By Tom Fowdy
The military situation in Yemen has dramatically isolated.
In a resurgence of a civil war that has broken the South Arabian country for over a decade, the Houthi group, who dominates its Southwest, have seized the coastal city of Mocha on the Red Sea and "reached the Red Sea islands of Hanish." Their goal is very obvious, to subsequently shut down the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that goes into the Red Sea, one of the world's most important shipping routes, and thus exert a strategic stranglehold over it just like Iran has done with the Strait of Hormuz.
None of it is a coincidence. After all, the Houthis are an Iran-backed militia whose political hold in Yemen is a by-product of a longstanding regional proxy conflict between Tehran and Saudi Arabia. The conflict in Yemen had been frozen in 2022, but now it has come alive again precisely because America's war against Iran itself, and the failure to reach a peace agreement, has given it political space to do so. The Houthis are a pressure valve that is now being tightened to inflict even more pain on the global economy.
Why are we in this position? First of all, the United States under Donald Trump has badly miscalculated in initiating a war against Iran which to their miscalculation, would result in a shift and inexpensive regime change. It did not. Despite massive US strikes, Iran has remained politically and militarily resilient and its massive geographic size has given it coverage to repeatedly retaliate against the United States, striking military bases and infrastructure throughout the Middle East.
This has left the US Presidential administration with no actual way to ending the conflict, because cutting a compromise peace agreement with Tehran goes against the ethos of its modern foreign policy doctrine, cedes strategic ground to an adversarial state, and is tantamount to domestic political humiliation. In their view, Iran either submits to one-sided US terms, or it doesn't, but because Tehran is not truly defeated and has leverage of its own, this is a non-starter, and this has evolved into a month's long standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, as Washington now tries to crush its economy with sanctions.
So, in Iran's point of view, what is the next logical step? The answer is to back escalation in Yemen and subsequently expand the force of maritime disruption to the Red Sea, which is an even more important waterway than the Strait of Hormuz as itself, along with the Suez Canal, constituting the essential shipping between Europe and the Indo-Asia-Pacific Axis of the world.
This escalates the situation into an even more global crisis, and for countries such as Saudi Arabia, an effective blockade would subject them to a maritime embargo for all trade going eastwards, as the Strait of Hormuz is blocked on their Eastern coastal flank and the Strait of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is blocked on their western coastal flank, leaving the Suez Canal as their only route out. This, combined with the failure of peace talks, has again sent the price of crude oil back to over $107 a barrel. Thus, Iran is attempting to checkmate the Saudi Kingdom with this latest move.
The question is, what happens now? If the United States commits to a military intervention against the Houthis in Yemen, this arguably constitutes a widening of the war Trump expected to be over in a matter of days. The campaign for the US mid-term elections has now begun, and there is little doubt that more war will be popular amongst the electorate. Iran, having chosen to escalate at this very point, clearly sees this as an opportunity to exert further pressure and undermine the administration, precisely because Trump doesn't really have any options left to deal with it. After all, his war is not popular and it remains probably the biggest miscalculation of his 2ndterm in office, and all he can truly do is kick the can down the road and postpone the political costs of it for as long as possible, and only time will tell how this truly ends.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
Opinion | The Two State Solution is no longer rhetoric, but a red line
Comment