When he was a candidate for president, Donald Trump tended to rail about the stupidity and wastefulness of U.S. interventions in the Middle East. He blasted his predecessors as men who didn’t know what they were doing, naively believing that the U.S. military could will the region to bend to its preferences. These remarks earned him a lot of applause on the campaign trail, in large part because they happened to be true.
Yet Trump isn’t exactly consistent in his thinking. During his first term, he had numerous opportunities to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Syria but ultimately took the advice of his more hawkish advisers by keeping them in place. Rhetoric notwithstanding, Trump actually increased the U.S. force posture in the region, ordered additional ships into the Persian Gulf and boosted U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia by 3,000 personnel.
The trend is continuing in his second term. Last weekend, Trump authorized large-scale U.S. airstrikes against dozens of Houthi positions throughout Yemen, the Arab country on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that is technically still in a state of civil war. Another round of U.S. strikes reportedly occurred on Monday, although the White House had not confirmed it at the time of writing.
The Houthis, the Yemeni militia group whose traditional base of support is in the north, has effectively controlled Yemen since 2014, when its fighters took the capital, Sana’a, and deposed the internationally recognized government there. The Houthis are also the last group standing in Iran’s so-called axis of resistance; the other two, Hamas and Hezbollah, aren’t dead but remain far weaker today than they’ve ever been courtesy of Israeli military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.
Unlike those organizations, the Houthis seem to relish a fight with the United States, viewing any direct confrontation as a way to gobble up more domestic support and distract from its otherwise-dismal, brutal and incompetent administration of the country.
The Trump administration has made its demands clear: The Houthis need to stop threatening the U.S. Navy and civilian vessels in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow waterway separating East Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. The Houthis have launched hundreds of missiles and drones into these waters since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, in a campaign designed to pressure Israel into stopping the conflict. Some of those projectiles have come dangerously close to U.S. vessels, forcing them to use defensive measures. The Houthis have also single-handedly caused major shipping companies to avoid the area; tankers are taking longer alternative routes around southern Africa to get their goods to market.
The U.S. obviously wants to change all that. “We’re doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News on Sunday when asked about the U.S. strikes. “That’s the mission here, and it will continue until that’s carried out.”
If that is indeed the U.S. goal, then the Trump administration will have an awfully difficult time achieving it. Worse still, coming up short could convince Trump to go in even harder with more U.S. military power. It doesn’t take a genius to understand how this entire situation could snowball into yet another large, resource-intensive U.S. military commitment in a part of the world where previous large, resource-intensive U.S. military commitments have ended in frustration.
This isn’t supposition. Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, had much the same objective against the Houthis. The prevailing assumption of Biden’s National Security Council and Pentagon was that Washington could leverage the awesome power of the U.S. military to force the Yemeni militia into submission. In cooperation with the United Kingdom, the U.S. conducted five comprehensive sets of airstrikes on Houthi military infrastructure, from drone manufacturing bases and communications buildings to underground missile storage facilities. These strikes were separate from the almost daily U.S. strikes against Houthi launch sites positioned along Yemen’s coast to preempt attacks. Like Trump, Biden referred to this U.S. military campaign as one to restore deterrence and protect one of the world’s most trafficked shipping routes.
The Houthis, however, didn’t submit. The missiles and drones kept coming. The fact that these retaliatory attacks didn’t do much materiel damage meant little — the Houthis were still able to inflict enough risk that shipping companies steered clear. And for an organization that wears anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment on its sleeve, defying the mighty United States ostensibly in support of the Palestinians in Gaza was a script the group couldn’t have written better itself.
The Trump administration hasn’t taken the right lesson from that experience. For national security adviser Michael Waltz, the reason the U.S. didn’t succeed in reinstating deterrence was because Biden was too timid in his response. “These were not kind of pinprick, back and forth, what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” Waltz told ABC News, describing the Biden-era strikes. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.” In other words, the Trump White House is betting that by expanding the lethality and range of U.S. attacks, the very deterrence that proved so elusive during Biden’s time will finally be established.
What Trump doesn’t seem to grasp is that his buddy, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), thought the same way when he authorized a war against the Houthis, which he believed would be over in weeks. Seven years of massive, indiscriminate bombing later, however, MBS essentially gave up and sought to extricate himself from the conflict.
Presidents need to know when to pick their fights. Yemen isn’t one of them.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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