For 50 nights beginning March 15, the U.S. military pounded Houthi targets in Yemen with “unrelenting” forces, including bombs from fighter jets and missiles from warships, to restore freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.
In late 2023, shortly after the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel in which terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage, the Houthi rebels who control part of Yemen began a campaign to use their substantial arsenal of missiles and drones to disrupt commercial shipping, which the United States suspected was at the behest of their Iranian sponsors.
The Biden administration’s sporadic bombing of Houthi targets in response to the attacks on shipping had little effect.
“Those strikes were retaliation strikes,” said President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in March. “They launch one missile, we hit the missile launcher.”
They were, in the words of former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz, “pinprick attacks months between.”
What we learned was dubbed “Operation Rough Rider” on Trump’s watch was much more intense.
“We are pounding them militarily. By the way … this isn’t a one-night thing,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. “This campaign is about freedom of navigation and restoring deterrence. The minute the Houthis say, ‘We will stop shooting at your ships, we will stop shooting at your drones,’ this campaign will end. But, until then, it will be unrelenting.”
And so it was. However, seven weeks in, the costs of the U.S. operation began mounting, and the Houthis remained undeterred.
The U.S. lost three $60 million F-18 fighter jets to combat-related accidents, and the Houthis shot down a half dozen MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drones, which run about $30 million a plane. The total cost topped a billion dollars.
Trump even expressed grudging respect for the endurance of the Houthis, who saw their leaders killed, as well as their headquarters and weapons systems destroyed, and still fought on.
“You know, we hit them very hard. They had a great capacity to withstand punishment,” Trump said following a deal with the Houthis brokered by Oman. “They took tremendous punishment. And, you know, you could say there’s a lot of bravery there, that it was amazing what they took.”
But there are two versions of who blinked.
“They have capitulated,” Trump said on May 6 during an announcement that a ceasefire had been reached. “The Houthis have announced … that they don’t want to fight anymore,”
However, the Houthis said it was the U.S. that backed down, and that once it offered to stop bombing, they accepted, saying they were only firing at U.S. ships in self-defense.
“What changed is the American position, but our position remains firm,” Mohammed Abdulsalam, the chief Houthi negotiator, said in an interview with Houthi-run Al Masirah TV.
The U.S. said all along, as Hegseth indicated, that all the Houthis had to do was stop firing at ships, and the U.S. campaign would end.
“This is always [about] the freedom of navigation,” Rubio said. “A band of individuals with advanced weaponry threatened global shipping, and the job was to get that to stop. And if it’s going to stop, then we can stop.”
Few details have been released about the handshake deal, except for a short post on X by Omani Foreign Minister Badr Al Busaidi, which said, “In the future, neither side will target the other, including American vessels, in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait, ensuring freedom of navigation and the smooth flow of international commercial shipping.”
Missing from the agreement is any promise to stop attacking Israel or its ships.
“The agreement does not include Israel in any way, shape or form,” Abdulsalam told Reuters.
In the days before the ceasefire with the U.S. was announced, the Houthis managed to get a ballistic missile past Israel’s vaunted air defenses and hit the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. Israel retaliated with devastating air strikes on Yemen’s main airport in the capital, Sanaa.
Yemen’s continued missile launches and the vague language of the agreement have shippers worried that the region’s risks are still too high.
The top five container shipping companies told the Wall Street Journal that they were assessing the situation and have no immediate plans to return to the once popular route from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Oman.
Most companies have adjusted to the instability in the region by routing their ships around the Cape of Good Hope. While going around Africa’s southern tip adds about two weeks to the trip, it saves considerably on the cost of insurance for passage through what remains a risky war zone.
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For now, Trump said he’s taking the Houthis at their word.
“We’ll see what happens. But I think, you know, I believe that, hopefully, that’s over with and they’ll leave the ships alone,” he said.