Trump Returns to Washington, and the Houthis Take a New Tone

On the menu today: It’s not quite like the Iranian regime releasing the American hostages upon Reagan’s inauguration, but this week, one of Iran’s proxy militias, the Houthis in Yemen, took several steps indicating they weren’t as eager to continue the fight now that Donald Trump is sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. But the new president is apparently unimpressed, not only re-designating the Houthis as a terrorist group — a long overdue move — but declaring that the U.S. will cancel any humanitarian aid projects with any group cooperating with the Houthis or critical of U.S. efforts to fight the Houthis. In the past two years, the Houthis picked the biggest fight with the U.S. Navy since World War Two, a development that was stunningly under-noticed by the American public and egregiously under-discussed by the previous administration. It’s a new day, and that new day is a lousy one to be a Houthi — and honestly, tomorrow’s not looking so hot for them either.

The Houthis Back Down

This is one of the busiest news weeks in a long time, so you’re forgiven if you haven’t kept up on developments in Yemen. But on Inauguration Day, the Houthis in Yemen — who call themselves “Ansar Allah” — announced that, in concurrence with the Israeli–Hamas cease-fire, they no longer intended to fire at U.S. or United Kingdom cargo ships:

Yemen’s Houthi rebels signaled Monday they now will limit their attacks in the Red Sea corridor to only Israeli-affiliated ships after a ceasefire began in the Gaza Strip, but warned wider assaults could resume if needed.

The Houthis’ announcement, first made in an email sent to shippers and others late Sunday, likely won’t be enough to encourage global firms to reenter the route that’s crucial for cargo and energy shipments moving between Asia and Europe. Their attacks have halved traffic through the region, cutting deeply into revenues for Egypt, which runs the Suez Canal linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

And the Houthis made another conciliatory move this week, releasing the crew of the cargo ship Galaxy Leader, a vehicle carrier seized in November 2023 at the start of their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea corridor. The seized Galaxy Leader is now a male-only tourist attraction in Hodeidah, Yemen. No, I am not making that up.

Still, if the Houthis made those moves, hoping to ingratiate themselves to Donald Trump and the new administration, it didn’t work.

Trump issued an executive order Wednesday re-designating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, reversing Joe Biden’s decision to remove the Islamist group’s designation four years ago. The executive order also declares the U.S. government’s intention to “eliminate Ansar Allah’s capabilities and operations, deprive it of resources, and thereby end its attacks on U.S. personnel and civilians, U.S. partners, and maritime shipping in the Red Sea.”

Back in February 2021, then-secretary of state Antony Blinken announced that in the eyes of the U.S. government, the Houthis were no longer a terrorist group:

This decision is a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen. We have listened to warnings from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, among others, that the designations could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel.

The early Biden move was also seen as a de facto middle finger to the Saudi Kingdom; on the campaign trail in 2019, Biden had pledged to “Make the [Saudis] pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”

But the effort to punish the Saudis required the previous administration to avert its eyes from the Houthis’s status as kidnapping, humanitarian-aid-obstructing, cholera-exacerbating Islamists who carried out a “partial and limited reintroduction of slavery.”

Trump’s executive order states:

Supported by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF), which arms and trains terrorist organizations worldwide, the Houthis have fired at U.S. Navy warships dozens of times since 2023, endangering American men and women in uniform.  Since seizing most Yemeni population centers by force from the legitimate Yemeni government in 2014-2015، the Houthis have launched numerous attacks on civilian infrastructure, including multiple attacks on civilian airports in Saudi Arabia, the deadly January 2022 attacks on the United Arab Emirates, and more than 300 projectiles fired at Israel since October 2023. The Houthis have also attacked commercial vessels transiting Bab al-Mandeb more than 100 times, killing at least four civilian sailors and forcing some Red Sea maritime commercial traffic to reroute, which has contributed to global inflation.

The Houthis’ activities threaten the security of American civilians and personnel in the Middle East, the safety of our closest regional partners, and the stability of global maritime trade.

While the Biden administration was insisting they were not a terrorist group, the Houthis effectively shut down a huge chunk of world trade though the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal; before the attacks, about 12 percent of the world’s trade passed through that route. One year ago, at least 90 percent of the container ships that had been going through the Suez Canal were rerouting around the tip of Africa.

Those who paid close attention noticed that the Houthis announced they would not attack China’s state-owned COSCO shipping lines. The Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that monitors and translates foreign media sources, spotlighted a YouTube video posted December 19, 2023, by Chinese professor and military expert Yun Hua, who is a faculty member at the PLA’s National Defense University. Hua smugly boasted:

Five global international shipping companies — Denmark’s Maersk, Switzerland’s Mediterranean Shipping Company, France’s CMA CGM, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd — have successively announced the suspension of their services in the Red Sea, opting to detour around Africa. This has resulted in direct increases in time and transportation costs. China’s COSCO Shipping Holding has become the only major shipping giant able to navigate the Red Sea.

Back on June 14, 2024, the Associated Press reported from the USS Laboon in the Red Sea, and offered an eye-opening account of how intense the fighting between the U.S. Navy and the Houthis had become:

The U.S.-led campaign against the Houthi rebels, overshadowed by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II, its leaders and experts told The Associated Press.

The combat pits the Navy’s mission to keep international waterways open against a group whose former arsenal of assault rifles and pickup trucks has grown into a seemingly inexhaustible supply of drones, missiles and other weaponry. Near-daily attacks by the Houthis since November have seen more than 50 vessels clearly targeted, while shipping volume has dropped in the vital Red Sea corridor that leads to the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

“I don’t think people really understand just kind of how deadly serious it is what we’re doing and how under threat the ships continue to be,” Cmdr. Eric Blomberg with the USS Laboon told the AP on a visit to his warship on the Red Sea.

“We only have to get it wrong once,” he said. “The Houthis just have to get one through. . . .”

“This is the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II — easily, no question,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

You would think the phrase “the most sustained combat that the U.S. Navy has seen since World War II” would get people to sit up and take notice.

Instead, that report and the near shutdown of one of the world’s most important shipping lanes was largely ignored outside of this newsletter, a few other reporters and publications, and that small slice of the American public that pays attention to matters of national security. It was barely an issue in the presidential campaign.

In a July 2024 address to the nation, Biden contended, “I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”

In her lone debate with President Trump, Kamala Harris claimed, “As of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

In other words, we live in a world where the U.S. Navy can be in its biggest fight since World War Two, and most of the American public didn’t notice.

Back in May 2024, the U.S. Agency for International Development boasted it was providing “nearly $220 million in additional humanitarian aid to help the people of Yemen, including nearly $200 million through USAID and nearly $20 million through the Department of State. This brings the United States’ total assistance to the humanitarian response in Yemen to nearly $5.9 billion since the conflict began in September 2014.”

Under Trump’s executive order, U.S. aid to Yemen is likely to halt. Trump ordered the State Department and USAID to “jointly conduct a review of the United Nations partners, nongovernmental organizations, and contractors through which USAID works in Yemen, and identify any entities with a relationship with USAID” that have paid the Houthis or “criticized international efforts to counter Ansar Allah while failing to document Ansar Allah’s abuses sufficiently.” Any institution failing those tests will have their projects, grants, and contracts terminated.

ADDENDUM: Speaking of foreign aid, our Noah Rothman notices, “After he took the oath of office, Trump implemented an across-the-board freeze on all foreign aid for a 90-day study period with two glaring exceptions: Israel and Ukraine.”

I have no idea what the future holds for the Trump administration, Russia, and Ukraine. But Trump’s Truth Social post from yesterday morning certainly makes it sound like the president is getting irritated by Russian intransigence:

I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way – and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!

Reprinted with permission from the National Review by Jim Geraghty

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.