Biden Has No Good Options in Yemen

The U.S. and U.K. militaries launched a wave of airstrikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on Thursday night, following months of brewing tensions over Houthi attacks on commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, a strategic global maritime trade route.

The strikes, which targeted Houthi military installations and missile supplies, were aimed at weakening the militant group’s ability to launch attacks against commercial shipping lanes as well as restoring deterrence against the Houthis and other Iran-backed groups that have stepped up their attacks on Western targets in the Middle East amid the Israel-Hamas war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, U.S. officials said.

Yet the strikes also revealed the limited batch of mostly bad options the United States has for dealing with the Houthi attacks as it scrambles to contain the regional crisis sparked by the war. On the one hand, experts say, the scale of the Houthi attacks on a major global trade chokepoint made the cost of not taking any action untenable.

As a result of the Houthi attacks, more than 2,000 ships have changed course to circumvent the area, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement on Thursday—diversions that have exacerbated shipping delays and intensified companies’ costs. A new study by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy found that the volume of containers transiting the Red Sea plunged in December to some 70 percent below what would normally be expected.

At the same time, launching strikes risks provoking sharper escalations or further ensnaring Washington and other regional powers in a widening conflict. The Houthis have vowed to retaliate against the operation, which they said killed five people and injured six more, promising the strikes would “not go unanswered or unpunished.”

Washington is “in a bad position,” Thomas Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, said on Thursday before the strikes. “There are no obviously good options for the U.S. at this point, so the challenge is to find the least bad option moving forward.”

Washington and London’s strikes on 16 sites across Yemen are designed to send a forceful warning to the Houthis over their commercial shipping attacks, just one day after the U.N. Security Council demanded that the group cease its assaults. “These targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes,” Biden said in his Thursday statement. The U.S. and U.K. strikes were backed by Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands and were launched in response to an “unprecedented” 27 attacks that affected more than 50 nations, Biden said. The statement made no mention of Iran, the Houthis’ primary benefactor and arms supplier.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters that the strikes “focused specifically on Houthi missile, radar, and [unmanned aerial vehicle] capabilities, the capabilities that are essential to the Houthis’ campaign against commercial shipping in international waters.” The official said the administration would not telegraph any further strike plans against the Houthis if their attacks continued.

The operations are expected to degrade, but not completely eliminate, the Houthis’ military strength and in the short term could embolden the Houthis and other Iranian proxies in the Middle East to ramp up their attacks against Israel and the West, officials and experts warn.

The strikes were “tactical, symbolic, and measured in scope,” said Ibrahim Jalal, a nonresident scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, who noted that the operation lasted only a few hours and the number of reported casualties was low. That indicates that one of the objectives is “to establish the rules of engagement and to signal that further international targeting in the future, at a greater intensity and an expanded scope, is likely if the Houthis continue maritime adventurism,” he said.

In effect, the strikes ordered on Thursday night represent a least bad option with limited aims and are unlikely to completely rid the Red Sea shipping lanes from the Houthi threat.

“We always think that airstrikes are enough, and they never are,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, a former National Security Council official during the Trump administration and an expert on Middle East security. “In this case, however, the objective is limited to incapacitating their immediate firepower,” she added. “I don’t think the Houthis will stop escalating with these strikes, but they also would not have stopped without them.”

Experts warn that the strikes could also help boost the Houthis’ popularity. As part of Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, the Houthis aim to harness their attacks against what they deem as Israeli-linked vessels to boost their domestic and regional popularity, positioning themselves as major power players across the Middle East. The group’s Red Sea attacks have already helped it garner more support, both at home and abroad.

The Houthis are “hoping to also leverage pro-Palestinian sentiment and their framing of maritime attacks to further boost their regional approval, acceptance, and support,” said Jalal of the Middle East Institute.

The strikes sparked massive demonstrations in Yemen on Friday, with tens of thousands of people marching through the country’s major cities in protest. “We did not attack the shores of America, nor did we move in the American islands, nor did we attack them. Your strikes on our country are terrorism,” said Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, a member of the Houthi Supreme Political Council.

The Biden administration framed the operations as a “defensive” response to attacks that imperiled U.S. personnel and civilian mariners and said the strikes were only launched following an “extensive diplomatic campaign.”

Yet the operation has reignited a long-standing legal debate over the U.S. president’s war power authorities without prior congressional approval, particularly among a small group of progressive Democratic lawmakers. “The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution. I will stand up for that regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive from California, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Washington’s earlier efforts to thwart the Houthis’ attacks saw it mobilize some 20 other countries for an international task force that would help safeguard freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, known as Operation Prosperity Guardian.

Yet the effort has been plagued by confusion as some U.S. allies skirt direct association with the coalition—and several other countries refuse to be named at all—underscoring how difficult it has been for the Biden administration to assemble the force. Regional actors, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are particularly wary of getting publicly involved, fearful of Houthi reprisals that could drag them back into Yemen’s protracted conflict.

“The Houthi ability to hurt the U.S. is very limited—there’s not that much that the Houthis can do directly against American assets,” Juneau said. “But what if this escalates and the Houthis try to hit back at Saudi Arabia or the UAE? The Houthis are unpredictable, and they play by their own rules. They don’t follow any kind of established rules of the game.”