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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1742 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 11, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Red Sea

Speaking of the Red Sea, things still look chaotic there. The US issued a “final warning” to the Houthis to stop attacking or face reprisal, which the Houthis immediately defied by attacking the next day. It’s been a week since then and it’s unclear to me if the west has escalated in any specific way.

Otherwise, tanker traffic still looks remarkably stable though the shipping behemoth Maesrk has recently put a pause on the route for their vessels though, despite the US sinking three Houthi vessels that attacked Maersk ships.

Don’t worry though, Sri Lanka has now announced they will join Operation Prosperity Guardian.

The US issued a “final warning” to the Houthis to stop attacking or face appraisal, which the Houthis immediately defied by attacking the next day.

Someone ELI5- the US, UK, Latin Europe, Israel, etc all want the straight open and to crush the houthis. All of them individually outgun the houthis by a lot and like 3/5 top navies in the world are literally in a formal alliance committed to keeping the straights open. There are major friendly bases located nearby for the US/UK.

Why haven’t the houthis gotten, well, anything? It would be one thing if stopping them turned out to be harder than it seemed but no one has tried. Why?

A few things:

  1. The media describes the Houthis as “rebels” but they control 85 percent of the urban parts of Yemen. The “legitimate government” is confined to some mountain and desert strongholds. For all practical purposes attacking the Houthis is like going to war with an actual country.
  2. Saudi Arabia has been bombing the Houthis for years with American assistance. It hasn’t done much. There’s a good chance this will escalate into an invasion and a lengthy ground campaign.
  3. The Houthis actually have pretty good weaponry from Iran. And possibly very good weaponry from Russia. No European leader wants to get one of their cruisers murked with hypersonic missiles and be politically on the hook for the deaths of 400 sailors.

For all practical purposes attacking the Houthis is like going to war with an actual country.

If anything, that seems to be rather good than bad for prosecuting the war. For somebody like the West, it's much better to have a war with an actual proper country than a bunch of vaguely defined rebels. It's much easier to pressure the country into making some kind of a deal - after hitting their soft points, which any country has aplenty - than hunting down every single last cave dweller in the desert, without even knowing if there are more or where they are. If they are like a country, they have offices, stores, ports, materials, etc. - all this can be hit and destroyed. The bigger the target, the easier it should be to strike it, not? And then, the carrot can be presented - if you stop the stupid shit, maybe we'll let you have your country and run it as you please.

No European leader wants to get one of their cruisers murked with hypersonic missiles

Not even Russia is dumb enough to give those guys something like that, and also it's not a magic wand - it needs to be used properly to strike a warship, and the likelihood of anybody there knowing how to do stuff like that is null. Russian "advisors" probably could pull it off but Russia has enough trouble to be actively involved in another war right now. They are buying weapons from places like Iran and North Korea, not selling them.

For somebody like the West, it's much better to have a war with an actual proper country than a bunch of vaguely defined rebels.

Wouldn't they need to have recognize Houthis as legitimate government to do so?

Not really, it just needs to have the same set of vulnerabilities as legitimate governments, or at least a sizeable subset of them.

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