THE astonishing effectiveness of the Houthi blockade of Israeli-linked shipping through the Red Sea has provoked a dangerous US-British response.

Lone among nations, Yemen has taken military action to uphold international law against the genocide in Gaza. In November it warned that any Israeli-owned shipping or ships to and from Israel would be legitimate targets — until the genocide ceases. Ships with no links with Israel had nothing to worry about.

The Houthi attacks on around 30 commercial ships so far — without any loss of life — have forced international shipping thousands of miles round South Africa rather than sailing through the Red Sea and Suez Canal to Europe. Ships now have to pay a war-risk premium on the London insurance market. A third of all container shipping passes through the Red Sea and this fell by 60 per cent between November and December.

What is effectively a Yemeni naval blockade of Israel means that Eilat, Israel’s Red Sea port, has reported an 85 per cent drop in activity, a virtual shut-down. 

The Western attacks

After a vote at the UN security council condemning the Houthi actions, the US navy and air force launched attacks, supported by British planes based in Cyprus. 

The strikes targeted several Yemeni cities, including the capital, and follow-up raids have attacked Sanaa’s airport, Yemen’s vital link to the outside world, as well as many other targets. 

What is the US doing?

Lt Gen Douglas Sims, director of the US military’s Joint Staff, expressed the US casus belli in simple terms: “We simply are not going to be messed with here.”

In other words, the US reserves the right to assert its undisputed military dominance anywhere in the world. 

Ibrahim Jalal, of the Middle East Institute, says the US and British attack was to “protect prestige.” The attacks came after the spectacular failure of Operation Prosperity Guardian — the US-led multinational fleet of warships — which did nothing to guarantee the free movement of shipping. 

British involvement is both to protect its own interests in the region, including its shipping insurance market, and to magnify its power on the world stage on the back of US might. 

Several US and British Establishment figures claim a limited bombardment will deter the Houthis and Iran, which they accuse of controlling the Yemenis. Other more belligerent voices want to bomb both Yemen and Iran. While this tendency is not yet dominant, ultimately, as the US moves strategically to weaken and confront China, all the different US ruling circles regard the neutering of Iran as key to denying China its energy supplies from that country. 

Iran supplies China with a significant amount of energy. Disrupting that flow would hold back Chinese development and weaken the US’s main global rival before an all-out war on an enfeebled opponent. A Western naval presence off Yemen is also a way of threatening China’s only foreign base — in Djibouti, on the Bab al-Mandab Straits into the Red Sea. More immediately, the US has been stung by China’s success in bringing together old enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran. Bombing Yemen will stretch the China-brokered deal, so the US hopes, to breaking point.

President Joe Biden claims the air strikes are to guarantee “freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.” But given that Gazans are not allowed freedom of navigation by Israel in their own waters, and that the Saudis and US have been blockading merchant ships from reaching Hodeida port in Yemen as part of the Saudi war of occupation, this claim rings hollow. 

The siege on Yemen prevented humanitarian aid from reaching the 23.4 million people directly dependent on it — 60 per cent of the almost 400,000 deaths during the war in Yemen have been caused by lack of access to food, water and healthcare. 

Western hypocrisy is also revealed in the fact that the US could end Yemen’s threat to Israeli-linked ships at any time — without violence — simply by depriving Israel of arms and funds, and thus enforcing an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. This it refuses to do. It chooses to enable Israel’s massacres, supporting Israel as its loyal enforcer in the Middle East.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent trip to the region wasn’t about de-escalation. He went to organise the strikes against Yemen. 

Reaction to the bombing

The response to the bombardments by Yemen’s Ansarallah, the broad-based patriotic movement with the Houthis at its core, was defiant.

Beyond Ansarallah, which is far from being a pawn of Iran, the attacks have inflamed public opinion in the region. Already there have been massive demonstrations in Jordan — a country that acts as a hub for supplying Israel, while rhetorically calling for Israeli restraint in Gaza — as well as in Yemen itself where the vast weekly protests reached unprecedented size after the bombings. 

In Iraq, patriotic militias linked to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and others have vowed to intensify their attacks on US bases there, aiming to oust the US’s illegal presence in Iraq. 

In Lebanon, Hezbollah condemned the US and British attacks on Yemen, as did Iran and Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “It is as if they aspire to turn the Red Sea into a bloodbath.”

Yemen – a formidable foe

If the US and Britain do decide to expand their war against Yemen, they may find it harder than expected. The Houthis are “not responsive to deterrence, and deterrence has always failed,” according to Andreas Krieg of King’s College, London.

The Houthis’ formation is not centralised but acts as a network, which makes them difficult to destroy. They are also highly experienced in warfare, having fought the Saudi invaders of Yemen to a standstill since 2015. Most importantly, they have massive popular support for their patriotic stance against foreign interference.

The Houthi government in Yemen, which began as a regional resistance movement against corrupt pro-Western, pro-Saudi rule expanded after the Saudi invasion of 2015. With large-scale defections from the Yemeni army, it grew into a coalition of resistance known as Ansarallah, transcending Shia/Sunni differences and becoming a broad movement to free Yemen. 

It succeeded in forcing the massively armed Saudi and UAE forces into suing for peace by attacking Aramco oil-refining facilities and other infrastructure within Saudi territory. They also threatened the UAE’s Dubai. Their ability to evade expensive US air defences took both Gulf powers by surprise. Thus, Ansarallah has a history of confounding Western-backed aggression. It’s worth remembering, too, that Yemen pushed the British out of Aden in 1967. 

The latest escalation by the US and Britain in Yemen is a sign of the war spreading out of control — and it could even beyond the region. China’s approach in acting as a regional peacemaker for the first time — in an area long-dominated by the West — stands in stark contrast to Western recklessness. 

It marks the shrinking of the Western sphere of influence. It is this shrinkage that the US will not allow. Bypassing Congress to initiate this new war, just as Britain bypassed Parliament, evades even the weakest democratic oversight of decisions on war and peace and illustrates the empire’s ruthless determination to hold onto global supremacy come what may.