What happens if the Houthi rebels fight back?

When it comes to US military strikes, the UK is used to being a loyal, junior helper – but after last night’s co-ordinated action against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, London should be asking Washington: what’s the plan… and how do we get out of this one?

So what’s the plan? As ever, the British military, led by the United States, drew up an exquisitely detailed plan for a limited, targeted, clinical air strike on Houthi targets in Yemen.

Last night’s UK and US-led strikes were as a direct result of weeks of Houthi aggression towards shipping in the Red Sea, including a Royal Navy vessel, and the casualties were, as intended, very light.

Mission accomplished, then?

Tactically, the operation appears to have been highly successful. In some ways, the action was inevitable – to protect shipping, prevent another recession, and for more base reasons: you can imagine how losing a Royal Navy frigate or a destroyer would play in an election year.

But what is the strategic plan? What happens, in other words, if they now shoot back? What does “victory” in our war with the Houthis look like? Who are they anyway? How do we win this one?

That is the great worry – and, by the way, another reason why parliamentary scrutiny would have been better delivered sooner rather than later.

The great danger is that the West now gets drawn into yet another ever-escalating war in the Middle East and, with the mixed experiences of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria behind us, a futile one that we might well lose. After all, the still-obscure Houthi rebels aren’t some little gang of terrorists, or at least they are not just that. They are well-armed, battle-hardened, fanatical and, crucially, the proxies of Iran, which has long supported them as a key ally – especially in their relational rivalry with Saudi Arabia, itself another outcrop of the Shia-Sunni schism in Islam – as well as a matter of simple powerplay.

The Houthis thus spent seven years resisting attempts by the Saudis and their local allies to destroy them, in what amounted to a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It ended in a humanitarian disaster, stalemate and, oddly enough, a peace brokered by China and a thawing in Saudi-Iranian relations.

We have to ask ourselves, in that context, what we in the West are now getting ourselves into. If the Saudis couldn’t destroy the Houthis, why will the Americans, even with their firepower, be able to do so? Time and again, the world’s superpower has been fought to a standstill in futile, never-ending wars in this region, and this may well prove the case again.

An actually more pessimistic possibility is that the war in the Red Sea and for Yemen – a pitifully poor, broken country – now escalates, unpredictably, into a proxy war between the West and Israel versus Iran and its allies such as Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, no doubt assisted by Russia, North Korea and, possibly, China.

Proxy wars can drag on for many years in stalemate because they are fought by other people on your behalf, but they can escalate into more direct confrontation if there is a danger of actually losing. Unlike in Afghanistan, where, it tuned out, the stakes were remarkably low, it is not possible for the United States and its allies to permit hostile control of the Red Sea shipping lanes, or for Israel in particular to be further menaced.

All this is really what Hamas wanted after the October 7th attacks, even albeit in a sort of vague way. Hamas sought a wider destabilisation of the region that would open up new possibilities in their war against Israel and their stated aim to kill Jews. They created chaos for a purpose. They failed to draw in Hezbollah and open up new fronts in the West Bank and southern Lebanon/northern Israel, but their friends in Yemen, also backed by Iran, have rallied to their cause.

That is useful for Hamas, because it leaves Israel’s allies, already stretched by the Ukraine war and tensions in Taiwan, weakened. For Hamas, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, drawing America into a proxy war with Iran suits it very well, because it creates more chaos and more pressure on Israel to settle. In a reversal of the usual proxy pattern, and to put it crudely, Hamas wants Iran to fight its war with Israel and America on its behalf.

Paradoxically, Benjamin Netanyahu would not be upset if America ended up targeting Iran’s nuclear programme, or, alternatively, Washington acquiesced in an Israeli attack and then protected it from Iranian retaliation. The direct confrontation between America and Iran (and various allies on both sides) – which has been threatened for so long – would finally become reality.

That sounds fanciful – and it is in the sense that the very prospect of such Armageddon is a strong deterrent against escalation. Witness, for example, the restrained response by Hezbollah, its allies in the Lebanese government and Iran, to the Israeli assassination of a Hamas commander in Beirut; and, indeed, their unwillingness to do much about the tragedy in Gaza.

But the risks of some wider conflagration are growing, and the geopolitical linkages between the Middle East, Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan, are tightening, with an adventurist Russia at the centre of the troublemaking.

In the end, the venerable nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction between the United States and Russia should save us all from thermonuclear destruction. But there is every chance that we’ll be engaged in a long, low-level, partially successful war in Yemen to protect the tankers getting through the Suez Canal.

For Britain, seven decades after the Suez debacle, and long after the end of Empire, it is a particularly strange position to be in, even as a very junior partner to the US. Once again, we are trying to stop an Arab nation from putting their boots on our economic windpipe – the free flow of international shipping.

After recent decades, being a loyal, junior helper of America has become a familiar feeling. But it’s worth London politely asking Washington: so, how do we get out of this one?