OPINION:
A version of this story appeared in the Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each Wednesday.
Worldwide trade performs the same service as the World Wide Web: to bring diverse peoples together for mutual prosperity. Just as hackers take advantage of internet vulnerabilities for self-serving aims, so do terrorists who interrupt the free flow of trade upon the seas.
Iran-backed Houthi rebels are threatening global commerce with their attacks on freight and oil shipping in the Red Sea. They are due a smart smackdown, but President Biden is hesitating to lead it for fear of stirring up an Iranian-Houthi hornet’s nest. If the past teaches anything, it’s that terrorism does not desist on its own.
Mr. Biden is reportedly mulling the prospect of redesignating as a foreign terrorist organization the radical Islamist Houthis attempting to overthrow the government of Yemen. The president removed the critical label more than two years ago in hopes of mollifying its leaders and their sponsors in Tehran.
Consequently, the Houthis have seized upon the war that fellow terror-addicted Hamas instigated against Israel to launch drone attacks on some commercial ships and to commandeer others passing by their Yemeni bases. At the same time, U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq have been attacked with rockets more than 100 times by associated terrorist groups since the war’s inception. All are financed by Iran.
The Houthis’ terrorist relabeling is fully warranted. Already, international shipping firms, including Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, have opted to reroute their vessels around Africa rather than risk attack while transiting the Red Sea. In response to the tightening stranglehold imposed on the global economy, the president tasked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin with launching Operation Prosperity Guardian, an international naval coalition to protect Red Sea shipping. Better late than never.
Such foot-dragging is symptomatic of Mr. Biden’s geopolitical leadership. Projection of American strength is deemed anathema to his “progressive” globalism, which clings to the illusory notion that diminishing U.S. superpower status is the key to melding nations into a borderless world of peace. Such folly informed the president’s unforgivable U.S. retreat from Afghanistan, and it colors his open-border policy that is allowing record numbers of immigrants to flood our cities illegally.
Evidently afraid to disturb the terror hornet’s nest, Mr. Biden has thus far rejected a muscular strategy of striking the bases of Houthi provocateurs, much less their Iranian sponsors. Even his ideological guru, former President Barack Obama, eventually tired of watching his Middle East peace overtures slapped down: In 2014, he ordered airstrikes on the terrorist organization ISIS in Syria.
Rather than swatting swarming Houthi drones one by one as they buzz toward vulnerable Red Sea shipping, the newly formed naval coalition should knock out a terror base or two, thereby demonstrating the penalty for interrupting the right to safe passage in waters protected by international convention.
Ultimately, Iran must be disabused of the notion that it can use terror to impose its long-sought Islamic caliphate across the Middle East and isolate the region from the modern world. Moreover, if Iran is left unhindered in putting the finishing touches on its nuclear weapons program, the world will have much more than mad Houthi hornets with which to contend.
Regrettably, there is simply no effective alternative to peace through strength.
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