This won’t be popular. I can’t help that, but I do want to warn you before you read it, maybe save you some unnecessary rage. Lord knows there’s plenty of cause without this, and I wouldn’t add to it.
This country is doing the absolute right thing about the Houthis in Yemen.
For the benefit of those of you who won’t continue reading anything that isn’t venomously anti-Trump, I’ll add that there’s no particular virtue accruing to Trump over this except that he isn’t royally screwing it up. It’s kind of a no-brainer to any expert on the region. Which I’m not, but I’ve had it explained to me at great length by several people who are. At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll try to put their arguments into a more understandable form.
The Houthis are Zaydi Muslims, the hereditary heirs to the ancient Caliphate. They’re sort-of Shiites, transplanted to Yemen a thousand years ago from their home on the northern Iran-Iraq border, where the descendants of their distant cousins now number themselves among the Kurds. Traditionally, they’re hated by the Persians of Iran, despised by the Sunnis of the Arabian Peninsula, were once detested rivals of the Sultans (now Turkey), and were roundly persecuted by almost every other Muslim sect in existence.
In response to local outrages, including pogroms and the destruction of their ancestral cemeteries, they began to organize in the 90s. When armed and funded by Iran, who wanted a proxy war to weaken the Saudis, they became a strong local power.
Presently, they are isolated, militant, governed by hereditary imams rather than those chosen for ability, and have no industry or infrastructure. The advanced missiles they regularly launch at Israeli, Saudi Arabian, and North Yemeni civilian populations and every passing tanker that won’t pay bribes are all supplied by Iranian money, much of which is raised by quondam charities in Europe, Africa, the US, and Saudi Arabia itself, but some of which comes from oil sales, plus China and Russia.
Iranians from the IRGC build the missiles and train the missileers, and Houthis fire them more or less as directed.
(Every hereditary imam has near absolute power over a handful of followers. It’s not so much a government as it is a perpetual violent argument involving bullets and high explosives.)
As Iranian proxies, they wage war against civilians and engage in piracy against oil tankers. It pays fairly well. They’ve been doing it for over twenty years, and a very few of them are getting enormously wealthy while living well away from the gunfire. Some of that money funds online propaganda mills that are highly effective at spreading disinformation, but the remaining profits are truly vast.
The US has deployed a large naval force to shoot down their missiles, protect shipping, and blockade them to prevent new missiles from coming in. This was not entirely successful, as Iran insisted, and started seizing tankers of their own in order to make their point. American intervention was begun covertly under Obama, escalated to a massive Tomahawk strike in 2016, and has expanded into the present conflict under Trump, Biden, and Trump again. It’s an international coalition force, not purely US, but the US is doing most of the fighting.
The Iranian IRGC has acted repeatedly against the blockade, which they argue is illegally interfering in their national rights. This has led, step by step, into what’s being called “Trump’s Iran War”. As a reminder, the US did act to kill several generals plus the Ayatollah.
Right now, every time the Houthis fire a missile, the US blows up the launcher, and sometimes the missileers. The navy is responding to the IRGC in the same tit-for-tat fashion, and is systematically bombarding logistics along the coast of Iran in order to make the war more costly for those who insist on perpetuating it.
There are, roughly, five possible ways things can go from here:
1. A coalition ground force goes in and stomps on the Houthis until they stop twitching. This would result in massive casualties and be widely condemned as an act of genocide, but it would probably stop the ballistic missiles that keep hitting skyscrapers in Riyadh.
2. Eventually, the US gets tired of fighting for oil and goes home. A Saudi force then moves in and utterly exterminates the Houthis. This would be quietly condemned as an act of genocide by a very few people, but most of us would never even hear about it.
3. Iran makes a diplomatic deal that sells out their puppets. Because they’re presently running no fewer than five different proxy wars around the globe, this seems highly unlikely.
4. Iran becomes a nuclear power, and turns Riyadh into a sheet of green radioactive glass. World War Three ensues and everybody dies.
5. The naval blockade continues indefinitely, or at least until OPEC dissolves and the price of oil starts moving with market forces.
Note that US actions in Venezuela were largely an effort to break up OPEC, and they appear to have been effective. In five years or so, cheap Venezuelan oil will begin flooding in, and the price of US heavy crude will plummet. As a result, Option 5 will naturally wind down in five years, after which World War III in the region will no longer be a serious danger, and they’ll go back to their usual practice of killing only each other.
Unfortunately, when Trump leaves office in early 2029 (if he should survive that long), his successor will likely try to score cheap points with the voters by immediately abandoning the blockade, blaming it on Trump instead of Obama, Biden, or whatever local faction one cares to assign fault to.
But the truth of the matter is, there’s really no viable alternative that prevents either genocide or a nuclear exchange.
