May 13: Did the Houthis Beat America?
Trump announces Saudi investments; U.S. to lift sanctions on Syria; Did Israel kill another Sinwar?
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The Big Story
Why did Donald Trump abruptly call a halt last week to the U.S. campaign against the Houthis? Because the U.S. military was no match for the mighty Houthi Wehrmacht, according to a report in The New York Times. Apparently the Pentagon, with its $850 billion budget, can’t quite suppress a band of desert pirates.
The report, which boasts five bylines and cites more than a dozen “current and former officials,” claims that Trump pulled the plug after concluding that the operation was too expensive and wasn’t working. The United States failed to establish “air superiority” over the Houthis, burned through $1 billion in munitions in a month, lost half a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones plus two fighter jets that fell off an aircraft carrier, and saw “several” jets “nearly” be struck by Houthi air defenses, “making real the possibility of U.S. casualties”—all while achieving only “some degradation” of Houthi capabilities. Pentagon contingency planners, moreover, grew “increasingly concerned” that the United States was depleting critical munitions stocks that would be needed “to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China.” The usual suspects—Vice President J.D. Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, now reportedly joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio—favored wrapping up the operation, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “went back and forth.” Former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who had supported the operation, had of course been duly cashiered from his role and demoted to the United Nations.
It should go without saying that this is an entirely different note from the one that Trump has struck publicly. Last week, Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated” and “don’t want to fight anymore,” while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump had “swiftly deliver[ed]” on his “promise” to “restore the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” Speaking in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump again touted the Houthi campaign as a success:
The United States military launched more than 1,100 strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. As a result, the Houthis agreed to stop. They said, we don’t want this anymore. It’s the first time you’ve heard that from them. They’re tough. They’re fighters. Just days ago, we [asked them] to cease targeting commercial. They were not going to be targeting commercial ships in any way, shape, or form, anything American. And they were very happy that we stopped. But we had 52 days of thunder and lightning like they’d never seen before. This was a swift, ferocious, decisive, and extremely successful use of military force.
So which is it? The Houthis have declared victory and promised to continue attacking any shipping that they consider helpful to Israel, which in practice means any ships, since the Houthis have shown no ability or inclination to distinguish between Israeli and non-Israeli commercial vessels. Representatives of the world’s five largest shipping companies told The Wall Street Journal last week they have no plans to return to the Red Sea anytime soon. And Egypt, which as of March was losing about $800 million in revenue per month from the decline in traffic through the Suez Canal, is now offering a 15% discount in a bid—thus far apparently unsuccessful—to lure shipping companies back to the route. As if to underscore the point, during Trump’s visit on Tuesday, the Houthis launched yet another ballistic missile at Israel, which had to travel through Saudi airspace to get there.
We have a few observations to make about the Times report. One is that yes, sure, the Houthis are fairly robust for what they are, which is a primitive nonstate actor. They have decent air defenses relative to their general technological level, thanks to some leftover Soviet technology and a steady supply of weaponry and advanced targeting equipment from Iran. That’s why it makes little sense to attack them without simultaneously imposing costs on Iran, given that their entire purpose is to provide Tehran with “deniable” deterrence. And that’s also why it makes sense that, according to several reports, the Iranians ordered the Houthis to strike a deal only after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a direct threat to Iran on X on May 1.
On the other hand … the Houthis are a primitive nonstate actor. The United States has the most sophisticated Air Force and Navy in the world, with semi-recent experience of suppressing and destroying the air defenses of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. The Israelis, flying U.S. aircraft, have been able to consistently operate in Syria—with its much-touted Russian-made S-300 air-defense systems—and in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Just last week, they obliterated one of the Houthis’ major ports, as well as the Sanaa airport. It’s one thing to say, for instance, that the United States used the Houthi campaign as a chit to trade in talks with Iran. But saying that the United States was deterred by the loss of Reaper drones—which are already being phased out by the U.S. Air Force due to their lack of “survivability” in contested airspace—or by jets “nearly” being struck (impossible to say what that means) simply does not pass the smell test.
What makes us particularly suspicious is that all the purported rationales for abandoning the campaign are a near-exact match to those deployed by the Kochworld “realists” who now staff the Pentagon for why the United States shouldn’t have bothered with striking the Houthis in the first place. The Houthis are too strong! They withstood the mighty Saudis and Emiratis! We need to defend Taiwan (except we don’t want to go to war over Taiwan either)! It’s too expensive! All America can do is lose! Come to think of it, some of those same experts (like current Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Michael Dimino) spent most of 2024 arguing that any Israeli escalation with Hezbollah would fail, invite massive and catastrophic retaliation against Israel, and force the United States to join a regional “war with Iran” in order to bail out its hapless client. What happened instead, of course, was that Israel decapitated Hezbollah within the space of a few weeks, with no U.S. involvement, and in doing so prompted the collapse of the Assad regime and with it the Iranians’ strategic position in the Levant. Iran did nothing, because there was nothing much it could do.
Trump appears to at least understand that We Are Losers is not a good message to broadcast to the world, which (we assume) is why he claimed victory. But his subordinates don’t want to let him get away with even that. Instead, they are rushing to leak to the Times that, in fact, the president is lying, and everything is just as they said: I.e., a weak and overextended America was humbled by Iran’s JV team and is now going home with its tail between its legs. By extension, all of Washington’s threats are fundamentally empty, because the most powerful military on the planet is incapable of projecting power and too broke to replace its munitions.
In other words, the fire and brimstone rhetoric is bullshit, and if you push us, we’ll fold. You know, peace through strength and all that.
—Park MacDougald
The Rest
→President Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday to kick off his four-day swing through the Gulf Arab states on his first official foreign trip as president. The headline for today was the announcement of a series of U.S.-Saudi economic deals—including what the White House has said is the “largest defense sales agreement in history,” per The Wall Street Journal—that would collectively amount to a Saudi investment of $600 billion in the U.S. economy over the next four years. (At least, we think that’s the number, which is the one included in the White House press release on the deal. Trump said Tuesday that Riyadh was committing to investing $1 trillion, roughly equivalent to the country’s entire annual GDP.) Aside from the arms sales agreement, valued at $142 billion, the centerpiece of Tuesday’s dealmaking appears to be a series of major joint ventures between Saudi Arabia and various U.S. tech firms, including a partnership between Humain, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the chipmaker Nvidia to build AI data centers in the kingdom.
→At the same summit in Riyadh, Trump announced that he would lift all sanctions on Syria following discussions with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said. Despite Syrian President Ahmed al-Sheraa’s terrorist background and connections with the Muslim Brotherhood nexus (i.e., Turkey and Qatar), the lifting of sanctions is, on balance, a good thing. As Tablet’s Tony Badran told The Scroll, “You want to stabilize Syria so that, among other things, the Turks and the Gulfies take over and help them out, the refugees go back, and you snuff out any attempt at an Iranian insurgency, etc. But it’s a shit show, so who knows who will be able to launder money through the Syrian banking system.” The proposed lifting of sanctions is also, in our view, a somewhat amusing rebuke to the heated Tucker Carlson conspiracy theorizing about Syria, according to which (last we checked) former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was a heroic pro-Western protector of minorities chased out of power by a cabal of CIA/deep state/neocon/Obama/Jewish “warmongers” and replaced with the “jihadist” Sheraa, who has since been committing fictional massacres of Christians on behalf of, uh, the Qataris (?), who are otherwise our friends against said CIA/Obama/Jewish warmongers. We think. It’s sort of hard to keep track.
→A few other notes from Trump’s Saudi visit:
Trump said in his speech that his administration was working to end the war in Gaza and bring back all of the hostages, and told an interviewer on the sidelines of the conference that he had been pressing the Israelis to allow more aid into Gaza. Over the weekend, reports emerged that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee had presented the Israelis with a U.S. plan to use private aid groups and U.S. security contractors, working in coordination with the IDF, to deliver aid to Gazans while cutting out Hamas and the United Nations.
Trump once again addressed the Iran file but this time seemed to dial down the threat considerably. “If Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors,” Trump said, “then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure [and] drive Iranian oil exports to zero like I did before.” Which is funny, because previously “maximum pressure” and “oil exports to zero” were the stated current policies of the administration, not the threat in the event of noncooperation, which was bombing.
Trump railed against the “neocons,” “nation builders,” and “interventionists,” who he said had “wrecked far more nations than they built” and “intervened in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” (Trump needs a different speechwriter, because this one is not capturing his voice.) That led to the most unintentionally funny quote of the day. “No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits,” the president said. “Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.” Yes, people of the region themselves, like Saudi Aramco (previously Standard Oil of California), Kermit Roosevelt, and His Royal Highness Jerry Inzerillo of the Medina Inzerillos, whose grandfather was famously played by Omar Sharif in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia:
→Israel targeted the head of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Sinwar, in a massive strike on an underground bunker beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis, the IDF announced on Tuesday. According to Axios, the Israelis received intelligence about Sinwar’s location earlier today and moved quickly to try to hit him, but there has been no confirmation yet as to whether Sinwar or any other Hamas commanders were killed.
→On Monday, the United States and China agreed to a temporary truce in their trade war, with Washington agreeing to lower import duties on most Chinese goods from 145% to 30% over the next 90 days. (Tariffs on certain goods, like steel and aluminum, will remain in place, meaning that the effective U.S. tariff rate on China will be closer to 39%, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip, though some analysts have cited figures as high as 55%.) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a press conference in Geneva, where the interim deal was negotiated, that “neither side wants to decouple” and that the United States was working toward a “long-lasting and durable trade deal with China.” Speaking Tuesday morning in Riyadh, Bessent added that Washington was still looking to reshore “strategic industries” like medicines and semiconductors and expressed hope that the United States and China could achieve a “big, beautiful rebalancing,” according to a report in Bloomberg.
In a thread on X, China analyst Christopher Balding observed that the deal—which locks in a higher base tariff rate than the pre-Liberation Day rate—is a “move in the right direction” but warned that simply agreeing to further talks with China is “the Chinese black hole of negotiations.” He added, in a comment that applies equally to the administration’s Iran diplomacy, that Trump’s recent tendency to back off threats risks sacrificing its credibility in negotiations. “If you are a hit man people will live in fear of you,” Balding writes, “but every so often you have to actually kill someone or else after a while people will learn not to take your threats seriously.”
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As long as the Trump administration supplies the IDF with the hardware needed, the IAF can slowly but surely degrade the houthis..see Hezbollah. After every ballistic missile fired at Israel, everything under Houthi control should be on the table, all the power plants, govt buildings, fake hospitals etc. The US Navy and Air force has already done plenty.
Re: the Big Story, you leave out an important element with regard to the Houthi campaign, that our Pentagon, and in particular our military defense capabilities have been so dangerously degraded and depleted over the last 5-6 years it is a national security nightmare, and thus, one you’ll barely see reported.
The Houthi campaign, to those who were paying attention, highlighted a number of such deficiencies, not least of which had to do with poorly trained soldiers, sailors and crewmen.
The work on Hegseth’s plate to rebuild almost the entire infrastructure and operations, right down to bullets, of one our most critical pillars of National Security, is one of Herculean proportions. And he has to do it fast.
I don’t envy him, but sure do pray for him in his efforts.