Houthi anti-ship missile systems: getting better all the time
iiss.org
iiss.org
They have a very large base in Djibouti, directly across from Yemen and across town from the US/multi-national base at the airport.
It's going to be interesting to see how "China, who wants to the authority of a world power" starts to run up against "China, who has the responsibilities of a world power."
https://www.google.com/maps/place//@11.5906054,43.0625938,16...
And the PLAN has 25+ Type 052D destroyers w/ 64 VLS cells apiece [0]. And HQ-9 (reverse engineered Patriot SAMs) and ground attack capable YJ-18 cruise missiles in them.
They absolutely have the capability, if they weren't busy bullying their regional neighbors in the South China Sea, who have vastly less capable warships (if any blue water).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_052D_destroyer#Armament
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/water-filled-missiles-...
The PLAN seems to be more effective and less corruption prone.
Probably why they tapped a PLAN admiral to replace the defense minister, who apparently came from the missile branch.
We will look back on the escalation of the conflict in Yemen as a strategic blunder. The Biden administration is digging itself deeper & deeper into a hole of its own making.
Funny how those people never seem to have any reservations to what hamas did, or any of the history of the past 20 yrs
we were attacked by 'thugs' on 9/11.
afghanistan was still a predictably disastrous war.
For well over 100 years ago England was messing with the region. (Sykes picot)
Getting european and american nation state influence and support of genocide out of the middle east is completely appropriate.
> like the perpetual ethnic-cleansing
Funny you ask that, makes me wonder what happened to the jews of the levantine and arab countries
Of course not, why on earth would anyone tolerate a bunch of invaders taking over their land? Zionists are really still making that argument as if it makes a lick of sense. No sane human would react otherwise.
>Funny you ask that, makes me wonder what happened to the jews of the levantine and arab countries
What came first? Exactly, Zionists started ethnic-cleansing Palestinians and IN RESPONSE their neighbors acted in kind, which by the way was exactly what Zionists wanted anyway. They wanted and needed as many jews in occupied Palestine as possible, so it was an emotional response from their neighbors that was a moral and strategic mistake.
The point of reclaiming Zion is to ultimately reclaim Mount Temple to build the Final Temple and usher in the end of days and an eternity of paradise.
One of the strange things with Israel is a lot of people that are pro Israel dont know anything about the nation. Ignorance usually breeds hate and not love. Or maybe being darker skinned is the key.
And the numerous attacks on the Israelis since it was formed, after each of which Israel gained more land?
And the numerous offers made to the Palestinians for a state which they refused?
Zionism did not exist until the late 19th century and was based in Berlin at the time england suggested splitting up the middle east.
The who “our history from God” thing is a retconn.
Regardless, your narrative is false because we know exactly what the founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote about Zionism in great detail in his book "Der Judenstaat" and it was a colonial project from day 1. They even considered colonizing Alaska or Uganda before they decided to colonize Palestine.
There is no hasbara you could tell me that I haven't heard before in my 20 years of dealing with zionists. All of your narratives contradict each other and try to deflect from the reality that "israel" is and was a colonial project from its inception.
Israelis/Jews ARE indigenous to Palestine. If they didn't want to live scattered amongst other peoples who regularly subjected them to pogroms, that is prerogative; It is not for me or you to judge. A substantial part of the Israelis are Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, not the Ashkenazi who are being derided as "colonialists" (although that is also quite a suspect argument).
Noticed how little sympathy the people in Palestine get compared to people in Ukraine? Why do you think that is? If I was to say the Palestinians are Arab savages I would be reprimanded for being prejudice but making excuses for their continuing genocide isnt prejudice?
These commenters are just articulating the same venom that their parents and grandparents did, in a different way but its the same bile fundamentally. Preaching logic to hateful people that think they are superior makes as much sense in 2024 as it did in Malcolm X’s day. Dont bother trying to talk logic to people like that, they dont listen to your kind.
Thanks for clarifying. Most European Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, were and still are secular. These false post hoc narratives about religious motivations are a deflection from the real reason why Zionists wanted to colonize Palestine and it had nothing to do with religious folklore. It only became a talking point later when colonialism became a "bad word" and they were trying to legitimize their colonial project via other means.
>Noticed how little sympathy the people in Palestine get compared to people in Ukraine? Why do you think that is? If I was to say the Palestinians are Arab savages I would be reprimanded for being prejudice but making excuses for their continuing genocide isnt prejudice?
You could say that arabs or muslims are savages without facing any serious repercussions in most cases assuming that you live in Europe or America. In theory Islamophobia, like any other form of bigotry like antisemitism or homophobia, is supposedly not acceptable but in reality it is and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for it one of which you already stated.
In reality there is an hierarchy of victimhood, where the validity and impact of different groups' experiences are often weighed and measured differently by those in positions of power or with societal influence.
The biggest irony is that the same people who are quick to shut down any form of criticism of israel, by intentionally conflating a political entity with jewish people itself, by screaming antisemitism, also engage in the most viscous Islamophobic tropes to defend their apartheid ethno-state while seeing absolutely no irony in their own bigotry. So it's obvious that it's not really about being tolerant or civilized, but rather about cleverly weaponizing narratives to reshape politics in one's own best interest.
>These commenters are just articulating the same venom that their parents and grandparents did, in a different way but its the same bile fundamentally. Preaching logic to hateful people that think they are superior makes as much sense in 2024 as it did in Malcolm X’s day. Dont bother trying to talk logic to people like that, they dont listen to your kind.
You're correct, but they are also assisted by the fact that geopolitical dynamics provide them with impunity such that their psychotic behavior compounds over time because it never gets checked and thus mutates into worse behavior over time.
The absolute bare minimum of a position is "I'm taking the less bad side" but I think both are so awful neither honestly viable to support on a social level (political is different)
Anyway, hope the football game or something went well.
As for the current situation, my point was to clarify that the Houthis didn’t just randomly wake up in the morning one day and start attacking commercial ships for no reason. They communicated their reasoning and demands from the very start, and made it clear that this was their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The US response was to simply ignore their demands and just bomb Yemen. This is a mistake. The Houthis (and Iran by proxy) are no strangers to conflict. Bombing Yemen will do nothing to stop attacks on commercial shipping - in fact, it probably will escalate them. Worse yet, starting a new conflict doesn’t help the negative reputation the US has built up over the past few months in the eyes of the so-called global south. Instead, this gives China an excellent opportunity to step in as a (actually) neutral power.
> Bombing Yemen will do nothing to stop attacks on commercial shipping
This is bully logic. It can escalate the conflict, yes, but destruction of artillery and missiles works
You might be surprised how preoccupied they are with ‘preventing’ civilian death
THESE particular bombings were because the blockade and sanctions that they did in the region and they justify with the genocide happening in Palestine.
Of course, another way you know they're full of shit is that they were shooting rockets at cargo ships in the Red Sea years before the Gaza war.
I think a pretty mainstream and reasonable way to look at Ansar Allah is:
What they say: meaningless agitprop about Palestinian liberation.
What they intend: A Zaydi Shi'a imamate with racial and bloodline governance.
What they are: A chaos agent managed by Iran in order to keep Saudi Arabia, which operates a military with one of the world's worst ratios of capacity and funding to competence, perpetually on the wrong foot.
The Houthis are not the only one blocking Maritime trade, there are also activist groups in e.g. Oakland and Tacoma which have blocked freight traffic from respective ports with the aim of disrupting shipment to Israel and the stated goal of stopping the genocide.
What the Houthis and these activist groups in America do after they’ve succeeded in stopping the genocide, that is another question which we can tackle at the time. As of now there is an emergency situation in Gaza, and we must treat it as such. Stopping the genocide is at utmost importance.
Campism is a hell of a drug.
As for effectiveness, we do know that protests do work if they are disruptive enough. But we also know that rulings by the ICJ have a tendency to be ignored if a powerful enough nation disagrees with them. Both the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle are among the nations largest cities who are calling for ceasefire. Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal are among very few members of congress calling for ceasefire.
We will see in the days after Friday whether the actions at the ICJ were enough, and that actions against international shipping were indeed unnecessary. However, I’m gonna remain pessimistic about that.
There's a further irony to appealing jointly to the ICJ, an instrument of international law, and piracy, opposition to which is the literal original basis for all international law.
You seem to take issue with the methods the Houthis are employing, but I would like to point out that blockading international shipping is also a method which the Israelis use against Gaza. This blockade by Israel has manifested it self in direct assaults on cargo vessels and murders of their crew members (see e.g. Gaza Flotilla Raid[1]).
I think the targets of the Houthis is not the IDF directly, but rather the international community, particularly nations which are aiding and enabling Israel in the genocide, such as the USA. That the tactic here is to be disruptive enough that it won’t be worth it for these nations to support Israel in its crimes any longer. However, I’m not a member of the Houthies, so I can be wrong about that.
I recommend that you do some additional reading about the Houthis. Rasha Al Aqueedi and Nadwa Dawsari are good starting points. I think you're unlikely to find a credible reported account of Ansar Allah that is sympathetic to them.
I don’t dispute this. However by that logic, Israel has been at war with Gaza (and everyone that trades with Gaza, including Turkey) since 2008. And if we follow that logic further—which we shouldn’t—we can explain Oct. 7 as a particularly horrendous war-crime in a war full of war crimes committed by both sides, but again, we shouldn’t do that.
I also don’t dispute the irony. It most definitely is there, I just find it unimportant. On a global issue, you will always find very different groups with vastly different goals, and it just so happens that one of their goals intersect. They don’t need to be united behind that goal (and they seldomly are) but what you will see is every group has most likely very different means towards that goal.
These actions may even be counterproductive. You may believe that this is the case for the Houthi actions, I don’t, and for that we’re just going to have to disagree.
Finally I would like to note, I’m not sympathetic to the Houthies as a group, merely their stated goal of a ceasefire. I’m also of the believe that we are going to have to be way more disruptive if we are to achieve ceasefire. I believe—and I may be proven wrong about this—that the ICJ case is not gonna be enough, as any enforcement may—and I believe it will—simply be blocked by the USA.
Expect to see much more disruptive actions from all groups if (when?) the international community fails to enforce the orders from the ICJ.
Further: your logic doesn't cohere. Were Israel to blockade international shipping lanes, countries would declare war against them, as Israel did when Egypt blockaded the Tiran Straits. The discussion wouldn't be "can Israel do this"; it would be "has Israel provoked a war with another seafaring country", the way Ansar Allah has.
What you can't do is supply an analysis like "since Israel blockaded Gaza, Ansar Allah can blockade the Red Sea". Well, they can do that, but then the UK and the US will be applauded by the Security Council when they aerosolize Ansar Allah with cruise missiles.
You have repeatedly defended the actions of Ansar Allah in this discussion, most importantly by accepting their explanations at face value despite a (recent!) historic context that gives the lie to all of them, pretty bluntly and objectively. I understand you'd rather just focus on making a case against Israel, and I get why, but the reason you're conversing with me on this thread and not a supporter of Israel is that I'm not prepared to let sail by the idea that the Houthis are a legitimate actor. They are precisely the opposite of that.
This is why I think the only thing that will work are disruptions, these disruptions may include boycotts, blocking of highways, shipping, etc. divestments, etc.
I keep in perspective the urgency of stopping the genocide. And the scale of the disruptions I find justified are proportional to that urgency.
EDIT: Just to prevent this from being read wrong. I still support South Africa’s case for the ICJ. Including because the off chance their rulings will be enforced, but also because I think it will persuade more actors to pursue more disruptions, e.g. for the EU to ignore the USA and issue sanctions against Israel, for broadcasters across Europe to kick Israel out of Eurovision, etc.
If you follow the subthread back to the point where I joined it, you'll see that's been my consistent point throughout.
You need to show that the intent of Israel is to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza, even partially. What I see is the attempt of Israel to prevent more October 7 attacks, which Hamas declared it is going to repeat. The actual goal here is to protect Israel's own citizens from genocide, which Hamas has shown willingness to commit and ability (albeit in a smaller scale currently).
I think it is perfectly valid for a country to protect its own citizen from being burned alive among many other atrocities that were committed, which is also one of the reasons the genocide convention was created in the first place.
As this is war, it's also causing immense suffering in the Palestinian side. Which is why a war to remove Hamas from power was constantly deferred in the past, knowing they are highly entrenched in the civilian population. However, I don't think they left Israel any other way this time.
> I think it is perfectly valid for a country to protect its own citizen from being burned alive among many other atrocities that were committed, which is also one of the reasons the genocide convention was created in the first place.
Also wrong. The genocide convention was created to prevent genocide. There is nothing in the convention mentioning that you should not act if the victims are from other countries. On the contrary, the convention says that you must act to prevent and has an extraterritorial scope (as was established in a previous judgement in UN).
How exactly killing children, reporters, women and people holding white flags, attacking UN shelters, as well as destroying hospitals and universities prevent more October 7 attacks!? In fact, it will create more attacks because of the anger from an oppressed people. Which was the cause of October 7 attacks, by the way. Sorry, declaring war is not a free pass to commit war crimes. If the war crimes are frequent, and they are not opposed (or if they are encouraged), this is a serious evidence of genocide.
About the common western trope of “you should never fight terror because it will only bring more terror” that’s false. There is no way the palestinian population would be more radicalized, they are at the end of the spectrum. It wasn’t like there was any type of atrocity known to man on October 7 that was stopped short due to being too extreme.
Also, israel had shown that when fighting palestinians organizations in the second intifada 2001-2004, it succeeded in greatly reducing the amount of terror and achieve deradicalization
The conflict in Yemen is an old one, and one that the US has always indirectly played a part in, given their seemingly unwavering support of the Saudis. Every power player in the region has been a part of this conflict. It's why there still is civil war in Sudan(!). It's a conflict so complex that makes the Palestinian conflict look trivial in comparison.
Really? That seems to be funny for a group that is actively promoting another kind of genocide as part of their political manifesto:
> The group's slogan reads as following: "God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slogan_of_the_Houthi_movement
If you had such neighbors they might just decide to kill you if you are not of their tribe. Not sure why people would whitewash such a group of extremists.
I'd have thought that here of all places people would be able to differentiate between words and actions (though we can go to the founding document of Likud and statements by various politicians next, if you like).
They've been the defacto government in a large part of Yemen for a number of years, yet they haven't attacked shipping till now.
When they started they were operating using cruiser rules, they escalated to using missiles without attempting to board/warn first only after the US Navy turned up. They have largely been selective with their choice of targets, which is why the Chinese are very reluctant to get involved.
There's a good analysis of their current position in the latest episode of the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze ("The War on Global Shipping").
The West things they know Islam, specifically radical Islam, better than we do, because they did two semesters worth of courses on Middle Eastern studies at their local university.
One could argue that the Shia Houthis are fighting for their independence, but there's a clear distinction between an independence war and a war calling for destroying the West. That is also a distinction between the Hamas and Fatah factions in Palestine.
Now, about those tunnels in Gaza – they're everywhere, right? But Hamas doesn't let ordinary folks use them for safety. That's pretty different from Israel, where new apartments have had to include bunkers since the 90s, and you can find bomb shelters all over the place. So, the sad truth is, the high number of civilians dying in Gaza is mainly because of how Hamas operates, using its own people as a shield.
It would undermine a lot of Israel’s international support. At the end of the day, the Houthis aren’t in Gaza. Them raising random asks is orthogonal to the security threat they pose. Piracy is piracy.
Targeting key enabling (e.g. radar) or missile sites will absolutely have an effect.
The Houthis have large but limited stocks of missiles, little ability to domestically manufacture, and difficulty importing more advanced models from Iran at scale.
Moving interdiction left of launch is absolutely the right call, as it leverages weaknesses in Houthi air defense to more economically blunt their launches.
Hell, the US/UK could just close the loop on foreign military aid and buy low-cost Ukrainian UAVs to attack Houthi targets.
No- you need to go further back before you see the big picture. Much as in the ancient world (which the modern world order consists of in large part), this is a Romans vs. Parthians vs. Chinese thing.
These actions are just the Parthians making access to the Silk Road harder, in the hopes that Consul Biden and the Senate and People of Rome (and the provinces they control) will stop supporting the king of Judea and his recent military invasion of the Parthian-allied settlements on his border.
>Those shipping lanes are vital, and there is only so much disruption the international order will accept before putting a decisive end to the interference.
I'll believe that as soon as the Chinese Emperor Xi commands his warships to sail out and fire their first salvos at the Parthian-supplied forces. The "international order" you think exists is literally just Rome and its provinces, and those provinces are currently busy supplying a civil war in the European Borderland (one the Romans were a major factor in creating the conditions for it to occur) and they barely contribute anything to their obligations in the North Adriatic Treaty Organization to begin with. They don't even have any legions to deploy (not that they could raise any in the first place) and won't be anywhere near decisive in a proper fight.
So that just leaves the Romans themselves... who have been engaging in proxy military action (with the king of Arabia) to remove the Parthian proxies for the past 10 years or so with very little success.
To be fair to Parthia, their main goal has always been to pull nearby provinces out of Roman orbit and into Parthia's- while Judea and Arabia might never enter the Parthian orbit unless physically conquered (organization of the Parthian-sympathetic states surrounding Judea has been a long goal of the Parthians; unfortunately for Parthia, their armies keep losing) the vassal states that depend heavily on goods traveling through the Silk Road might start to view the actions of the Judeans with disfavor.
And sure, the Romans could always just attack the Parthian proxies directly- but the entire reason that Parthia can get away with this is because the Senate and People of Rome aren't actually interested in yet another desert war that costs quadrillions of denarii, and by committing to assisting the King of Arabia secure his southern flank they lock themselves out of defending a breakaway Chinese province (whose unique products Rome arguably values even more than the loyalty of its own provinces) should the Chinese attempt to capture it, as they've long been threatening to do.
We are currently seeing a higher civilian death rate than we saw back in February 2022, yet it doesn't seem like a lot of people complained about disrupting international order when Russia was sanctioned. And they were well deserved sanctions ,it just turns out that it's not just the US or Europe that can care about civilian deaths.
Especially since those countries don't necessarily seem to care a lot about non white civilian deaths, since absolutely 0 western country condemned Israel even when they put literal war criminals like Russia to shame in terms of sheer destruction and indiscriminate murder.
When "the international community" (aka, the west) drops the ball on that regard and lets it happen for close to 4 months now, well what do they expect?
This is a false equivalence. Israel was attacked first, brutally. Russia was not attacked; theirs is a war of agression, pure and simple. It is clear that the fundamental cause of the Ukraine war is a desire by Putin and his ilk to restore the old soviet "empire". [1]
Actually, that has been the cause of many wars down through the centuries. A former power, or a country that thinks it needs to play a more powerful role in world affairs, seeking (re)ascendancy. It happened with Germany and Japan in WW2, and it is happening with Russia now. But it seems people will believe anything but what the aggressors themselves clearly want.
Do you know what the Muslim nations say among themselves, what their ultimate objective is? Without understanding that, it is impossible to place the Israeli-Arab conflict in proper perspective.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/25/putin-...
Even beyond the whatboutism in your comment, sure yeah, let's talk about how trying to restore old entities and states is a bad thing. But isn't that the whole premise of Zionism? It's literally the reasoning behind the Israel state backed settlements in the west bank. Somehow I guess Israeli colonialism is just different... because reasons. And somehow, it's not an act of aggression. Sure! And before you say that Gaza didn't have any colonies, well they didn't exactly because they have been aggressive (and it doesn't matter, Palestinians view themselves as a nation so it happening in the west bank is just as important for people living in Gaza).
The west bank stopped "being aggressive" and stopped the armed struggle and they have been rewarded with 2 decades of constant, blatant pushes for ever more settlements by literal lunatics and Israeli supremacists. All endorsed fully by the military and the Israeli state.
Can anyone who understands this conflict explain this more? What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping? For that matter, how do they benefit from naval coercion in the Gulf?
The Houthis are often thought of as an arm of the IRGC (Iran refers to them as part of their "axis of resistance", along with Hezbollah and Hamas), but they are their own thing, although Iran is believed to be actively assisting them with spotter ships in the Red Sea.
This is just a shotgun blast of additional details. Nobody really knows what Iran's game plan is here.
The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.
Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.
Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.
Autocratic rulers like MBS deciding to cut up journalists/opposition political figures into tiny pieces with bone saws inside Saudi consulates didn't help matters. The whole Khashogghi incident really illustrated exactly what the Saudi regime thinks of rule of law and human rights of their own citizens when it's boiled down to the the barest essentials. US senators, congressmen, foreign service career people have taken note.
It's still worth noting that the Saudi military/air force/other armed forces are extremely large customers of US/NATO spec equipment and UK origin equipment.
It would be worth remembering that something like 85% of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and there were very clear financial/funding connections from wealthy persons within the Kingdom to the pre-9/11 training program. Highly reputable journalists and intelligence sources have also extensively documented the Saudi funding sources that supported (and still support to this day) wahabbist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the "V1.0" of the Taliban in the 1990s, and other fundamentalist salafist jihadi groups.
Invading saudi arabia for regime change instead of iraq in 2003 would have been much more logical if anyone in the US and UK had the fortitude to do it. It would have also been vastly more messy.
It's well known in people who study foreign affairs that Iran funds and arms Shia and shia-adjacent armed groups (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc). But this doesn't happen in a vacuum - to some extent this is the IRGC and Iran's reaction to the well documented and widely known Saudi support for salafist jihadism.
It's also well known and documented that the saudis have been investing vast amounts of their oil wealth in the US stock market, real estate and other equities since the mid 1960s, so the financial and interconnected realtionship between the US and Kingdom would be extremely difficult if not impossible to dis-entangle at this point in 2024.
Despite the Khagoggi affair and other problems descrived above, I think it's pretty clear that US decision makers still consider saudi arabia a much more trustworthy regional "partner" compared to Iran. Ongoing US/UK contractor support of all of their armed forces (and US/UK relationship with Saudi Aramco) and ongoing exports of munitions to saudi arabia back up this theory.
Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.
The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.
While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?
The Khashoggi affair was stupid and incompetent enough to call into question Riyadh’s qualifications as our chief regional ally.
Their subsequent de facto defeat in Yemen underscores that their value is in oil first and maybe geography second.
As these are non-state actors using civilian infrastructure, the international legal order cannot handle these, as they are not party to any law. Therefore when a western aligned country needs to fight these they are in an extreme disadvantage. Any real attack will kill the civilians whose infrastructure said organizations are providing and misusing, eventually pressured to stop retaliating. This was used by Iran in Saudis/UAE vs Houthis, Israel vs Lebanon/Hamas or US vs Iraq.
The approach of having a full fledged state yet declaring it is not a state gave them invisibility, allowing these organizations to grow in strength. Due to their extreme ideology and brinkmanship, ironically this still means someone will need to fight these eventually (see Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis), but in a much greater civilian loss than when was possible previously.
Later on, Iran improved this strategy by creating an alliance of these organizations. They train each other and have planned to fight together in the case of war (partially successful in the last conflict). Currently, they are on the verge of losing two such proxies (Hamas, PIJ) and are in the risk of another one (Hezbollah), and that's why Iran is trying to exert pressure on western countries through attacking civilian shipping.
Fighting back conventionally is obviously not realistic, but the time honored tradition of funding allies and fighting proxy’s is the next best thing. The idea of the policy is also that this is a deterrent to their enemies to think twice about striking them directly.
How true or effective any of this is another matter entirely.
The well-educated government of Iran does not at all consider this. They are an autocratic, theocratic dictatorship. No one has any interest at all in annexing Iran. Like all governments of such a type, there must always be external, powerful, and yet weak enemies at the border or they cannot retain power. Iran has nothing the world wants except hydrocarbons, and their current level of production can easily be replaced by their fellow OPEC members. Anyone actually invading Iran would get nothing but 30 million citizens that live in abject poverty, with the UN expecting another 40% (!) of the country to fall below the poverty line in the next 2 years. Without China (40%) and Turkey (20%) importing from Iran, the country would fail overnight.
Iran registers very clearly as an authoritarian country, what democratic institutions exist are not powerful enough to dislodge the ultimate rulers of the country.
Carl Sagan comes to mind:
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Supporting the Houthis achieves a few things. It ties up Saudi Arabia, one of Iran's regional rivals. It gives Iran a level of force projection over the crucial gulf shipping route, which is leverage. It gives Iran the ability to have the US or Israel struck without giving the US or Israel the easy narrative ability to strike Iran directly in retaliation.
Also, destabilizing US-aligned Arab countries is in Iran's benefit because secular US-aligned dictators are quite anti-Iran and compliant with the US. For example if the Houthi activity leads to economic troubles in Egypt, it could lead to a popular revolution. The US friendly regimes gets ousted by populists (most likely Islamists win at the end), who will be more pro-Iran bloc than compliant with the US.
Another thing to note is that Iran, like Russia and China, is a revisionist power. They are not a status quo state. The TLDR of this is that they hold a grudge and a lot of their energy is dedicated to changing the world/regional order.
Various members of the GCC (UAE, Saudi) can't ever really pressure Iran, because Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz mean they can massively disrupt oil and gas exports, and the Khaleeji countries are heavily reliant on these, despite valiant efforts to diversify.
> What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping?
Iran's lesson learned from the above is that that's super useful, and they'd like to be able to do the same thing to the rest of the world.
It's one reason why violence can be so high in tribal societies. There is no higher power to resolve disputes so you need to front-run the hypothetical violence of the opponent, which creates a game theory situation where the only solution is to attack.
The way to break this dynamic is to have a hegemon, like the US, who can dictate outcomes (e.g. a border) to both sides and enforce it. This can then de-escalate. France no longer side-eyes Germany and vice versa because the US guarantees that neither will do anything. Some attribute this to democratic institutions, prosperity, a common enemy (Russia), etc, which largely does explain things, but it's not the entire picture. If the rest of the world disappeared, tensions between Germany and France would probably go up again due to there being no external power to enforce the status quo.
That said, the Houthis are a non-state actor, so the same logic may not apply.
This has parallels to the issue of there being 400M firearms in the US and an almost infinite capacity to produce new ones in a very decentralized fashion. Almost all of the leverage is on the incentive side; people should be maximally reluctant to inappropriately use what we cannot limit them acquiring. No one can stop people from acquiring or building anti-ship missiles as a practical matter. Building the missiles is too cheap and too easy. The costs to using them inappropriately have to be much higher than they currently are.
That's mostly true because of Iranian support according to the article, not because the Houthis were able to develop them themselves...
Context free discussion ia useless in geopolitics.
But what I will say is that this corridor is extremely important for international trade across many nations. Securing it, for purely monetary reasons, might escalate this much more than for ideological differences.
The current SOTA in anti-ship technology are the Chinese hypersonic missiles such as the DF-26, which are believed to pose a credible threat to aircraft carriers. Iran is also developing hypersonic missiles like the Khalij Fars, but the Houthis don't have these and they are substantially less capable than the Chinese ones.
FTA:
> Civilian vessels can adopt security measures to thwart attempted boardings, but they lack defences against anti-ship missiles. While Western military vessels have advanced air and missile-defence capabilities – using them to down Houthi missiles and UAVs – they are constrained by the number of interceptor missiles they can carry and the challenge of restocking depleted inventories.
These could potentially nullify any ship-bound missile threat if they can be miniaturised and incorporated into CIWS.
The biggest problem is that there is no solution that is both effective and also morally satisfying. The moral injury makes it very difficult to talk about effective solutions - which might include steps towards normalizing relations with Iran and other soft power interventions that would make people angry because they are not harsh enough.
Everyone should feel free to disagree, but think about the reaction to military interventions - more recruitment.
Unless this paradigm breaks very soon, Houthis seem favored to win. Pretty easy to win against a military which bogus morality won't let it harm you, its enemy.
Have you ever served in uniform yourself? Or do you just confidently proclaim barstool opinions based on what you've read here and there?
We all know the US military can defeat the Houthis. But so far it hasn't used its capabilities. It warned and threatened endlessly, while the Houthis continued their campaign of naval terror.
The real question is who is going to do anything about this, if any. Attacking some Houthi targets is just fighting the symptoms here. A direct attack on Iran seems much less likely and appealing. It would turn the proxy war into a real war. It seems the Iranians are quite successful at discouraging that sort of response.
Anti ship missiles are really 1930s tech, there's not necessarily much modern electronics involved.
This is the reason they still exist, it's just easy to blame a single villain and call it a day.
These are more like howitzers with self propelled projectiles. These are much simpler than cruise missiles.