Houthi attacks on shipping continue. While Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced a multilateral effort to patrol the passage with warships, this is dangerous and unsustainable virtue signaling. Perhaps President Joe Biden believes this akin to the Obama-era anti-piracy mission just 400 miles away, but that was in open water far from shore. The U.S. Navy was seldom under threat from land-based missiles, drones, or the type of suicide speedboat that struck the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen a quarter century ago.

A better analogy would be to the Reagan-era mission to protect reflagged tankers transiting under fire from Iran in the Persian Gulf. In that operation, American ships faced constant air and sea threats. Even that was easier. The Bab el-Mandeb is twice as narrow at the Strait of Hormuz; indeed, the Missouri River is at places wider than the waterway now under threat. In the 1980s, Iran took advantage of that narrowness to mine shipping channels; it is only a matter of time until the Houthis do likewise. Iranian harassment of shipping ended only when the United States responded militarily.