Do you think the Houthis can do more damage to the U.S. than the U.S. can do to them? I don’t understand your point. Is it a bad thing if the U.S. doesn’t want to wage war on someone?
Every potential opponent knows that the main US weakness is the unwillingness of the civilian population to commit to winning a prolonged war. If the opponent can just survive long enough, there is a high likelihood that Americans will grow tired of the casualties and the wasted billions and give up.
Subsequently, most potential enemies will be operating in the grey line between doing some damage to American interests while not so much that it pisses them off to really invade. Conversely, the US military does serve as a deterrent that heavily limits the actions of opponents from actualizing their own goals. Instead they need to engage in decades long asymmetric warfare while their population suffers without a end goal in sight. And even while USA might be unwilling to engage, it dosent stop other opponents like Israel with more political will from performing more direct actions.
What people don’t realize is that the US hasn’t actually fought under LSCO conditions since early Vietnam, as regardless of the scale of the deployment the ROI and thus the tactics that can be employed were mostly limited to LIC/PKO.