President Joe Biden and Western allies will not be able to halt Yemen-based Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, according to a top White House official.
“This needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And so, we want to work with countries across the board — countries who are allies and partners, countries who are not — in the common interest to get this to stop.”
The Iran-backed Shia Islamist organization has launched numerous attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in recent months in a stated show of support for Hamas amid the war with Israel. U.S. and British forces coordinated to bombard Houthi targets in Yemen last week, but Sullivan signaled Tuesday that any effective restraint on the Houthis would require support from rival powers.
“How long this goes on, and how bad it gets, comes down not just to the decisions of the countries in the coalition that took strikes last week but the broad set of countries, including those with influence in Tehran,” Sullivan said.
This broader diplomatic combination, he emphasized, should “indicate that the entire world rejects, wholesale, the idea that a group like the Houthis can basically hijack the world as they are doing.”
Iran figures as the chief patron of both Hamas, which ignited a major war with Israel by perpetrating an attack that resulted in the massacre of 1,200 civilians on Oct. 7, and the Houthis. The Western response to Houthi attacks drew an emphatic rebuke from Russia, which relies on Iran for weapons to bombard Ukraine.
“We strongly condemn these irresponsible actions of the US and its allies,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last week.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the Houthis as doing “a great job,” according to an Iranian media outlet.
“By stopping ships that are bound for the occupied [Palestinian] territories, Yemen seeks to put a halt to the Zionist regime’s crimes and genocide against civilians in Gaza,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said Tuesday.
Sullivan calculated that “more than 50 nations have been affected in nearly 30 attacks” in the Red Sea. And, while he argued that the Oct. 7 attack was designed to disrupt the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Sullivan also emphasized that Hamas officials have pledged to repeat the carnage of Oct. 7 “again and again” while using human shields in Gaza.
“That is the reality Israel is contending with: a determined terrorist threat that chose, as its battlefield, the communities of innocent civilians, and still to this day holds more than 100 hostages in circumstances that are dire and deteriorating,” Sullivan said. “Now, this does not lessen at all Israel’s responsibility to conduct its campaign in a way that upholds international humanitarian law and abides by the moral and strategic necessity to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians. Every innocent life — Palestinian, Israeli, every one — is sacred and deserves to be protected.”
Saudi Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Gulf Arab monarchy’s foreign minister, allowed that Riyadh still has interest in a deal with Israel, provided that the bargain includes a Palestinian state.
“We agree that regional peace includes peace for Israel, but that could only happen through peace for the Palestinians through a Palestinian state,” the Saudi royal told Davos. “There is a pathway towards a much better future for the region, for the Palestinians, and for Israel. That is peace, and we are fully committed to that.”
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Sullivan, for his part, maintained that a Palestinian state had been a part of the U.S. intent throughout those negotiations.
“The basic recipe, which is peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed — these pieces are not, in a way, operating in completely separate spheres,” he said. “They are linked and connected. They were before Oct. 7. They remain linked today. And they’re something that we’re going to have to continue to work on.”
