Red Sea burning
“Can’t say I didn’t warn you.” It’s a simple cliché, repeated ad nauseum by smart alecks in American film and television. For how much Hollywood leans on it, you would imagine American policymakers to be more cautious. But Washington prefers another cliché – the lone ranger with a big iron on his hip (or an Uzi, if you prefer contemporary), who alone knows and stands for what’s right. Stand back, fall in line or face the music, consequences be damned.
Well, the United States was warned. Not least by the victims of Israel’s excessive brutalities. Nor only by the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ – Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi Ansar Allah, who the US views purely through its Iran filter. No, the US was warned by the entire world, save Israel and the United Kingdom, when it vetoed their resolution calling for ceasefire in Gaza.
Now the Red Sea burns and the world can deliver the cliché in chorus. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Over the past few weeks, the Houthi forces have launched at least a hundred attacks against 14 different commercial and merchant vessels passing through the Red Sea, reports quoting American officials have suggested. A Karachi-bound container ship was targeted just this week in a Houthi-claimed attack, although no casualties were luckily reported.
So risky has the channel become for commercial shipping that more than 350 vessels have diverted to other, more costly routes. In the face of relentless attacks and hijackings, Danish logistics giant AP Moller-Maersk, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd and oil and gas ‘supermajor’ BP have all announced they will pause shipments through the Red Sea. Taiwan’s Evergreen Line went a step further while suspending navigation through the Red Sea route, announcing it would stop accepting Israeli cargo ‘until further notice’.
Widening hostilities
The latest attacks by Houthi forces, including the one this week on Karachi-bound vessel MSC United VIII, represent a widening of their response to Israel’s relentless offensive in Gaza, which just recently crossed the 90-day mark. While the group earlier claimed it was targeting ships bound for Israel, recent strikes seek to deny the crucial Red Sea shipping lane entirely.
Even so, the Yemeni forces framed its actions in terms of “continued support and solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
“The naval forces of the Yemeni Armed Forces carried out a targeting operation against the commercial ship, ‘MSC UNITED,’ with appropriate naval missiles,” Yahya Sare’e, a spokesperson for the Houthi forces, posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “The Yemeni Armed Forces affirm their continued support and solidarity with the Palestinian people in consistent with their religious, moral and humanitarian duty … [and] confirm the continuation of their operations in the Red and Arab Seas against Israeli ships or those heading to the ports of occupied Palestine until the food and medicine enter to Gaza Strip,” he added, in subsequent posts. The group carried out drone attacks targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat the same day.
No takers for US response
Despite growing calls for ceasefire from all corners of the globe, Washington support for Israel’s war hasn’t wavered. Instead of addressing the root of the crisis, its response to the Red Sea disruption has been to canvas support for a multinational maritime patrol, titled Operation Prosperity Guardian.
So far, that attempt appears to be fizzling out. Although US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin confidently proclaimed last week more than 20 nations had joined the mission, some of Washington’s closest allies have pushed back against the effort. Meanwhile, nearly half of the rest have not yet acknowledged their participation.
The task force, overseen by the US Combined Maritime Forces, primarily consists of American warships, with the UK and Greece contributing a warship each. Nato members Spain, Italy and France have flat refused to hand over command of their naval vessels in the Red Sea to the US, while other Western allies, like Canada, the Netherlands and Norway, have committed only a handful of staff officers.
America’s Aukus partner Australia, announced it too would send only personnel, but no ships or plane. “We need to be really clear around our strategic focus and our strategic focus is our region,” the country’s deputy prime minister told Sky News this week.
The maritime alliance also seems to have been all but snubbed by Gulf nations. Bahrain, the only regional country named as part of Prosperity Guardian, has not acknowledged its role even though the mission was announced by Austin in Manama.
According to observers, the disinterest of US partners to commit themselves to its Red Sea operations reflect both a break from its stance on the conflict in Gaza – where more than 20,000 Palestinians have been reported killed – and regional security pressures.
A Reuters analysis noted that the European public is increasingly critical of Israel and wary of being drawn into a conflict. "European governments are very worried that part of their potential electorate will turn against them," it quoted David Hernandez, a professor of international relations at the Complutense University of Madrid, as saying. The same appears to be doubly true in the case of Middle Eastern nations, where despite a muted response from leaders, there is enormous public anger against Israel.
Following the China-brokered rapprochement with Iran, Saudi Arabia appears to have no interested in being dragged into new hostilities with Yemen’s Houthis. Instead, the Kingdom wants to conclude its eight-year war with its peninsular neighbour, experts say.
Like Australia, key Nato member Germany is preoccupied with its regional security environment. “Germany has not joined in [Operation Prosperity Guardian], to some criticism but with good reason,” security analyst Bruce Jones wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy. “There are mounting demands on Germany’s modest navy in Northern European waters, where the Russians are flexing their subsea muscles. Australia was asked to join but made the counterargument that its modest naval capacity is better deployed in the Western Pacific,” he pointed out.
Asymmetric victories
So far, in the course of Prosperity Guardian, the US military has claimed to have shot down a dozen drones and five missiles launched by Houthis over the Red Sea. However, the vast asymmetry between the two opposing sides, far from guaranteeing security over the shipping lane, may be key to understanding a strategic Houthi victory.
“With a handful of missiles and drones, the Houthis have succeeded in placing at risk one of the most important arteries of the global economy,” Bruce Jones noted in his Foreign Policy analysis. Elizabeth Braw, another analyst writing for the same publication, concluded that Iran has deemed the Houthis’ Red Sea experiment “so successful that it bears repeating in the Mediterranean.”
A commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, issued that warning to the world community a couple days before Christmas: “They shall soon await the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, [the Strait of] Gibraltar and other waterways,” Brig Gen Mohammad Reza Naqdi told Iranian media.
The asymmetry extends beyond a simple ‘cost of drones versus cost of Western missiles’ metric. Instead, Jones wrote, the right calculation is ‘the cost of the missile versus cost of the target’. A successful attack, he pointed out, could wreck a ship worth over $50 million, carrying goods worth as much as $500 million or even $1 billion. Not only that, the pace at which Houthi drone and missile strikes are being launched would force Prosperity Guardian warships to expend their defensive arsenal in a matter of weeks. In order to replenish, these ships would have to be rotated out of action. The cost of maintaining the naval escort, consequently, could rapidly run up to tens of billions of dollars, Jones estimated.
Energy costs
In the face of relentless low-cost attacks in the Red Sea, shipping corporations have begun rerouting their traffic. The longer the threat persists, the more unsustainable such temporary measures would become.
“Rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope would add roughly 60 per cent of the transit time (and fuel cost) from Asian ports to European ones, not just adding costs to shippers (who would pass those costs onto consumers) but more importantly gumming up the works in global just-in-time manufacturing,” Jones wrote in his analysis. The consequences would also be felt by the world’s energy sector at a time when it is already heavily disrupted due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“If the Bab el-Mandeb is constrained to oil traffic … there is a good chance the price of oil to some places will go up,” Al Jazeera quoted Atlantic Council fellow Paul Sullivan as saying. “If it gets bad enough that all sorts of cargoes will be redirected around Africa, this could reconfigure many cargo contracts, including of oil and LNG,” he added.
A strange game of chicken
As things stand, the ramifications of Israel’s relentless Gaza offensive and the United States unyielding support to it seem to be leading to a new quagmire. Only this time, it is a quagmire that directly threatens the trade economy of half the world. Without any major takers from the world community and given the stark asymmetry in costs, Operation Prosperity Guardian is unlikely to extend beyond a token effort. Would it not be wise, then, for Washington to pay heed to what the rest of the world is insisting? Would it not be more effective, not to mention humane, for the US to exercise its influence on Israel and relieve Gaza’s battered residents from their suffering?
Instead, it seems the US is engaged in a strange game of ‘chicken’ with both its allies and its main rival. It is perhaps banking on the rising cost of trade to draw Eastern nations into policing the Red Sea. Following a drone attack on an Israel-linked tanker off its coast (which the US was quick to pin on Iran), India has blinked first – the country’s defence minister it would deploy three destroyers to the Arabian Sea. Experts suggest the US may also be counting on Beijing’s patience running thin, given that Chinese shipping accounts for a significant bulk of Red Sea shipping.
But counting on China presents a strange dilemma for the US, given that it is actively competing with it in the South China Sea. “Do the Western powers … pay the price of protecting global sea-based trade, of which China is the largest source and arguably primary beneficiary, or … help facilitate China’s growing capacity to project naval power across the high seas,” wrote analyst Bruce Jones in his article. He called attention to the “deepening contradiction between the reality of globalisation… and the reality of geopolitical contest.”
Some analysts also view US responses to Israel and in the Red Sea as a pretext to increase a military footprint in the Mediterranean or in terms of the proposed India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) – Washington’s answer to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative which bypasses the Red Sea altogether. The latter especially reflects another contradiction, given that the war in Gaza complicates Israel’s normalisation with Saudi Arabia, two crucial nodes of route.
In any case, Washington seems to be willing to risk global trade and economy rather than taking up a stabilising role in the crisis.
How to calm the Red Sea?
With or without policing, experts see resolving the conflict in Gaza as the only way to calm the Red Sea. On the flip, they believe tensions Red Sea tensions will rise as long as the scale and toll of Israel’s offensive continues to grow. “The fundamental way to ease the regional tension is to achieve a cease-fire between Palestine and Israel,” noted Shanghai International Studies University’s Niu Song in an analysis carried by China’s CGTN.
In his opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Rami G Khouri of the American University of Beirut also highlighted how the US and West continues to misinterpret dynamics in the Middle East. According to him the Axis of Resistance that unites Iran with half a dozen big and small Arab non-state, armed actors, particularly Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, is best understood through their common underlying values of resistance and defiance. “The American media and political class, and most of the West, still refuse to see or acknowledge this, because Israel, the US and their Arab allies are the ones being resisted and defied,” he wrote.
He concluded that the longer the issues that plague the Middle East drag on – be they the Palestine question or other forms aggression by either the US or Israel – the stronger the Axis of Resistance will grow. Washington can start by urging Tel Aviv to implement UN resolutions on Gaza as soon as possible.