U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, now in the Middle East, has just announced the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational maritime force to protect shipping in the Red Sea, which connects the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden. Ten nations, significantly including Bahrain from the region, will contribute to the effort, which augments the Combined Maritime Forces and its Task Force 153. And yet, Operation Prosperity Guardian is shaping up to be a stop-gap solution. There are more fundamental ways to deal with attacks on vessels in that troubled area.
The Iran-backed Houthi militia has hit commercial shipping with missiles and drone-borne weapons from sites in Yemen, and ships have been captured in international waters. On November 19, the Houthis in the southern part of the Red Sea boarded the Bahamian-flagged Galaxy Leader, which is now in a port they control in Yemen. The Houthis have also threatened American warships. The USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down 14 drones in the Red Sea on Dec. 16 after downing a drone there on November 29. The USS Mason and USS Thomas Hudner, sister ships, took down Houthi drones as did a British warship, HMS Diamond.
In response to the attacks, shippers have taken matters into their own hands. The world's largest shipping line, Mediterranean Shipping Co., has announced the suspension of all sailings through the Red Sea.
Other large shipping lines and oil companies are now avoiding the canal as well. Instead, they are sailing around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa. The new route adds almost 12,000 nautical miles to trips between Europe and Asia and is nearly 40 percent longer than the passage through the Suez Canal. As of Monday, more than a hundred container ships have either delayed or rerouted trips away from the Red Sea.
The Houthi action echoes that of Libya in 1984, when one of its ferries, the Ghat, released floating mines in the Red Sea, forcing ships to reroute around Africa and damaging the global economy.
"The situation is far worse now, with globalization meaning that the Red Sea-Suez chokepoint sees massively more trade passing through than it did in 1984," Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told me. "All the Houthis need to do this time is to fire off the occasional inaccurate cruise missile or launch a drone attack to help deepen the economic crisis in which Europe, in particular, is engrossed."
Houthi commanders have said that they are targeting Israeli-bound or connected ships, and some carriers have stopped accepting Israeli cargo, like China's OOCL and Taiwan's Evergreen Marine. But the Houthis have been hitting shipping with no connections to Israel. "The Houthi—and by extension their main military backer, Iran—are probably using their strike capability in the Red Sea to further exercise greater geopolitical influence in the region, in addition to influence on Israel's war in Gaza," said Jack Kennedy of S&P Global Market Intelligence to Reuters.
"Iran is continuing to hold the global economy hostage in order to continue its agenda of destroying Israel," James Fanell of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy tells me.
Given the broader aims of the militants, the attacks are doing more than just significantly raising insurance premiums and delaying the delivery of goods and commodities. The attacks can also destabilize Egypt—the canal produces about 10 percent of the country's entire gross domestic product—and raise the cost of oil, further helping Iran.
In 1984, an international effort cleared the Red Sea of mines. Is Operation Prosperity Guardian also a good idea?
The goal of today's effort is certainly worthy: The international community cannot allow militants to control a chokepoint where 15 percent of the world's shipping passes. The U.S. has the assets to protect commercial vessel traffic. There are, at this time, the USS Eisenhower and the USS Ford Carrier Strike Groups in the region. Yet as Fanell, also a former U.S. Navy captain who served as director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, points out, the recently announced multinational effort "places American and other coalition sailors in a continually defensive position and therefore puts them constantly at risk, where the likelihood of a 'leaker' missile is greatly increased."
"Instead of trying to play defense for the thousands of ships that transit the Suez and the Red Sea—stopping 'arrows' once they are in the air—it would make more sense to go after the 'archers,' the origins of these attacks at the operational and strategic levels," he said. "At the operational level, the intelligence community knows where the Houthi rebel camps are, so their weapons caches can be destroyed. At the strategic level, given Iran's financial support for these militants, the U.S. should reimpose embargoes to end Tehran's ability to support the Houthi attacks."
Yet Iran is not the ultimate financier of the shipping attacks. That would be China. With increased purchases of sanctioned Iranian oil, China is making it possible for Tehran to financially support the Houthis and its other terrorist proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. The volume of China's purchases of Iranian crude in the first nine months of this year was about 60 percent above that in 2017, the last year before the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on this commodity.
Is it, to borrow Fanell's imagery, smart to protect victims only by stopping arrows in the air? Or is it better to go after the archers—as well as the supplier of arrows and those paying for them?
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and the recently released China Is Going to War. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
The Real Force Behind Houth Attacks on U.S. Warships Isn't Iran. It's China
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19.12.2023
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, now in the Middle East, has just announced the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational maritime force to protect shipping in the Red Sea, which connects the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden. Ten nations, significantly including Bahrain from the region, will contribute to the effort, which augments the Combined Maritime Forces and its Task Force 153. And yet, Operation Prosperity Guardian is shaping up to be a stop-gap solution. There are more fundamental ways to deal with attacks on vessels in that troubled area.
The Iran-backed Houthi militia has hit commercial shipping with missiles and drone-borne weapons from sites in Yemen, and ships have been captured in international waters. On November 19, the Houthis in the southern part of the Red Sea boarded the Bahamian-flagged Galaxy Leader, which is now in a port they control in Yemen. The Houthis have also threatened American warships. The USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, shot down 14 drones in the Red Sea on Dec. 16 after downing a drone there on November 29. The USS Mason and USS Thomas Hudner, sister ships, took down Houthi drones as did a British warship, HMS Diamond.
In response to the attacks, shippers have taken matters into their own hands. The world's largest shipping line, Mediterranean Shipping Co., has announced the suspension of all sailings through the Red Sea.
Other large shipping lines and oil companies are now avoiding the canal as well. Instead, they are sailing around the........
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