The Houthis just seized the Red Sea's most critical shipping chokepoint, and the usual suspects are already positioning to make American sailors and American taxpayers clean up a disaster that belongs to Riyadh.
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is one of the world's most consequential maritime bottlenecks. Houthi forces captured the port city of Mokha and Perim Island at the strait's southern entrance, putting rebel guns within firing distance of any ship transiting the waterway. They now control Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline. Saudi-backed forces — trained, equipped, and funded by Riyadh and the U.A.E. — melted away in the path of the offensive. "The result is catastrophic," Amr al-Bidh, a senior official with Yemen's Southern Transitional Council, told The New Yorker. That's catastrophic for Saudi Arabia, which has fought this war for a decade and just lost it on a front that directly menaces its own oil export pipeline to Yanbu.
So why should a single American carrier group steam toward Bab el-Mandeb?
We already tried the military route. A seven-week U.S. bombing campaign in 2025 involving more than 1,000 strikes ended in a ceasefire with the Houthis "still intact and capable of threatening regional targets," as the Daily Caller reported. Over a thousand bombs, and the rebels are stronger today than before. The Pentagon's track record here is a bill of particulars against more intervention, not an argument for it.
Now Italy's defense minister, Guido Crosetto, is scrambling warships, warning that bureaucratic delays threaten Italy's economy. "When a maritime route is interrupted, goods arrive late, costs increase and prices" rise, his ministry argued. Fair enough — that's Rome looking out for Romans. That's how sovereign nations are supposed to act. But watch the NATO apparatus and the Washington think-tank class try to fold this into an American commitment. A NATO official told the Daily Caller that Allies "regularly discuss" freedom of navigation and called on Iran to respect it — the kind of vacuous institutional statement that always precedes a request for more U.S. hulls in the water.
Follow the money. Saudi Arabia has spent years and billions arming proxies who collapsed at first contact. The kingdom exports crude through the Red Sea because Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz made the Persian Gulf unreliable. A drone attack — which Saudi Arabia said was launched by Iran-backed militias in Iraq — already hit the kingdom's East-West Pipeline, spiking Brent crude. This is a Saudi-Iranian contest for shipping lanes and regional dominance. Both sides are fighting over who controls the toll booth. Neither is fighting for American interests.
The neocons will insist that "freedom of navigation" is a sacred U.S. obligation — a phrase that somehow only requires American ships to absorb risk while allies contribute statements. The defense lobby will cite every spike in oil futures as proof we must act. But America First means knowing the difference between a threat to commerce and a threat to the republic. The Houthis spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam claims passage through the Red Sea remains "safe and orderly" — propaganda, surely, but also a signal that the rebels want revenue from shipping, not a war with the U.S. Navy.
Saudi Arabia has the weapons, the money, and the direct stake. Let them patrol their own chokepoint.
The open question is whether Washington can resist the reflex to volunteer American power for someone else's fight — or whether the lobbying class will bury the lesson of a thousand failed strikes and sell the public on round two.
