American and British forces are expected to bombard Houthi positions in Yemen in response to the Iran-backed group’s intensifying attacks against vessels in international shipping lanes in the Red Sea.
“Unfortunately, the Houthis continue, day after day, to attack shipping,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday while traveling in Egypt. “We have a number of countries that have made clear that, if it doesn’t stop, there’ll have to be consequences, and unfortunately it hasn’t stopped. But we want to make sure that it does, and we’re prepared to do that.”
U.S. Naval forces intercepted a pair of anti-ship cruise missiles and an anti-ship ballistic missile fired by the Houthis on Tuesday, according to U.S. Central Command, a barrage that included 18 “Iranian designed one-way attack” drones. That attack appears to have spurred President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to authorize a retaliatory strike.
“Any American attack will not remain without a response,” Houthi chief Abdul Malik al-Houthi said, according to a BBC translation. “We are more determined to target ships linked to Israel, and we will not back down from that.”
The festering crisis is the most blatant example of the potential for the war between Israel and Hamas to expand into a wider conflict. The Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that ignited the war was perpetrated by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, two Gaza-based organizations backed by Iran. With Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah keen to avoid the kind of cataclysmic clash that likely would result if Iran’s Beirut-based terrorist proxy unleashed its forces, the Houthis have emerged as Iran’s most bellicose proxy.
“This is the 26th Houthi attack on commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea since Nov. 19,” according to U.S. Central Command. “There were no injuries or damage reported.”
British officials have signaled that they are designing the strike in a manner that they hope will stop short of initiating another cycle of retaliation.
“Discussions have gone on for days as to which targets to hit in order that the conflict does not escalate into a full-blown war,” the Times of London reported on Thursday. “The co-ordinated strikes are expected to be similar in scale to those launched in April 2018 by the US, UK and France against President (Bashar al) Assad’s Syrian chemical weapons facilities.”
That operation was the second strike that then-President Donald Trump authorized to punish Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Yet one of his top advisers for countering Iran questioned the logic of such a plan, arguing instead that the Western allies should “restore deterrence” through a larger-scale punishment.
“This is a major threat we’re talking about in one of the world’s most important waterways,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior adviser Richard Goldberg, who coordinated White House National Security Council efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2019 and 2020, told the Washington Examiner. “This can’t just be hitting an empty warehouse and seeing what happens next. It has to be something that is truly meaningful, in an attempt to restore deterrence.”
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Malik, the Houthi chief, promised to increase the scale of Houthi attacks. “The response will be greater than the attack that was carried out with 20 drones and a number of missiles,” he said.
Blinken maintained that a wider war is not erupting. “I don’t think the conflict is escalating,” he said. “There are lots of danger points. We’re trying to deal with each of them.”
