The Houthis announced that they plan to resume their attacks on merchant ships traveling through the Red Sea and Suez shipping lanes. The Yemen-based, Iranian-sponsored junta makes two claims: that they will only attack Israeli vessels and that they are doing this in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.
Both are false. In reality, every ship will be vulnerable to attack, and the Houthis are testing a model of 21st-century piracy that, if successful, will be made permanent and likely copied by others, throwing the global economy (and global security) into turmoil for which it is unprepared.
The Houthis can and should be stopped, but it would require Western leaders to confront the consequences of their atrocious miscalculation of the Houthi threat. Meanwhile, the Houthis’ fan base in Western progressive activist circles should be seen for what they are: cheerleaders for economic terrorism that, if left unchecked, will cause a chain reaction of death and destruction across the region and beyond.
In other words, it’s time to stop playing games with the Houthis.
Let’s take the first lie first: that only Israeli ships are in danger. Just one example of several, via Noam Raydan and Farzin Nadimi: “when the Marshall Islands-flagged oil/chemical tanker Ardmore Encounter (IMO 9654579) was attacked in December 2023, it was owned by Ireland-based Ardmore Shipping and had no clear links to Israel. Two weeks later, a report by TradeWinds untangled the case of mistaken identity—the strike was seemingly driven by the belief that Israeli shipping magnate Idan Ofer had a stake in the company, but Ofer’s shares had been sold off months before the attack.”
The Houthis also expanded their targets to those from countries allied with Israel, especially the U.S. and U.K. Between the number of ships under those flags and the exponential possibilities for mistakes, shipping through that route was soon dominated by Russia and China because Western firms were steering clear. Yet, as Raydan and Nadimi notes, “the Houthis have attacked a few vessels linked to Russia’s oil trade, once again based on inaccurate data. Even two Iran-bound bulk carriers were attacked in the Red Sea in February and May 2024.”
Russia and China are the main beneficiaries of the Houthi attacks, though nobody is truly safe.
Now let’s go to the second lie: that this is merely additional Gaza “resistance” and therefore poses no wider threat. To understand the full extent of this one, it’s worth reviewing the widespread damage that the Houthis’ Red Sea terrorism has caused, the benefits to the Houthis themselves, and what both tell us about future uses of these tactics.
“It’s as if the shipping industry had been transported back to the days before the Suez Canal opened in 1869,” the New York Times reported in December. Shipping companies have en masse redirected their fleets around the Cape of Good Hope instead, adding 3,500 nautical miles and 10 days to most trips. Before the Houthis began their attacks, the Suez Canal was processing 10 percent of global trade.
The result: Shipping costs are, in some cases, up nearly 400 percent. “From just $1,660 at the end of last year, a 40-foot steel box now costs almost $6,000 to move,” Bloomberg reported last summer. “Other sectors are feeling the effects, too, with a host of crude oil tankers finding new lines of business carrying fuel.”
In January, the Economist estimated that “Red Sea cargo shipments are 70% lower by volume” and that the increased costs to shipping firms—which raise the cost to consumers of the goods being transported—amount to about $175 billion a year.
There is, of course, another way around the threat: bribe the Houthis. The group has a payment system set up to operate almost like E-ZPass, but for Suez piracy. The payments are, of course, illegal, so Western firms can’t pay them; it would be easy to spot those who suddenly started passing through the shipping lanes untouched. The protection money brings the Houthis as much as $2 billion a year. And the missiles and drones they use to carry out this scheme are getting cheaper by the year.
This is a business plan, in other words. The Houthis could probably survive on their own, even if Iranian sponsorship disappeared. As the Economist points out, “by shaking down ship owners, they are earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year—or even billions—while imposing hundreds of billions of dollars of cost on the world. Far from going quiet when the shooting stops in Gaza, the Houthis may be heralding an anarchic world without rules or a policeman.”
The Trump administration now faces the same choice that bedeviled Joe Biden on whether to end the Houthi threat to the global economy. The stakes are higher than many people seem to realize, because of the knock-on effects of creating a working modern piracy model that might serve as a template for other terrorist groups. The stakes are high enough, in fact, that putting a stop to the Houthis is the obvious choice, and letting this continue would be inexplicable and indefensible.
