When he was a candidate for president, Donald Trump tended to rail about the stupidity and wastefulness of U.S. interventions in the Middle East. He blasted his predecessors as men who didn’t know what they were doing, naively believing that the U.S. military could will the region to bend to its preferences. These remarks earned him a lot of applause on the campaign trail, in large part because they happened to be true.
Yet Trump isn’t exactly consistent in his thinking. During his first term, he had numerous opportunities to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria but ultimately took the advice of his more hawkish advisers by keeping them in place. Trump actually increased the U.S. force posture in the region, ordered additional ships into the Persian Gulf and boosted U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia by 3,000 personnel.
The trend is continuing in his second term. Last weekend, Trump authorized large-scale U.S. airstrikes against dozens of Houthi positions throughout Yemen, the Arab country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that is technically still in a state of civil war. Another round of U.S. strikes reportedly occurred Monday, although the White House had not confirmed it at the time of writing.
The Houthis, a Yemeni militia group whose traditional base of support is in the north, has effectively controlled Yemen since 2014, when its fighters took the capital, Sana’a, and deposed the internationally recognized government there. The Houthis also are the last group standing in Iran’s so-called axis of resistance; the other two, Hamas and Hezbollah, aren’t dead but remain far weaker today than they’ve ever been courtesy of Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.
Unlike those organizations, the Houthis seem to relish a fight with the United States, viewing any direct confrontation as a way to gobble up more domestic support and distract from its otherwise-dismal, brutal and incompetent administration of the country.
The Trump administration has made its demands clear: The Houthis need to stop threatening the U.S. Navy and civilian vessels in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow waterway separating East Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. The Houthis have single-handedly caused major shipping companies to avoid the area; tankers are taking longer alternative routes around southern Africa to get their goods to market.
The U.S. wants to change all that. “We’re doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News on Sunday when asked about the U.S. strikes. “That’s the mission here, and it will continue until that’s carried out.”
If that is indeed the U.S. goal, then the Trump administration will have an awfully difficult time achieving it. Worse still, coming up short could convince Trump to go in even harder with more U.S. military power.
This isn’t supposition. Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, had much the same objective against the Houthis. The Houthis, however, didn’t submit. The missiles and drones kept coming.
The Trump administration hasn’t taken the right lesson from that experience. For national security adviser Michael Waltz, the reason the U.S. didn’t succeed was because Biden was too timid.
“These were not kind of pinprick, back and forth, what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” Waltz told ABC News. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.” In other words, the Trump White House is betting that by expanding the lethality and range of U.S. attacks, the very deterrence that proved so elusive during Biden’s time will finally be established.
What Trump doesn’t seem to grasp is that his buddy, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, thought the same way when he authorized a war against the Houthis, which he believed would be over in weeks. Seven years of massive, indiscriminate bombing later, however, MBS essentially gave up and sought to extricate himself from the conflict.
Presidents need to know when to pick their fights. Yemen isn’t one of them.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
