A Win for the Houthis – and China

A year ago, the terrorist organization and quasi-state of the Houthis in Yemen launched drone attacks at great distance against Israel, and then proceeded to attack ships passing through the narrow channels separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden. Effectively, these attacks have shut down the bulk of the global maritime trade that passes through this route to devastating impact.

The United States has repeatedly warned both the Houthis and Iran that it will respond to the assault on shipping. But the character of the US response has embodied the larger concept of what the Biden administration terms as legitimate “self-defense.” That concept is limited to blocking an acute attack, but at the same time avoiding use of force to preempt, prevent or address the underlying capability of the aggrieved nation to take the war to their attacker’s territory and terminate their ability to further conduct such attacks.

The enfeebled limits of US strategy – which since October 2023 has failed to stop or deter Houthi attacks – were exposed by Israel, which finally in July struck the Yemeni ports that plagued it so substantially that it led to nearly two months of no long-range attacks on Israel and to a month in which ships passing through the Red Sea suffered no significant attacks.

Freedom of the Seas

For five centuries, since the British fleet led by Sir Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the freedom of the seas and unfettered global navigation for all nations was secure because the great power leading the West prized its maritime domination and laid as a foundation of its national strategy the prioritization of its naval force and power to secure the seas. It was an essential strategic doctrine that was both inherent to its geostrategic nature as an island and as a free land that valued economic vitality and the global enterprise that underlies it. In other words, global order – the strategic architecture of the world – was anchored to primacy of Western naval power and the securing through it of international navigation as well our prosperity.

It was a fortune of history that when Great Britain declined in will and power, which several far-sighted Americans led by Alfred Thayer Mahan divined early, the United States was already surpassing Britain’s naval power by the 1890s. The United States, thus easily and seamlessly stepped into the breach and assumed the mantle the British Navy had carried through the four previous centuries.

Replacing US Will

But now, US power declines through a loss of will to commit to securing the vital naval passage of the Ba al-Mandab, through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, to connect Europe and Asia, production and consumption. And this time the nation that has moved to replace receding US power neither upholds global free trade nor freedom of navigation. It is not a force for stability, but one which seeks to undermine the sovereignty of nations by empowering international institutions it controls.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) aggressively fills the void left by American power and folds it neatly into both its strategically challenging Belt and Road Initiative and its attempt to establish a new order of international rules that seek to undermine American power and sovereignty. Beijing has navigated to evade the threat posed by the Houthis to international shipping and closure of the Bab al-Mandeb straits and through that, also the entire Red Sea – essentially the Suez transit corridor.

Rather than a threat, China an opportunity in its global competition with the United States.

The Chinese Alternative

China, soon after the closure began, devised with the Houthis and Iran a strategy to forge an alternative, secure shipping structure – a clearing house for Houthi-permitted passage (and by implication Iran-permitted passage through Hormuz) safely through the Bab al-Mandab Straits.

That emerging clearance and de facto international regulatory structure bars any shipping going to Israel, either directly or indirectly boycotting Israel. That includes a primary or secondary boycott of Israeli companies – even companies that are not Israeli, but trade with Israel, or tertiary companies that are known to trade often with Israel, but that have not been going to Israel.

In other words, if Maersk Shipping has any shipping contact with Israel, then the entire Maersk line – even routes that have nothing to do with Israel – will be unable to attain safe passage. Thus, the Houthis, with Chinese and Russian help, are beginning to create a sanitized shipping corridor through the Canal and through the Straits, which then also begins to bar American and European trade that doesn’t organize it through the Houthis.

China is creating an entire shipping structure that bars America, as well as Israel and its allies, unless they pay homage to the Houthis. And the Houthis are working most closely on that particular issue – apart from with the Iranians – with the Chinese. And the Chinese are working to create this alternative shipping clearance structure that undermines one of the primary functions of the United States Navy, which is to be the real guarantor of freedom of the seas.

What Happens

The devastating image being created of eroding American power and perfidious will, also creates conditions for the rise of an alternative shipping structure that’s safe for China and bars those Beijing doesn’t like. In the end, this will likely evolve to have no connection to the Middle East. If Toyota, for example, competes with China, and China wants the company to be obstructed, it can use its role as the guarantor of global sea traffic to punish Toyota and bar it, in coordination with its allies like Iran and the Houthis, from cortical passage.

A structure is emerging which demands that one agree with China. And nations and companies will be forced to pay the Chinese regime’s piper in terms of policies – and not only over policies toward the Houthis or the Middle East more broadly, but also to China (and through this also to Russia and Iran) for its own ambitions – in order to have proper shipping through the Suez Canal.

Nations or companies China deems as competition will have built-in costs that are prohibitive compared to Chinese companies. The denial of passage through more direct routes from Europe to Asia and reverse – which includes not only goods but critical raw materials and rare earth minerals – can add substantial costs to shipping, which render goods non-competitive.

Raw Materials & Rare Earth Minerals

Indeed, China already has made a strong play for the control of African raw materials through its Belt and Road projects seizing control of the logistics and ports of the African coasts. And the Russians are racing through the Sahel further north in Africa to consolidate the whole of north Africa. Adding the creation of a global shipping structure that advantages Russia and China essentially helps them monopolize the supply of raw materials and profit from their advantaged control over their transmission.

This is all the more problematic since under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, with its domination of African rail and port structures, China has bent the raw material supply chain structures in Africa to run to its eastern coasts along the Indian Ocean – making the closure of the Straits of Bab al-Mandeb, the Red Sea and Suez all the more problematic for European manufacturers.

This structure China is forging with Red Sea closures is in fact a play for a far broader strategy that anchors not only a new global shipping order to replace the freedom of the sea which had been guaranteed over the last five centuries by Britain and the US, but of an entire new, alternative economic order over which China has asserted structural advantages.

WHO

In addition, the establishment of such a global structure fits into a larger Chinese strategy to invent new or hijack existing international structures to strategically paralyze the United States. One need only look at what should be an innocuous structure – the World Health Organization (WHO) led by Secretary General Tedros Ghebreyesus. It has become inescapable that Ghebreyesus, and thus WHO, clearly answers to China’s beckon.

China’s main thrust in attacking the West as a whole through such structures is designed to diminish the concept of national sovereignty. We see that in organizations including WHO, in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and other UN structures, and in climate agreements, where China is exempt from economically burdensome conditions. But we also see it in international initiatives which allow, encourage, or fully support “resistance” or violence. As a response, they put forward “solutions” that more or less suggest the diminution of sovereignty.

Strategic Initiatives

In turn, those initiatives to diminish sovereignty are veiled strategic initiatives designed to take away from the United States and Israel their ability to defend themselves or alternatively, provide structures that undermine core American interests.

For example, every time the Iranians lurch forward in their nuclear program, China raises the issue of a “nuclear weapons free zone” in the region as a major strategic assault on Israel. Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah came on the eve of the international community acting through the IAEA Board of Governors against Iran for violating the Paris Accords and moving ahead on its nuclear program. There is consistent regional escalation encouraged by Iran every time it jumps forward in its nuclear program.

While the West focuses on the regional, tactical and actual strategic movements in the region, we’re not paying as close attention to the nuclear arena.

China and Iran engage in a tango wherein Iran leads by moving ahead and then China comes forward with its “nuclear weapons free zone” (NWFZ) proposal as well as resurrection of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty 2000 Review Conference 13-point plan, of which the disarmament of the nuclear arsenals of the great powers and the termination of missile defense stands central. But then, Iran notes how impossible such a NWFZ will be if the United States fails to force disarmament of Israel’s nuclear program, let alone if the United States continue to carve out its own right to maintain its nuclear arsenal and develop missile defense. China and Iran consistently work together to try to checkmate Israel’s nuclear program, push global nuclear disarmament, and paralyze Western superiority in missile defense by presenting a “nuclear weapons free zone” and a return to the 2000 NPT Review Conference plan.

Conclusion

It is a festering, ongoing national humiliation that the Houthis, with their comical bravado, non-existent air power, and low-quality army have brought the greatest sea power in history into paralysis in protecting its own vital trade through a critical sea passage. Iran has not yet even cut off the Straits of Hormuz, but it has through its proxy already achieved a great victory on the seas over the United States.

This has imposed great economic costs on the region and on the world. And it will continue to do so. The first signs of new patterns of trade and transmission routes are emerging, some of which would actually be a very positive and powerful economic development, but overall, the economic impact of the closures of the Red Sea and Suez Canal remains devastating to production, logistics supply, and costs in Europe and Asia.

And yet, despite the substantial material damage to the West that these economic impacts represent, they are not the most important aspect of this problem.

The far more important and damaging impacts are strategic and geopolitical.

Regionally, as a result of the US failure to uphold its central role as the world’s guardian of the seas, its regional stature as a great power is damaged so much that alignments of nations and their peace agreements with Israel are under stress. Indeed, some of these peace agreements – such as Egypt’s with Israel – may not survive and some regional nations whose very existence is a manifestation of Western involvement and credibility – such as Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy – are in question.

Coordination with the West may shift as the United States becomes ever more perceived not as a strong horse but as a lame donkey. The failure to stand down the Houthis has codified the termination of the United States as an effective and attractive superpower for the region’s nations.

Globally, this failure opens the door to the rise of new international structures that codify new rules and norms that leave America and its allies strategically under siege, economically disadvantaged, its enterprises limping with its raw material supply uncertain as well as costly.

In short, the failure to stand down the Houthis in the Red Sea is emerging as a cornerstone in the construction of a new world order led by our rival, China, designed to diminish US sovereignty, undermine our economic security and impede our geostrategic stature.

David Wurmser is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington as well as in the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs, and the Misgav Institute for Zionist Strategy.