By Michael Rubin
The Houthis are riding high. They paralyze Red Sea shipping and cost Egypt billions of dollars in Suez Canal revenue as cargo ships divert around the Cape of Good Hope. Houthi militias have launched scores of drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but on Tuesday, they demonstrated new reach with a missile strike on Israel. The Houthi threat will only increase as the Biden administration’s latest $10 billion sanctions waiver for Iran trickles down to Iran’s terrorist proxies.
The United States may bristle, but its response to the Houthi attacks is, at best, whack-a-mole and, at worst, an irresponsible use of the U.S. Navy in lieu of strategy. The danger is twofold: First, an open-ended naval mission erodes readiness should a major crisis erupt elsewhere, as aircraft carriers and other ships must spend as much time undergoing maintenance in home ports as they do at sea.
Second, a Houthi lucky strike is only a matter of time, if not by missile, then by a suicide boat bomb like the one that struck the USS Cole off Yemen in October 2000. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the Houthi conflict is the Houthis have yet to use the mines Iranians often deploy in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps President Joe Biden sees Operation Prosperity Garden as analogous to Operation Earnest Will, the 1987-88 reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers, but he should remember that that operation escalated in April 1988 into the largest U.S. surface naval battle since World War II.
Rather than risk American men in a losing struggle, the White House should embrace a more holistic approach. Certainly, relying on Osprey and helicopter air operations out of the Cold War-era base in Berbera, Somaliland, could more effectively keep sea lanes open at a far lower cost and with less exposure for U.S. servicemen.
The problem, however, is not simply that Iran transformed the Houthis into a second Hezbollah who now threaten critical waters, but rather the problem is Yemen itself.
Yemeni unity is the exception rather than the rule. The British colonized Aden nearly 200 years ago to be a coaling station for the British Navy and later a telegraph hub. (The French, not to be outdone, carved out French Somaliland, today Djibouti, for similar reasons.)
In 1872, the British created the Aden Protectorate. In the early 1960s, they sought to reorganize this into the Federation of South Arabia, a model similar to what became the United Arab Emirates. South Arabia took a different trajectory, though, when communist revolutionaries overran it to form South Yemen.
While the end of the Cold War allowed North and South Yemen to unify, it was an unhappy marriage. South Yemen tried unsuccessfully to reassert its independence in 1994. The following year, I drove from Sana’a to Aden. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements still pointed south. Yemenis explained it was not worth moving them since they would need them again.
While the State Department pretends Yemen is unified, even at the best of times, this was fiction; the government seldom controlled territory 10 miles outside the capital or off main roads, where local tribes instead ran supreme. Indeed, academics debate whether the natural order of Yemen is two, six, or even 30 states.
Perhaps, then, it is time to take inspiration from the past. Not only should the United States recognize the Southern Transitional Council’s right to rule South Yemen as a separate country, but the international community should take inspiration from the British seizure of Aden and the French creation of Djibouti.
The Houthis are traditionally an inland and highland culture. To free the Red Sea from the Houthi scourge, the international community should organize and allow coastal communities along Yemen’s Red Sea coast to former their own internationally recognized protectorate based in Hodeidah and running from the South Yemeni border to the Saudi frontier.
Far from colonialism, this would be liberation. Red Sea coastal culture is as different from Yemen’s capital Sana’a and the Houthi center in Sa’dah as Germany is from Austria.
Just as in Somalia, unity and peace are mutually exclusive. It is time for a fresh approach.