Standing Up to the Puppeteers in the Red Sea and Beyond

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The Houthi rebels have been fighting in Yemen for thirty years, as part of the general power struggles between Shia and Sunni that define so many Islamic countries.

While their disruption was primarily confined to their home turf of Yemen until recently, they changed their tactics a year ago, and are now much more than a nuisance, literally causing destruction on a global scale.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists rushed through the wall from Gaza into Israel in a surprise attack, killing and torturing some 1,200 innocents, injuring thousands more, and taking hundreds of captives back to Gaza. This horror, along with Israel’s complex but necessary response in Gaza, has dominated mainstream news coverage of the region for the past year.

Inspired and energized by the attention focused on Gaza, the Houthis refocused their methods and have spent the past year harassing maritime transportation in the region, attacking cargo ships as they sail past Yemen on their way to or from the Red Sea. As a result, they have driven well over two thirds of the traditional commercial traffic out of the area, including virtually all of the container ships that transport the vast majority of cargo in international commerce.

To appreciate how severe a problem this is, we must consider the map.

The most significant general trade route on earth is the one between Asia and Europe; virtually all such cargo, for well over a century now, has travelled between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, through the relatively narrow passageway from the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea, and finally the man-made Suez Canal.

The Houthi pirates attack the undefended, or barely-defended, cargo ships in that lane with such ferocity — either boarding them, damaging them, or sinking them — that most of the ships in that trade lane now take the much longer route around the continent of Africa, adding considerable cost and transit time to the Asia-Europe trade, while reducing the practical equipment stock of the world’s maritime fleet (because the longer the average transit times get, the more volume is effectively removed from availability). There is therefore much less global ocean cargo capacity today, and thus it will remain until the ships can safely pass through the Red Sea and Suez again.

Between the cost of these longer lead times and higher freight prices to the world’s industrial supply chains, and the cost in manpower and productivity to the transportation industry, it is estimated that this ongoing process costs the global economy a billion dollars per day.

Now that this nightmare has continued for nearly a year, that’s over $300 billion burned away so far, a figure that now surpasses the annual gross domestic product of all but 45 nations on earth.

And what are we doing about it?

The United States and several European nations have spent the past year performing an ineffective containment action, occasionally attacking a launch site or rebel base, occasionally fighting back, but generally allowing the status quo to continue, as if to avoid meddling in an internal Yemeni civil war.

But anyone can plainly see that it is no longer an internal Yemeni matter. The Houthis have made it a global economic war, and the free world therefore has every right to respond as needed, without intentionally tying both hands behind our backs.

Everything we do to the Houthis alone is pointless, because they have an unlimited sponsor in the background. Blow up a launch site, another will immediately sprint up, fully funded and stocked. Blow up a drone; another will appear, programmed just as precisely. Capture and kill a terrorist squad; another will pour out of their cells, ready to attack the next ship just as vigorously.

Just like Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis’ sponsor is Iran.

Iran wants the global economy crippled because Iran wants to move up in the rankings; it’s a lot easier to move up in the economic rankings if you can get your rivals to be moved down.

And there is a special bonus to Iran when the Houthis keep cargo ships out of the Suez Canal:

Suez is an Egyptian passage; the Egyptian government depends on both busy port labor along the route and the steep Suez Canal tolls that every ship pays to travel the route. Until a year ago, transportation through Suez provided about $9 billion in revenue to the Egyptian government, but not this year. With the container ships removed from the mix, Egypt’s revenue from Suez has plummeted by well over 75%, weakening the nation’s economy and, one must assume, weakening the nation’s government.

Perhaps this is a good time to remember who runs Egypt’s government.

More than a decade ago, Iran’s Islamist ally Mohamed Morsi — the Muslim Brotherhood candidate — took over Egypt and ruled briefly before being successfully deposed, and replaced by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Iran has been licking its wounds ever since. The near-closure of Suez is a way to starve the el-Sisi government of the funds it requires to keep the struggling nation afloat.

The common thread in all these areas — Hezbollah control in Lebanon, the constant Hamas terrorizing of Israel, the Houthi civil warfare in Yemen, the economic starvation of Egypt, the continuous attack on the global supply chain — is Iran.

All these seemingly separate fronts are just different threads being pulled by the puppeteers in Teheran.

But how do the current rulers of the West — the Biden-Harris regime in America, the Labour government in Britain, the suicidally tolerant fools of the European Union — view these issues?

To them, each one is a separate issue, never to be tied together. We treat the Houthis as a ragtag band of insurgents from Yemen. We treat Hamas as a bunch of poor refugees, bitter from a long-ago war. We look at the Lebanese of Hezbollah with rose-colored glasses, remembering what a garden spot Lebanon once was, feigning bewilderment as to why that one-time garden spot has sunk so low.

It is plain to any observer that the source of this world war — this mix of economic warfare, piracy, and terrorism — is the home of the mullahs, the same source that’s been attacking the world in various ways for more than 40 years.

But the Biden-Harris regime has chosen the paths of olive branches, appeasement, even outright bribery as their methods of choice for dealing with Iran. The U.S. government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has turned over U.S. tax dollars and long-frozen assets to the mullahs, forgiven them countless violations of past and current agreements, and happily turned a blind eye to Iran’s continuous and blatant warmongering all over the world, even as they rush to develop atomic weapons.

We are in a world war with Iran already; we just refuse to declare it.

And the longer the Biden-Harris crowd remains in charge in Washington, D.C., the longer Iran can go on, consolidating their power, wreaking havoc near and far.

We rightly look to our elections as primarily domestic matters; we evaluate which candidate will sponsor sane tax and spend policies, which candidate will protect our culture and respect our institutions.

But we must also look to foreign policy, and see which candidate stands up to our enemies and which one might roll over before them.

Donald Trump firmly planted his stakes on these issues when he spoke in Riyadh in 2017, and he remained consistent and strong, supporting and nurturing a peaceful, anti-Iran coalition throughout his presidency.

By contrast, a Harris-Walz regime would continue the accommodationist approach to the Islamists promulgated by the Biden-Harris regime and the Obama-Biden regime before it.

In election years, it’s easy to exaggerate, but this year, it is no exaggeration to say that the rest of the world’s economic and physical security is as dependent on our making the right choice this November as America’s is.

Iran has more than enough puppet regimes in the world; if they win this one more election through the election of the Harris/Walz ticket, they could easily count the United States as one of them.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand-new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.