By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
The Houthis are a terrorist organization, controlling a large area of Yemen, on the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula.
The Houthis are primarily controlled and funded by the rogue state of Iran, a major terror sponsor, so, much like Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis’ relative strength and activity rise and fall with the fortunes of Iran. When Iran is flush with cash, the Houthis will do more killing; when Iran is on the defensive, Iran’s demonic satellite groups must tone down their activity, from a lack of resources.
When the Biden-Harris regime took office in 2021, it immediately reclassified the Houthis, taking away the Houthis’ designation as a known terrorist organization. The Biden-Harris regime also released billions of dollars of assets, which had been frozen for decades to protect the world, allowing Iran’s mad mullahs these billions of dollars’ worth of funds to distribute among their clients.
So it was that, virtually as soon as Iran had this money in hand, Hezbollah ramped up their threatening of Israel from the northeast, Hamas staged their horrific attack on Israel from Gaza, and the Houthis vastly increased their harassment of the shipping industry in the Red Sea.
We will focus here on the Houthis, as they happen to be located at a major choke point in global commerce, and are in the news again this week.
The Suez Canal – a manmade passage linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea – was completed in 1869 and has served as a major shipping shortcut for world commerce ever since, but especially since the dawn of intermodal container shipping. Over 20,000 ships typically sail through the Suez Canal and Red Sea every year, paying tolls critical to the budget of Egypt, and cutting ten to fifteen days off ocean transits in comparison to sailing around the continent of Africa.
For well over fifty years, the ability to take this shortcut has been taken as a given in international trade. Industrial and commercial supply chains depend on it; “just in time” inventory systems would collapse without it.
This route isn’t political or ethnically motivated; it’s not traditional or woke, it’s not designed to give an edge to the young or the old, or to the west or the east. Virtually the entire world has benefited from the presence of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal enabling quick, dependable transportation, primarily between Europe and Asia, though “round the world” shipping services including Africa, Australia, and the Americas use it as well.
The Suez Canal and Red Sea pathway is so important to world trade that it has been responsible for a share of worldwide economic advancement.
And as soon as Iran gave the order to their clients to act out, in autumn 2023, the Houthis took that message as authorization to completely shut down this pathway to world shipping.
That’s not an exaggeration. The Houthis’ location – in Yemen, at the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula – gives them a prime position to harass ships that travel through the narrow span between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
In the fall of 2023, the Houthis’ relentless missile and drone attacks on all kinds of cargo ships essentially closed the pathway, forcing most shipping to sail all the way around Africa at a massive cost of money, fuel, personnel, and perhaps most of all, time, since the arena of world trade has become so dependent upon fast transportation. The quick delivery of raw materials for further processing, of components for further manufacture, and of finished products for sale – all these constitute the foundation of the modern economy.
And for a year and a half now, the Iran-controlled Houthis have held that process hostage.
Other countries could intervene, such as the local Arab states themselves, but for the already tense middle east, to take serious action against one of Iran’s puppets is risky business; we can’t blame the locals for hoping some more distant players would address the matter instead.
The lion’s share of the cargo traversing this path is based in Europe and Asia, so one could argue that they ought to clear the path. But Europe has their hands full with the Russia-Ukraine war (yes, another foreign policy problem essentially created by the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris regimes), and Asia is a powder keg already, with China saber-rattling everywhere from the Taiwan Strait across the South China Sea and beyond, into the South Pacific and Indian Oceans.
So, as usual, it falls to the United States to solve the problem, and at least we do have a genuine interest in the area this time: lots of the ships that normally traverse the area the Houthis are holding hostage do travel to or from the United States on “Round the World” services, or fly the flag of the United States or our allies, or are owned by carrier concerns whose economic success or failure affects their American operations as well.
The United States does not need to stretch to come up with a justification to intervene; the United States just needs the resolve to do so.
Why, then, did the Biden-Harris regime fail to do much more than shake their fists at the sky and provide ride-along service on occasion, while refusing to launch major direct action against the Houthis?
They claimed there was nothing more they could do, but we know better. The Biden-Harris regime – for whatever reason – believed in empowering and funding Iran’s mullahs, knowing full well that by empowering and funding the mullahs, they were indirectly empowering and funding the mullahs’ shock troops: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
Well, there was an election on November 5, 2024, and there’s a new sheriff in town.
Among the many mandates that the electorate delivered was a clear order to bring common sense to middle east policy. The Trump administration is taking a clear position against terrorism, against the jihadists, against the Iranian mullahs and their surrogates.
And on the weekend of March 14, the U.S. military took positive action at last. In coordinated attacks on key targets, the United States destroyed at least thirty Houthi installations throughout Yemen. They’re not done, but it was a good start, showing that the United States will no longer tolerate these attacks on global transportation.
This won’t be a huge project for the United States, now that we are fully engaged, but even though it’s not a massive undertaking, it will produce great rewards.
· Restoring safety to global commerce in this regard means cutting about two weeks off the transit time of 20,000 ships per year.
· It means restoring the supply chain dependability that countless thousands of businesses have become dependent on.
· It means restoring a key financing source – the Suez Canal toll – to Egypt, an important anchor of middle-east peace and a key counterweight against Iran.
· It means lowering global seafreight pricing, and also global airfreight pricing as well, since the airfreight market has been saturated as a costly but often necessary offset to the Asia-Europe transit time problem.
· And it means that an important signal will be sent to other troublemakers around the world: as Calvin Coolidge famously said, the business of America is business. We will fight to pursue the establishment of a free and unencumbered global marketplace, and if anyone threatens the chokepoints of global shipping, they will have America to answer to, whether they’re a pipsqueak band of terrorists or an entire megalomaniac nation.
The American government is finally filling a vacuum of leadership that allowed problems like this to incubate all over the world for the past four years. President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and Secretary Rubio are speaking with one voice in their opposition to Tehran and their defense of global commerce.
It is a welcome change. Grown-ups are in charge in Washington D.C. at last. It is such a relief to see America resume the role of a world leader again.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
