JANUARY 11, 2024

Don’t Bomb the Houthis

Careful Diplomacy Can Stop the Attacks in the
Red Sea
A LE XA N D R A S TA R K

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houthis
 Don’t Bomb the Houthis

Don’t Bomb the Houthis

Careful Diplomacy Can Stop the Attacks in the
Red Sea
A LE XA N D R A S TA R K

T
he conflict between the United States and the Houthis in the
Red Sea is steadily escalating. On December 31, Houthi small
boats attempted to attack a commercial vessel; after U.S. naval
helicopters responded to the attack, the Houthis—a rebel group that
controls territory inhabited by 80 percent of Yemen’s population—fired on
them. U.S. forces returned fire, sinking three Houthi boats and killing ten
crew members. Then on January 9, the Houthis launched one of their
largest attacks in the Red Sea to date including 18 drones, two anti-ship
cruise missiles, and one anti-ship ballistic missile, which were intercepted
by U.S. and UK forces.
This engagement represented just the latest in a series of attacks in the
Red Sea. Since mid-November, the Houthis have launched more than 20
attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, a strategically critical strait
that is transited by 15 percent of global trade. Characterizing their attacks
as a response to the Israel-Hamas war, they have also fired missiles and
drones toward southern Israel. The Red Sea attacks have forced some
shipping companies to temporarily suspend sailing through the Suez
Canal, routing instead around the Horn of Africa, a change that adds

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about ten days to their journey. The attacks have not yet led to a
significant disruption in global trade, but over the long term, the rising
shipping costs they provoke are likely to increase oil prices and the cost of
consumer goods worldwide.
In response, the United States has mobilized international partners,
launching in mid-December a multinational initiative aimed at protecting
commercial vessels in the Red Sea. And on January 3, these partners
issued a joint statement that U.S. officials indicated should serve as a final
warning to the Houthis before Washington took more drastic action. U.S.
officials are now considering military attacks on Houthi targets.
Because the Houthi attacks could have serious consequences for global
commerce, the United States is under substantial pressure to respond
militarily. But instead of retaliatory strikes, the U.S. should favor a
diplomatic approach. The Houthis may be recent entrants into
international newspaper headlines, but they have been challenging the
United States and its Gulf partners for two decades. And the use of force
against the Houthis in the past, whether by former President Ali
Abdullah Saleh’s regime or by a Saudi-led effort to reinstate the
government the Houthis overturned in the mid-2010s, has merely allowed
the group to refine its military capabilities and portray itself as a heroic
resistance movement, bolstering its legitimacy at home.
Indeed, the group needed a boost: it faced growing domestic resistance
before October 7. Now, however, its response to Israel’s operations in
Gaza appears to have won support in Yemen and across the region.
Retaliatory strikes would also increase the likelihood that the Israel-
Hamas war will expand across the region and that the civil war in Yemen
will resume. Over the past year and a half, a UN-negotiated truce kept
serious conflict in Yemen at bay, but direct U.S. strikes on Houthi targets
could reignite internal warfare. The United States has few good options to
respond to Houthi attacks. But a diplomatic push for a sustainable peace
in the war in Yemen while continuing efforts to deter Houthi attacks
alongside international partners is the least bad of them.
BLAST RESISTANCE

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The Houthi movement began in the 1990s, when a group then calling
itself Ansar Allah (“Supporters of God”) began to resist Saudi
proselytizing of Wahabism and to assert Zaidi identity and religious
practice across Yemen. Zaidism is a variant of Shiism local to northern
Yemen and parts of southern Saudi Arabia. There are important doctrinal
differences between mainstream Shiism and Zaidi Islam: mainstream
Shiites recognize 12 imams, for instance, while Zaidis recognize only five.
But as the movement came to oppose the corruption endemic in Saleh’s
regime—and his partnership with the United States in the global “war on
terror”—it gained Yemeni supporters beyond the Zaidi community. Media
accounts sometimes portray Yemen’s long-running civil conflict as
sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites. In fact, throughout the early
years of the twenty-first century, notes Marieke Brandt, an anthropologist
who has studied the Houthis extensively, the Ansar Allah movement
expanded to become “a catalyst with the potential to unite all those [in
northern Yemen] . . . who felt economically neglected, politically
ostracized and religiously marginalized.”
In response to the movement’s rising prominence, beginning in 2004,
Saleh’s government launched six brutal rounds of fighting—killing the
group’s charismatic leader, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. But these
military efforts failed to root out the movement. Instead, Ansar Allah
gained new adherents and enshrined its founders’ family members as its
leaders.
When the Arab Spring came to Yemen in 2011,
Saleh was eventually forced to step down, yielding
Years of airstrikes
to his vice president, Abd-Rabu Mansur Hadi. But
against the Houthis the country’s democratic consolidation faltered
only aggravated the when the National Dialogue Conference, a 2013–
world’s worst 14 process meant to negotiate a transition to
humanitarian crisis. democracy, fell apart. Recognizing a power
vacuum, the Houthis took over Yemen’s capital,
Sanaa, in September 2014 and then attempted to extend their influence
south, seizing control of most of the country.

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The Houthis’ 2014 rise provoked alarm in neighboring countries, most

notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Around this time,
the Houthis also began to receive support from Iran and their proxy
Hezbollah—adversaries to the Saudis and Emiratis. In 2015, a coalition
led by those two countries—and supported by the United States, the
United Kingdom, and France—intervened militarily, launching airstrikes
to support other military organizations that nominally backed Hadi’s
government.
But instead of restoring peace, the airstrikes helped aggravate a war that
resulted in what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian
crisis in the world. Between 2015 and 2022, airstrikes by the Saudi-led
coalition—backed by U.S. intelligence-sharing, aerial refueling, and
aircraft maintenance—killed an estimated 9,000 Yemeni civilians. Four-
and-a-half million Yemenis are displaced, and more than 21 million, or
two-thirds of Yemen’s population, remain in need of humanitarian
assistance and protection.
GROW TH OPPORTUNIT Y

As the Houthis solidified their control over much of northern Yemen,

they began to seek more visibility on the regional stage. Their slickly
produced, Beirut-based media channel, Al Masirah, produces content in
both Arabic and English to share their perspective with a broader
audience. Houthi traditional poems, set to music and video and widely
shared on social media, declare Houthi opposition to Israel and the
United States.
To understand the Houthis’ goals, it is worth taking seriously what they
themselves say they want. Since about 2003, the Houthis’ sarkha—their
motto, usually printed in green and red—echoes the slogan of
revolutionary Iran and proclaims Houthi values and aims in no uncertain
terms: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the
Jews, victory to Islam.” In their public statements, Houthi leaders have
repeatedly framed their current attacks as a response to Israeli operations
in Gaza. Their intent, they say, is to pressure Israel to de-escalate its war
against Hamas.

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But this rhetorical posturing has also allowed the Houthis to build
legitimacy in Yemen and across the Middle East, diverting attention from
their failures at home, where their popularity has eroded in recent years.
They have been unable to deliver economic growth to the poorest country
in the Middle East and North Africa. The Houthis are also brutally
repressive, torturing and executing journalists, arresting and detaining
peaceful protesters, and restricting the rights of women and girls. Many
Yemenis increasingly see the Houthis as driven by a desire to establish a
totalitarian religious state that protects Zaidi elites’ power.
In September 2023, protests against the Houthis
for failing to pay public-sector salaries were
The Houthis have
followed by arrests, but the Houthi leadership
used their attacks recognized it had a problem. In September 2023,
in the Red Sea and they announced they were preparing a “radical
on Israel to change” to their government to address corruption
demonstrate their and economic problems—before the Israel-Hamas
importance to Iran. war gave them a new opportunity to gain
legitimacy. A Palestinian Center for Policy and
Survey Research poll conducted in late November and early December of
2023 found that residents of Gaza and the West Bank ranked Yemen’s
response to the Israel-Hamas war as the most satisfying among regional
actors. The Houthis have trumpeted Yemeni pro-Palestine demonstrations
as evidence of their support for the Palestinian people.
Regionally, the Houthis have used their attacks in the Red Sea and on
Israel to demonstrate their importance to Iran’s “axis of resistance,” the
network of state and nonstate actors that Iran has leveraged to spread its
influence across the region and encircle its opponents, including Israel and
Saudi Arabia. The partnership between Iran and the Houthis deepened
substantially over the course of Yemen’s civil war. Iran values the Houthis
because they allow Tehran to act more widely while maintaining plausible
deniability. The Houthis, for instance, claimed responsibility for a
September 2019 drone attack on Saudi oil facilities, but the attack is
widely believed to have been carried out by Iran. Until the April 2022

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truce in Yemen, the Houthis were also launching an escalating series of

strikes facilitated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds
Force on territory within Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Quds Force has helped the Houthis build stockpiles of
sophisticated weapons, including unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles.
Since approximately 2016, Iran has helped the Houthis learn to assemble
their own weapons using parts from abroad, outrunning the international
community’s efforts to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Yemen. The
fact that the Houthis are now able to launch missiles directed at Israel and
commercial vessels—while, thus far, avoiding significant retaliation—is
undoubtedly further demonstrating the group’s strategic value to Iran.
Tehran has offered support to the Houthi attacks, sharing intelligence to
assist attacks in the Red Sea and moving its own warship into those
waters.
STRIKE OU T

International actors must respond to the Houthis’ attacks, both to preserve

the Red Sea shipping route and to prevent further regional escalation. But
the United States is confronted by an array of bad and worse options for
how to do so. Some politicians and analysts have argued that the best way
to counter Houthi aggression is with military escalation designed to
“restore deterrence.” This perspective sees the United States’ eventual
decision, in 2021, to push for peace negotiations in Yemen as a failed
policy of appeasement.
But proponents of airstrikes against the Houthis cannot articulate what
should happen afterward. It is hard to see how airstrikes would deter
Houthi attacks now when they have failed to do so over the past decade.
Airstrikes against Houthi targets might marginally erode the Houthis’
ability to launch missiles and drones, but it will be much harder to
effectively target and eradicate the Houthis’ small, cheap manned and
unmanned boats.
Likewise, designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, as
the Trump administration did briefly in 2020, would likely have little
effect. Their leaders have long been under U.S. sanctions, and they would

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no doubt simply use the designation as further proof that they can get a
rise out of powerful adversaries. But the FTO designation would certainly
make the delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemen more difficult.
An approach that combines diplomacy with deterrence is the least bad
way for the United States to deal with this intractable problem in the near
term. There is little international appetite for a military response. Even
Saudi Arabia, which led the 2015 military intervention against the
Houthis, is now cautioning the United States to act with restraint.
Washington cannot count on public support
from its Gulf partners. Although some of the
To deal with the
commercial ships the Houthis have targeted have
Houthi threat, the no apparent links to Israel, the fact that they have
United States must repeatedly called their attacks an effort to support
push for an end to Palestinians limits the degree to which Arab states
the war between can respond to Houthi aggression, even if they
Israel and Hamas. were inclined to get involved. Public opinion in
Saudi Arabia, for instance, has turned even further
against establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. Gulf states have little
incentive to risk the wrath of their publics. Aside from Bahrain, the Arab
states have been reluctant to publicly associate themselves with the
multinational operation that the Pentagon announced in mid-December.
Still, that operation is a useful first step to demonstrate international
opposition to Houthi aggression and to intercept and deter attacks. The
United States must also continue to support the UN’s efforts to negotiate
a sustainable peace in Yemen. The 2022 truce agreement has held, more or
less, and the parties are close to a deal that would make the cease-fire
permanent and launch talks about the long-term future of Yemen’s
governance.
To deal with the threat posed by the Houthis, ultimately the United
States must push for an end to the war between Israel and Hamas—as
well as to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general. Like it or not, the
Houthis have linked their aggression to Israel’s operations in Gaza and
have won domestic and regional support for doing so. Finding a

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sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to de-

escalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off
their attacks on commercial vessels. Such attacks would have limited
utility in the absence of these conflicts.
These measures cannot fully address the threat that the Houthis pose to
U.S. interests and to stability in the region more broadly. But they remain
the best among bad options—and the United States has only bad options
because of its failed approaches to Yemen over the past 20 years.
Washington must not repeat its mistakes. Decades of experience have
shown, by now, that military efforts to dislodge the Houthis are unlikely
to be effective. Instead, they may merely further devastate the lives of the
already struggling people of Yemen.

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