US Magazine: Biden Administration Prefers to Follow a “Slow, Costly, and Ineffective” Strategy to Address Houthi Threat in the Red Sea

The American magazine "The National Interest" criticized the US administration's handling of the Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea, considering that the Biden administration preferred to follow a "slow, costly, and ineffective" strategy to address the Houthi threat in the name of maintaining an American response that is apparently proportionate to the level of violence that the Houthis have practiced so far.

In an article published by the magazine , Samuel Byers, senior national security advisor at the Center for US Maritime Strategy, considered that the current strategy does not fit well with US national goals. He said that by adopting a position of direct defense of civilian shipping, Washington also chose to spend $1 billion in scarce and hard-to-obtain munitions to shoot down Houthi missiles and drones instead of addressing the root causes of the problem.

The most appropriate approach—and the one that seemed most likely to succeed—would have been to escalate against the Houthis beyond their ability to respond in kind and to remove them from the scene with great speed and decisiveness. Or Biden could have empowered America’s Saudi allies to do the same.

He said the US administration could have taken decisive steps to deny Iran the sources of funds it funnels to the Houthis and its other proxies. Although the author considers each of these options to represent a major escalation in the short term, he insists that they would help the US Navy stop the slow depletion of its vital munitions arsenal.

“When Houthi ‘terrorists’ threaten to blockade a vital waterway, the U.S. Navy is sent to the scene—not to solve the problem, but to monitor things and ensure that nothing gets out of hand. That’s ‘the way you act if you’re the most powerful country in the world.’ But the result is a failure to secure America’s interests in the region while bearing risks and opportunity costs vastly disproportionate to the value gained,” he added.

According to the article, the important question remains whether Washington’s efforts in the Red Sea, the resources it spends, and the opportunity costs it represents are commensurate with the value of the results it has achieved, which the writer denied. He pointed out that despite all the efforts made by the United States to combat the Houthi threat, the Bab al-Mandab remains too dangerous for many shipping companies to use, with traffic down nearly 50% year-on-year as ships sail around the Cape of Good Hope instead. The Suez Canal has also seen its revenues drop by $2 billion as a result.

The writer continued: “If protecting freedom of passage through the Red Sea is a vital interest of the United States, Biden’s strategy has proven inadequate to meet the challenge.”