The Trump administration campaigned on no new foreign entanglements—especially in the Middle East. The White House must keep this promise, wrote Brandon J. Weichert, in an opinion publishd by The National Interest, an online publication focusing on defense issues, foreign policy, and U.S. politics.
There’s been a suggestion in some quarters in Washington, D.C., that to end the Houthi Rebel threat out of Yemen, the United States military should either take over or blockade the Yemeni port of Hudaydah, noticing that “ At first glance, this argument makes sense. After all, that port is the primary point of entry for imports to Yemen. It has also been proven to be a key conduit for getting supplies and illicit weapons to the dreaded Houthi rebels hiding out in the foothills of Yemen and encamped along its beaches and periodically spraying anti-ship ballistic missiles at the nearest U.S. Navy warship”.
Yet the implication that U.S. forces would have to be the ones to assume control of that port, manage it, and essentially ensure that the Houthis and their Iranian agents operating in the region did not continue using Hudaydah for their own malicious ends is bizarre.
Of course, the calls to blockade and/or take over the port have included calls for multilateralism. But twenty years after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, everyone knows that “multilateral missions” of this kind in the Middle East invariably transform into the U.S. military taking on yet more responsibilities that it should not be taking on.
Geopolitical Quicksand
The U.S. military has spent the better part of the last 24 years trying to hold territory, shape the sociopolitical environment, and determine winners and losers in the Middle East. The end result of these Herculean efforts has been extremely dubious: thousands of U.S. servicemen and women lost, trillions of dollars lit on fire, and the utter destabilization of the area (thereby placing further demands on the U.S. military).
The Middle East is the geopolitical equivalent of quicksand. That’s not to say the United States doesn’t have interests there: it certainly does. But the notion that the U.S. military should continue holding territory in Syria, or that it should “own” the Gaza Strip, or that it should take over a port in distant Yemen in order to crush a sub-regional rebel group, are laughable.
Even in the fight against al Qaeda and ISIS—which, to be clear, remain real threats to the United States—America’s success has been mixed. Since 9/11, the global jihad has spread to more places than it has ever been. What’s more, today’s militants are hardened in ways that Bin Laden’s cadre of jihadis had never been. They just keep coming. It’s because the U.S. strategy for dealing with these forces is flawed, to say the least.
Blockade or Annex Hudaydah? How About Neither?
Now come the calls for America to annex the important port of Hudaydah. These calls surely come about, at least in part, because the probability that a joint-naval blockade between the US Navy and its regional partners would end there is low. Doing this would essentially place a gigantic target on the back of whichever units the Americans deploy to that port. It should not be allowed.