By Amb. Dr. Mohamed Qubaty
How restraint without Yemeni leverage turned crisis management into a doctrine of permanent escalation.
One year after early warnings that U.S. restraint in Yemen was backfiring, the Red Sea crisis has become less an emergency than a condition—managed, mitigated, and endlessly postponed, but never resolved. What was once treated as a temporary flare-up tied to regional shocks has hardened into a durable pattern of coercion, in which a non-state actor learned how to escalate without triggering decisive consequences.
This evolution was anticipated. In late 2024, an AEI Critical Threats Project analysis warned that attempts to “manage escalation” were not containing the conflict but reshaping it in ways that advantaged the Houthis. That warning has since moved from hypothesis to lived reality.
The lesson of the past year is not that escalation spiraled uncontrollably, but that it became normalized. The Houthis learned how to operate below decisive thresholds, absorb limited punishment, and translate maritime disruption into sustained strategic relevance. This was not a failure of tactics. It was a failure of strategic design.
When Crisis Management Becomes Strategic Drift
U.S. policy has been guided by a familiar instinct: avoid widening the war, contain spillover, and prevent a regional conflagration. Yet the cumulative effect of this posture has been the opposite of deterrence. Carefully calibrated responses—defensive interceptions, selective strikes, and measured signaling—did not alter Houthi decision-making. They educated it.
Over time, escalation management hardened into a pattern. Attacks followed by statements, interceptions followed by assurances, strikes followed by restraint. The result was predictability—not stability. A coercive campaign settled into a rhythm that markets adjusted to and policymakers learned to tolerate.
This type of stability is deceptive. It masks a steady erosion of deterrence and normalizes the idea that global commerce can be disrupted without triggering consequences that threaten the attacker’s core position.
Tactical Defense, Strategic Exposure
Defenders of the current approach often point to improved interception rates and the avoidance of catastrophic losses. These are real tactical achievements. They are not, however, strategic solutions.
Maritime and aerial defenses protect shipping lanes and buy time, but they do not change the balance of power inside Yemen. As long as the Houthis retain control over territory, population centers, and revenue streams, external pressure will be absorbed and outlasted.
The danger is cumulative. A prolonged campaign of managed escalation provides adversaries with operational data, tests Western defenses under real conditions, and gradually lowers the political threshold for using global trade as leverage.
Foreseeable Limits, Confirmed Outcomes
The June U.S. air-maritime campaign illustrated these limits with unusual clarity. The strikes were more sustained and more intense than earlier responses, yet their strategic impact proved transient.
Well before the campaign began, analysts cautioned that air and naval power—absent a credible ground partner—could not alter the Houthis’ core advantages. The concern was not about military competence, but about structure: without forces capable of denying territorial depth and disrupting internal control, external pressure would remain temporary.
The campaign confirmed this assessment. Despite sustained strikes and maritime enforcement, Houthi capabilities proved resilient and adaptive. Control over territory, revenue streams, and population centers remained intact.
Post-campaign analyses sharpened the conclusion. Gregory Johnsen and Edmund Fitton-Brown, among several others, underscored that while the United States can weaken the Houthis from the air, it cannot eliminate their capabilities without effective ground forces—either its own or those of a capable partner.
Why Yemen Remains the Center of Gravity
The Red Sea crisis cannot be resolved at sea alone. It is a manifestation of a deeper imbalance on land. As long as the Houthis enjoy unchallenged control over key nodes inside Yemen, they can externalize costs while internalizing power.
Ports, supply routes, and population centers provide the insulation that allows regional escalation without domestic vulnerability. Without challenging this internal equilibrium, external military pressure will remain episodic rather than transformative.
Restoring Yemeni state leverage—organizationally, politically, and militarily—is therefore not optional. It is the missing foundation of any credible deterrence strategy.
Conclusion: From Managed Vulnerability to Strategic Denial
A year after early warnings went unheeded, the cost of inaction is no longer theoretical. The danger lies not only in continued disruption, but in the precedent taking shape: that a militia-state can hold global commerce at risk, probe advanced defenses, and remain politically protected at home.
Avoiding escalation has not prevented confrontation; it has delayed it while raising the eventual price. The choice now is between continuing to manage vulnerability or shifting toward strategic denial.
That shift requires anchoring deterrence inside Yemen itself. Without a credible Yemeni ground component capable of reclaiming space and denying territorial depth, the cycle of escalation will persist—managed, perhaps, but unresolved.