The US Is Choosing Escalation and a Wider War

Spencer Ackerman is not impressed by defenses of the U.S./U.K. strikes in Yemen:

The respectable set says that once the Houthis started attacking Red Sea shipping, a U.S. reprisal was inevitable. There’s a lazy-person’s truth here, for sure. Like the Royal Navy before it, the U.S. Navy sails under the banner of free trade. Any form of trade requires safe shipping lanes. Suez Canal traffic is down by something like 25 percent. Something like 10-12 percent of global commerce traverses the Red Sea.

The problem with this sort of thinking is that it confuses a justification for a military action with a strategy that produces a desired result. It treats a choice as an inevitability, and then, when convinced there is no alternative, intensifies a losing course of action when the choice doesn’t produce the desired result and instead makes everything worse.

There is always a choice when it comes to using force. Even when another party has taken the first shot, there is nothing inevitable about military action. As many people have reminded us since October 7, the Indian government chose restraint in response to the 2008 Mumbai attacks rather than lashing out with military reprisals, and that was clearly the wiser course of action. The Houthi attacks on commercial shipping are comparatively minor and trivial by comparison, but the U.S. and its allies chose to use force rather than explore other possible alternatives.

Escalating the situation is an overreaction given the limited costs incurred from Houthi attacks thus far. As Ben Friedman of Defense Priorities pointed out in a statement yesterday, the U.S. and its allies have exaggerated the problem caused by Houthi attacks:

The fact is that the Houthi attacks on shipping have not been particularly effective, nor are they a major economic issue.

While the original attacks have not done much damage, the reprisals to come could do significantly more harm. Everyone, including U.S. officials, acknowledges that the U.S./U.K. strikes will not stop future Houthi attacks, and most people expect that the Houthis will intensify and broaden their attacks. Indeed, they have declared that all American and British interests are now “legitimate targets” following last night’s strikes. The strikes have not only put U.S. sailors and ships in the vicinity at risk, but they have potentially put all U.S. personnel throughout the region in greater danger.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.