US President Joe Biden has said that attacks on the Houthis will continue even as he acknowledged that the group have not stopped their Red Sea attacks.
The US carried out a fifth round of strikes on Yemen on Thursday after a US ship was struck by a Houthi drone.
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that US forces “took out a range of Houthi missiles” that were about to be fired towards the Red Sea.
He said the American attacks took place on Wednesday and again on Thursday.
On Wednesday, a Houthi drone hit a “US owned and operated bulk carrier ship” which later had to be rescued by India’s navy. It came as the US designated the Houthis as a terrorist organisation.
“Well, when you say working are they stopping the Houthis? No,” Mr Biden told reporters in Washington DC on Thursday before he left for a speech in North Carolina.
“Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
I think your comment illustrates one of the biggest problems with our foreign policy.
We appear to have completely lost our ability to think laterally or strategically. I get why my comment seems crazy when you think our only options are “ATTACK” and “surrender”.
We need a strategic solution. The Houthis WANT a direct confrontation. They’ve said so, and their behavior is consistent with that. To figure out how to get them to stop, we need to ask: why on god’s green earth do a group of Yemeni rebels WANT a fight with the United States??
The short answer is that they hate us deeply for the incredible violence and destruction we inflicted on them and continue to inflict on them and the people they sympathize with. And we’ve destroyed so much of Yemen that they have nothing to lose. We turned it into a hellscape wasteland, so there is nothing more we can really threaten them with, and dying a proud and defiant death is pretty much the best offer on the menu. Plus, they know that if we fight, it’ll hurt us badly, just like all the last few wars have. We’ll spend too much, probably send troops eventually, and ultimately leave having accomplished nothing. And any surviving militants will declare victory and rule over ashes. Afghanistan provided a very appealing model of how to defeat the US.
So, strategically, what if… they had a reason to not want to die? What if … I don’t know, we negotiated with partners in the region to help them grow some crops, and maybe provide them with a new security arrangement where we don’t just sweep in every 10 years and light all their children and grandparents on fire? And concurrently, what if we tried to find ways to reduce their access to weapons?
Violence is not going to work. The region is spiraling out of control, and blowing everything up is easier for all the desperate radicals we’ve created across multiple nations than protecting our shipping lanes is for us. If violence no longer carries deterrence, it’s only utility is extermination. And if we embrace extermination, we radicalize more people. You can’t eradicate out of that situation, and trying just turns you into another of history’s great monsters.
It’s bad. We need to rediscover the concept of strategy.
If you let them do this with no response every idiot nation with a coastline is going to think shooting civilian sailors is a good way to get shit done.
Allowing them to get away with it is escalatory for the world.
First, the logic works in reverse, too. If they are trying to pull us into a confrontation that they believe benefits them, allowing them to do so also demonstrates a tool for controlling the US that others will be motivated to use, and is also escalatory.
The problem is that we only think in personal, school yard fight terms. We’re act sad though each country has a singular, logically operating decision making process. In reality, international actors are much more like natural phenomena, like mold growth or rabbit populations.
I’m not saying the school yard logic is baseless. When the US flinches, that definitely affects how Xi Jinping assesses our willingness to respond with force to a recapture of Taiwan, for instance. But: whether he decides to do that is not based primarily on whether he thinks the country as a whole has balls or not. It’s based on a combination of benefits and draw backs.
So in the long run, if we wanted to prevent unification by force, we’re far better off engineering conditions that make unification a bad deal, even if we look weak rather than make it appealing enough to go to war even if we seem likely to destabilize the whole world over it