These US strikes which began on 15 March have been of far greater intensity than those carried out last year by Trump’s predecessor, marking a significant escalation, according to an analysis published by The New Arab website.
Giorgio Cafiero, the auther of the analysis, and the the CEO of Gulf State Analytics quoted Mohammed al-Basha, founder of US-based Middle East security advisory Basha Report, who said “The key message here is deterrence. Under Biden, the US lost deterrence with the Houthis. Now, President Trump, his team, and CENTCOM are actively working to restore that balance,”.
Cafiero noticed that what Trump’s administration seeks to achieve through this bombing of Houthi rebels’ military sites is less than clear. What also remains to be seen is how far the US will go with these anti-Houthi operations and for how long Washington will sustain these strikes.
Cafiero added that some experts do not expect this intensification of US strikes on Yemen to successfully deter Houthi rebels from waging future maritime attacks. He quoted Dr Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at the Defence Studies Department of King's College, London saying: “The intensity is certainly on a different level than what we’ve seen the Biden administration doing in Yemen, and targeting individual leaders of the Houthis is certainly an escalation of what we’ve seen so far. But more than degradation, they won’t be able to achieve anything. Degradation is probably the only thing they can really achieve,” .
“We should understand that this is a limited move and, so far, these are all remote strikes, remote operations. That’s as far as Trump goes—remote operations, not putting soldiers into harm’s way and keeping costs for the US taxpayers to a minimum. But that also means you can only really sustain an operation like this for a limited period of time. The Houthis know that they just have to sustain it for a bit because Trump will be very unpopular at home if this becomes a longer operation which doesn’t deliver any clear sort of outcomes,” he added.