The Latest Suez Crisis

By Jock O’Connell

Talk about asymmetrical standoffs. On one side are the naval and air forces of the world’s most advanced economic, technological, and military powers. On the other side are the Houthis, one of a number of desert tribes competing for control of Yemen, a country which ranks the world’s poorest and least developed. Yet it is the latter who have caused a trillion-dollar disruption of the world’s maritime trade with missile and drone attacks that have lately expanded in scope to include Israel. Meanwhile, all those hugely expensive warships and military aircraft have been unable to guarantee safe passage for commercial shipping through the Red Sea and Suez Canal.

So much for Freedom of the Seas.

Making the situation all the more irksome is that the United States Navy traces its origin to Thomas Jefferson’s decision to safeguard the young nation’s merchant shipping against state-sponsored pirates operating off the Barbary Coast in the Mediterranean. So in the very early 19th century, a collection of armed sloops and schooners led by Commodores Edward Preble and Stephen Decatur successfully took the battle to the shores of Tripoli. And, if the admirals in the Pentagon need any further reminding of that noble heritage, the fleets they currently command include a brace of guided missile destroyers named Preble and Decatur.

The broad contours of the current standoff in the Red Sea are uncomfortably familiar. The Houthis are a Zaydi Shiite movement based in North Yemen that has been fighting Yemen’s Sunni-majority government since 2004 and just about anyone else for even longer. Officially, they are known as Ansar Allah, and they are deadly serious about their theological beliefs. Since last fall, their advocacy for the Palestinian cause has reportedly won them new respect among young people throughout the Arab and Muslim world, much in the way Che Guevara was once celebrated in the West.

I think I first heard about the Houthis a half-century ago while I was living in London and researching my dissertation on economic constraints on British foreign and defense policy. Back then, even the Labour Government elected in October 1964 could not escape the shadow of Winston Churchill’s soaring rhetoric about Britain’s preeminence in global affairs. It was commonly embraced as a matter of national self-identity that their island nation rightfully deserved a seat at the top table of international diplomacy. But, as the 20th century wore on, it was becoming more and more apparent at the Ministry of Defense that the cost of maintaining a military capability commensurate with the nation’s foreign policy aspirations was increasingly beyond Britain’s financial means.

That was a difficult pill for official London to swallow. While the implications for the military forces were most manifest in steadily diminishing defense budgets, the broader, less easily defined implications for foreign policy took time to filter through to the Foreign Office and even longer to reach Downing Street. So it was that a Labour Government that came to office in late 1964, intent on continuing Britain’s far-flung military commitments, came around to announcing in January 1968 that it would be abandoning the nation’s historic security role in the vast region known colloquially as “East of Suez.” 

Among the numerous epiphanies experienced by that government was the realization that maintaining two aircraft carriers and a modest fleet of ballistic missile submarines (albeit armed with American warheads) might merit the respect of the Russians and Chinese but had almost no practical value in policing the remnants of empire, including a strategic foothold at Aden on Yemen’s south coast that local hostility was making increasingly untenable.

Ever since the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea began last fall, the question dominating maritime conferences and blogs is not whether Western weaponry would eventually prevail but rather when the Houthis would decide to stand down. Since they explicitly linked their attacks on Western shipping to the conflict in Gaza, the more optimistic pundits expect the attacks to cease once a diplomatic solution is reached between Israel and Hamas.

That, unfortunately, overlooks a larger set of dynamics driving these attacks. Three questions in particular point toward a much less sanguine scenario in the Red Sea.

First, why should the Houthis stop merely because peace is restored in Gaza? In other words, did the outbreak of fighting in Gaza simply provide a convenient pretext for attacks on Red Sea shipping that had already been planned?  

Second, why would the Houthis surrender the unprecedented power they now enjoy and return to simply being an irritant to Saudi interests in the Middle East?

Third, would their sponsors permit them to stand down?

The Yemeni tribe is a proxy for Iran, which has numerous fish to fry in its troubled relationship with the West. As we have lately learned, the Iranian leadership has put Donald Trump on its hit list. And hackers associated with Iran have long been involved in cybercrimes aimed at disrupting America’s infrastructure, its financial system, and its communications networks. One incident involved compromising the controls operating the Bowman Dam in Rye, New York. Just this April, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned two Iranian companies and four individuals engaged in “malicious cyber activity” that targeted more than a dozen American businesses and government entities. 

A July 10th report from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents the assistance the Houthis have been getting from Iran as well as U.S. and allied efforts to interrupt that flow of arms. Critical components of missiles that have been seized have been found to share near-identical features with Iranian missile systems. Between 2015 and 2024, the U.S. and its partners have interdicted at least 20 Iranian smuggling vessels, seizing ballistic, cruise, and surface-to-air missile components, antitank guided missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other illicit weapons destined for the Houthis. The DIA calculates the Houthis have used Iran-supplied weapons to conduct more than 100 land- and sea-based attacks across the Middle East, the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden.

The economic damage Iranian rockets fired by the Houthis can inflict serves the broader interests of Tehran in a way that avoids direct confrontation with American and allied forces.  

Similarly, the standoff between the Houthis and the U.S. Navy offers U.S. adversaries around the world with a low-risk means of testing their latest offensive weaponry and tactics against the defensive capabilities of America’s naval forces. We can only imagine how much Russian and Chinese naval intelligence have already gleaned from observing how the U.S. Navy responds to attacks by rockets and, increasingly, by unpiloted drones.  

Ultimately, the whole dismal situation in the Red Sea should serve as a potent reminder to Western governments -- and to the world’s shipping industry -- that Freedom of the Seas can be maintained only with very substantial investments and occasional sacrifices. As we are seeing, a long cherished concept we thought we were defending is no longer the normal state of affairs.