US President Joe Biden has said that attacks on the Houthis will continue even as he acknowledged that the group have not stopped their Red Sea attacks.
The US carried out a fifth round of strikes on Yemen on Thursday after a US ship was struck by a Houthi drone.
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that US forces “took out a range of Houthi missiles” that were about to be fired towards the Red Sea.
He said the American attacks took place on Wednesday and again on Thursday.
On Wednesday, a Houthi drone hit a “US owned and operated bulk carrier ship” which later had to be rescued by India’s navy. It came as the US designated the Houthis as a terrorist organisation.
“Well, when you say working are they stopping the Houthis? No,” Mr Biden told reporters in Washington DC on Thursday before he left for a speech in North Carolina.
“Are they gonna continue? Yes.”
If you let them do this with no response every idiot nation with a coastline is going to think shooting civilian sailors is a good way to get shit done.
Allowing them to get away with it is escalatory for the world.
First, the logic works in reverse, too. If they are trying to pull us into a confrontation that they believe benefits them, allowing them to do so also demonstrates a tool for controlling the US that others will be motivated to use, and is also escalatory.
The problem is that we only think in personal, school yard fight terms. We’re act sad though each country has a singular, logically operating decision making process. In reality, international actors are much more like natural phenomena, like mold growth or rabbit populations.
I’m not saying the school yard logic is baseless. When the US flinches, that definitely affects how Xi Jinping assesses our willingness to respond with force to a recapture of Taiwan, for instance. But: whether he decides to do that is not based primarily on whether he thinks the country as a whole has balls or not. It’s based on a combination of benefits and draw backs.
So in the long run, if we wanted to prevent unification by force, we’re far better off engineering conditions that make unification a bad deal, even if we look weak rather than make it appealing enough to go to war even if we seem likely to destabilize the whole world over it