Who Gives Two Hoots About the Houthis!
Yesterday we noted that the ascension to NATO of the Balkan Five (Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania) and the Baltic Three (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) amounts to some kind of bad joke. Their combined active military forces total just 66,000 servicemen, which is exactly equal to the combined 66,000 man police forces of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
Likewise, their combined defense budgets are $8 billion annually or about the level of Pentagon spending every seven hours, including weekends, holidays, snow days and the Fourth of July parades, military bands and all. And when it comes to economic heft, their collective GDP is a diminutive $350 billion or just 1.3% of that of the USA.
So we rightly asked, why bother? Their military manpower, token defense budgets and rounding error GDPs do not have even remote relevance to standing up America’s triad strategic nuclear deterrent, which doesn’t require any foreign bases or allies in any case. Nor do they contribute a whit to an invincible conventional military Fortress America defense of the airspace and shorelines of the US homeland way over here on the far side of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats.
And yet and yet. The wee countries of Eastern European NATO actually have some modest throw-weight compared to what’s involved in the raging Yemen bombing leak controversy at the top of today’s the news. Of course, the controversy is all about the leak of what practically amounts to a scheduled bombing run against a tiny spec of an “enemy” on the Red Sea coast. But the far more important question is why in the hell was the Donald bombing the bedraggled Houthi installations in the first place?
Or as Ann Coulter expressed it more colorfully,
…because right now, his foreign policy team is looking like John Bolton without the ridiculous Wilford Brimley mustache. Since Trump keeps hiring these people, it’s a good time to remind him that, in 2016, he won more primary votes than any Republican in U.S. history (as well as the election) by saying things like this about a war that had a million more justifications than his recent bombing of the Houthis:
“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. … We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives … George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”
So why does Trump keep surrounding himself with tinhorn cowboys who think it’s America’s responsibility to drone, bomb, invade and occupy other countries whenever and for whatever reason they want?
As it happens, the Houthi tribes– who profess a variant of Shiite Islam—have dominated much of northern and western Yemen for centuries. They generally ruled North Yemen during the long expanse after it was established in 1918 until the two Yemen’s were reunified in 1990.
So when a Washington installed government in Sana’a was overthrown and the uneasily unified nation of Yemen disintegrated into warring religious factions, the Houthi took power in northern Yemen, while Sunni tribes aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda held sway in the south. And these latter folks are far worse on the terrorist scale than the Houthi ever dreamed of being.
Needless to say, this Houthi remnant of the failed state of Yemen ain’t no threat to nobody who’s minding their own business. They have no blue water Navy, no Air Force, no regular Army and just some odds and sots of coastal patrol boats and short range drones and missiles. So their ability to inflict even a scratch on the American homeland way over here lies somewhere between slim and none.
As indicated, the Houthis rule not the entire sovereign country of Yemen, but roughly 25% of the former Yemen territory (about 137,500 square kilometers out of 550,000), including the capital at Sana’a and key northern population centers. Given that the GDP of the entirety of the Yemen territory was a scant $20 billion in 2024 and that slightly more of the economic activity—now often barter-based after years of USA and Saudi bombing—is under Houthis control, our trusty AI, Grok 3, estimates that in their wisdom the Donald’s purported America Firsters were bombing the shit out of some desert salients which generate a mere $6-8 billion of GDP annually.
That’s right. We are talking about a rogue regime of rifle-waving ruffians who control the equivalent of 1oo minutes of US GDP!
And, no, ensuring the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. Thus, in 2023, about 8.7 million barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil and refined products flowed through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait (southern Red Sea entrance), but almost all of that went to Europe. And the tiny 500,000 barrels per day of Persian Gulf oil that went to the US (1% of US energy consumption) could be readily replaced by domestic production anyway under the Donald’s drill, baby drill policy.
When it comes to the oil trade through the Red Sea/Suez route, therefore, we are basically talking about profits to the Petro-State producers and costs to European consumers—not anything remotely related to the national security of the American homeland.
Likewise, the containership trade is even more irrelevant. The overwhelming share of US destined goods from China, South Korea, Taiwan or elsewhere in the Far East (upwards of $600 billion per year) arrive here via the Pacific Coast and Panama Canal routes to eastern USA, not the Red Sea/Suez route. By contrast, upwards of 75% of the $1 trillion of containership cargo transiting the latter route, goes to Europe.
Moreover, in the event that the modest amount of US bound container cargo is diverted to the Cape of Africa route the incremental cost to the US east coast is barely material: At current market levels, the price per TEU is about $264 for the Red Sea-Suez route and $292 for the Cape route, again according to Grok 3.
In short, there is no economic case for attempting to bomb the Red Sea into freedom of navigation. And surely there is no basis for claiming that the Houthi, who are a rag-tag tribe of desert insurgents, are a threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland in any way, shape or form.
After all, even their Iran-supplied missiles have a maximum range of well less than 1,200 kilometers. Yet the last time we checked, the distance from Yemen to Washington DC was 11,000 kilometers!
So to repeat the mantra that could not be more pertinent to the Donald’s inchoate attempt to bring the Empire home: America must not go abroad seeking monsters to destroy, as our sixth president, John Qunicy Adams, stated so cogently nearly 204 years ago on Independence Day.
The Red Sea is not the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound or the Gulf of Catalina. That means that the Houthi’s only real offense, which is attempting to blockade ships heading to Israel in retaliation for the latter’s genocidal assault on Gaza, is Jerusalem’s business to treat with, not Washington’s.
Moreover, the US Navy has not been hired by the UN or any other global body to safeguard every sea lane on the planet from the Suez Canal to the Straits of Hormuz and the Straits of Malacca. Nor should it take the assignment if offered because the homeland security of America does not depend upon Washington functioning as the gendarme of the world.
The fact is, if Washington had not foolishly placed warships in harms’ way in the Red Sea, monitoring the doings of the Houthi would be of such trivial relevance to the homeland security of America as to be assignable to a small staff of White House interns jabbering on Slack. There would be no need for secrecy at all, and even the CNN “war correspondents” wouldn’t much care.
In the section below, we will therefore address what Washington’s idiotic war on the Houthi is really about,
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
