifest destiny (see under “Taliban”).
Then there are the perennial preoccupations. The first is the conviction that failure to take the offensive signals weakness and invites further aggression. Concern over credibility is the twin sister to this. Having declared a U.S. interest and committed forces, we need to show results. If we don’t, adversaries will laugh off future commitments of military power. At the strategic level, global deterrence requires a response to Russian and Iranian reliance on horizontal escalation. If these competitors get a free pass, they’ll escalate elsewhere as well. And then there are practical naval issues. Given the U.S. Navy’s worldwide responsibilities, keeping a carrier strike group pinned down in the Red Sea is imprudent and punishes crews and equipment. The fact that the Houthis have refused to negotiate in what the United States considers good faith fuels the momentum for escalation. The United States and United Nations have tried diplomacy, and it hasn’t worked. Time for the gloves to come off, right?
The standard menu of escalatory options would include attacks against Yemen’s limited infrastructure along the lines of Israel’s bombing of the port at Hodeida, factories and warehouses linked to Houthi missile, rocket, and drone stocks, military bases, and senior Houthi officials. No one is talking about boots on the ground. But there is no doubt about the U.S. ability to hurt the Houthis.
So why not pull the trigger? Let us count the reasons. At the tactical level, the Houthis enjoy substantial territorial depth, which, combined with the range of their munitions, greatly complicates effective targeting of mobile launchers. The needles are in a vast haystack. The distributed production and storage of platforms and warheads also make targeting a difficult proposition. An economist would say that the United States would face a classic stock/flow problem: Given the size of existing stockpiles, interfering with marginal increases in the stockpiles will yield meager results. And these stockpiles are probably quite large, although no one knows just how large. And despite the large number of Houthi strikes since 2023, expenditure rates have been relatively modest. Moreover, there is the ample historical evidence for the ineffectiveness of airstrikes in the absence of synchronized ground maneuver. Did I mention that there would be no boots on the ground?
These are just the operational challenges. It gets worse. Strikes against Houthi territory would strengthen the regime’s grip and thereby increase its incentive to carry out attacks against shipping, Operation Prosperity Guardian fleet assets, and Israel. As a response to Russian and Iranian horizontal escalation — that is, where Russia and Iran turn up the heat on Washington outside of the main theaters in which they are confronting each other — U.S. attacks would be ineffective because the Houthis are mere cannon fodder, and the U.S. escalation will only draw it into a hopeless war. This, dear reader, is precisely why Russia and Iran rely on horizontal escalation. On balance, therefore, an offensive strategy would just recalibrate the current equilibrium to a higher level of violence and deeper U.S. commitment, while rewarding the Houthi regime and further incentivizing it to escalate the fight.
But surely there are costs to maintaining the current posture? Not necessarily. In terms of direct cost to the U.S. economy, despite Houthi provocations, U.S. gross domestic product is on the upswing, inflation is slowing, credit markets are booming, and the stock market is bullish. The cost of fleet operations is substantial, about $1 billion, but derisory compared to the administration’s overall 2025 defense budget request.
As for opportunity cost, the virtue of a navy is that it is supremely mobile. If, say, tensions over Taiwan suddenly spiked or Russia attacked cargo ships carrying military aid for Ukraine, the strike group could be out of the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandeb toward the Pacific, or through the Suez Canal toward the Atlantic, very quickly.
It is true that the “cost/exchange ratio” — the difference between the cost of the missiles the Navy uses to down Houthi weapons and the cost of those weapons — is unfavorable to the United States, but the Defense Department is working to fix this imbalance.
Current policy enables the United States to claim credibly that it is carrying out its responsibility to secure maritime trade routes and deny the Houthis the military edge in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb. These factors alone meet U.S. strategic objectives in the Red Sea. But the U.S. posture to this point has a number of additional virtues. It demonstrates the considerable defensive capacity of U.S. fleet assets to potential adversaries, while avoiding the trap of escalation — the costs of which would outweigh the interest at stake. America’s mainly defensive stance also assists in Israel’s defense. And it has done these things without further fueling Houthi justifications for waging war and further oppressing Yemenis under Houthi control. This in turn has maintained space for negotiation should the present logjam loosen up. The current approach also works as a hedging gambit because it allows the United States to focus on more urgent challenges at the same time.
In short, the American approach avoids starting a fight that it cannot finish given the natural advantages enjoyed by the Houthis, their relative imperviousness to air assault, and their tight control of their political destiny.
For this approach to stick, it will be essential that the United States convince Israel to maintain a defensive posture in the face of further Houthi provocations and not carry out renewed retaliatory attacks. The U.S. priority should be reassuring the Israeli government that the United States will continue to integrate its own regional air defenses with Israel’s to deny the Houthis the prospect of any further successful attacks against Israeli territory. Washington is probably doing exactly this right now.
Commitments carelessly acquired can be extremely difficult to abandon. There was a time when this was not necessarily the case. In 1982, the Reagan administration committed U.S. forces to the stability of Lebanon. Upon maneuvering itself onto one side in a civil war it had intended to defuse, U.S. forces and diplomats came under fierce attack. After hundreds of Americans perished and the U.S. attempt to bring its tormentors to heel through enormous firepower failed, President Ronald Reagan simply walked away. No U.S. administration in this day and age could afford to abandon the sort of solemn yet frivolous commitment Reagan made in Lebanon. That U.S. forces were in Afghanistan for 20 years, 19 years after they accomplished their mission, is the contemporary counterexample — hence this warning to policymakers tempted to make just such a commitment when the countervailing winds blow so strongly.
So, what should the United States do? In lieu of escalating militarily, the administration’s first instinct may be to double down on sanctions. But sanctions nearly always strengthen autocratic actors while punishing ordinary people. So that is not a great idea, especially when Yemen is already suffering from humanitarian disaster. Step number one, therefore, should be to keep pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. At this stage, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu are not quite prepared to get to yes, but Secretary of State Tony Blinken says the parties are within the 10-yard line. If that is the case, Houthi intentions will at least be clarified. The second, working with the United Nations, would be to establish a contact group consisting of Houthi representatives, Saudis, Emiratis, the Palestinian Authority, China, Russia, the European Union, and other participants in Operation Prosperity Guardian. Allison Minor, the former deputy envoy for Yemen, makes a powerful case for this sort of diplomatic approach based on her impression of dynamics at the U.N. Security Council. Its job will be keeping the Houthi leadership focused on resolving the conflict from which they clearly benefit. Although the Houthis thus far have waved off Saudi inducements, the larger contact group might be able to sweeten the pot. Separately, Washington should engage Beijing and Moscow directly or through intermediaries to press them to persuade Iran and the Houthi leadership to lower the temperature, define more specifically their requirement for a ceasefire in the Red Sea, and establish rules of the road for the future. And, in combination with these steps, the United States will need to continue to urge Israel to keep its nerve, focus on defensive measures, and, of course, agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. None of these steps will yield miracles given the unpromising conditions, but they are better than the alternative.
Returning to the subject of U.S. interests, the facts suggest that these would be best preserved by maintaining the current U.S. posture, which enjoys multilateral support and avoids an escalatory spiral that forecloses an exit strategy even as it strengthens a determined adversary.
Steven Simon is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author, most recently, of Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin Random House, 2023).
