America Can't Afford to Deter Itself

How self-deterrence in Yemen and elsewhere harms American and global interests.

A U.S. Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet prepares to launch from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower for strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. (Credit: U.S. Central Command)

The United States is an apprehensive giant.

This is not a new development, but with the war in Ukraine entering its third year, a war in Gaza that has widened to include the Red Sea and other parts of the Middle East, and chronic geopolitical tension East Asia, the wages of America’s apprehension are now coming due.

Washington’s trepidation-fueled foreign policy stems from over-learning the lessons of America’s ambitious efforts to transform the Middle East in recent decades. That searing experience combined with the politics of the social media age, which political entrepreneurs of neo-isolationist Right and Left have leveraged to great effect, have contributed to the making of a self-deterred superpower. Even though Washington’s foreign policy community remains overwhelmingly liberal internationalist in orientation, an influential narrative has emerged that frames the United States as a heedless power that does more harm in the world than good.

Given the drawn-out failures of America’s efforts to remake Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s perfectly understandable for analysts and officials to re-examine their assumptions about America’s place in the world—but that does not actually seem to be happening. Instead, foreign policy activists carelessly leverage past American fiascoes to advance their own isolationist agenda. In the process, they spread confusion about what is and is not important to the United States in the world. The unfortunate result is that foreign conflicts have grown worse or have become more dangerous because of Washington’s self-deterrence.

Not long after Syria’s Bashar al-Assad deployed his military to crush the uprising against his rule, a small number of analysts argued that American intervention had a chance to stave off a humanitarian disaster and would give the United States a geo-strategic advantage in its relations with Iran, the Syrian regime’s patron and defender. These arguments were met with howls of protest from a far larger group of analysts who claimed that Washington had no compelling interest in the conflict, that the United States would make the bloodshed worse, and that American intervention would trigger a wider conflict in the region.

President Barack Obama and his advisors harbored the same fears, and over the course of the decade that followed Syria became an arena for a regional proxy conflict, transnational terrorism, and great power competition. The Assad regime’s war on the Syrian people was a humanitarian disaster to which the current carnage in the Gaza Strip pales. It also perverted politics in Europe, where the nationalist Right took advantage of desperate Syrians seeking safety to advance their xenophobic agendas. Also, America’s reluctance to intervene demonstrated to Iranian leaders that the United States would do little to confront their regional depredations. Of course, it is possible that an American intervention may not have prevented these outcomes, but the foreign policy community—fearful of “another Iraq”—was deterred and disabused itself of any humanitarian or strategic benefits of the use of American power.

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Then there’s Yemen. The current Saudi leadership has done some foolish and cruel things—the murder of Jamal Khashoggi being the most spectacular example. Riyadh’s 2015 intervention in Yemen is almost always included in the bill of particulars against Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. The Saudis indeed contributed to their neighbor’s humanitarian suffering through a poorly executed military campaign, one intended to support Yemen’s internationally recognized government after the Houthis drove it from power in 2014.

Initially, the United States grudgingly helped the Saudis and their coalition partners. But officials from the Obama administration disavowed this previous support once they were out of power, opposed President Donald Trump’s weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and lobbied to head off an Emirati-led offensive on the port of Hodeidah in 2018 that could have turned the tide against the Houthis.

When they returned to the White House in January 2021, they quickly de-designated the Houthis as a terrorist organization—despite the group’s history of firing missiles and drones at Saudi and Emirati cities—arguing that aid to Yemen could not flow so long as the designation remained because it prohibited aid groups from working with Houthi authorities to get assistance to Yemenis in need. Of course, the Houthis had played a critical role in creating this situation in the first place by hijacking aid that was getting into Yemen. Throughout this period, critics of Saudi Arabia in the U.S. Congress sought to block weapons sales and service contracts to the Saudi armed forces while the Iranians worked assiduously to build up Houthi capabilities, dispatching Hezbollah operatives to train and supply them with ballistic missiles, drones, and other weaponry. 

Much of this support was overlooked or downplayed thanks to Washington’s perennially unrequited effort to forge a new relationship with Iran, the starting point of which was the nuclear negotiations that became the JCPOA could not be jeopardized even as the Iranians helped Bashar al-Assad mass murder his way out of a political jam in Syria, armed militias in Iraq that targeted Americans deployed fighting ISIS, supplied Hezbollah with rockets, and backed the Houthis with arms and military advice.

When President Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, critics cautioned that Trump’s recklessness would lead to a direct conflict with Tehran. They need not have worried—the then-president apparently shared their concerns. During the long summer of 2019, when the Iranians seized ships in the Gulf, shot down an American drone in international airspace, and attacked two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Trump shrugged and without explicitly saying so disavowed four decades of declared American policy to defend the oil fields of the Persian Gulf from external and internal threats. It was a rare moment of bipartisan comity in Trump’s Washington.

In light of recent events, it turns out that the Saudis were onto something when they said the Houthis—with Tehran’s help—were a destabilizing force in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet the problem is now worse than when the Saudis first warned of it almost a decade ago, and the stakes are considerably higher. One can argue over whether the conflict in Syria threatened American interests, but there is no question that Houthi piracy places Washington’s core global interest in freedom of navigation in jeopardy.

Even as the United States has undertaken military operations to keep the Bab El-Mandeb strait and Red Sea open, there remains significant apprehension about the use of force. Analysts, columnists, and commentators have gravely warned that by attacking the Houthis, Washington risks escalation and regional war. It’s not hard to infer that these concerns have some sway in the White House. If not, the Iranian vessel MV Behshad—which has been providing intelligence to direct Houthi attacks—would be at the bottom of the Red Sea and U.S. military forces would be engaged in broader operations to render the Houthis incapable of threatening shipping rather than tactically oriented strikes targeting “missiles on the rails.”

As the attacks on shipping continue, these same critics claim that American-led strikes are not working. That’s correct because the United States has deterred itself in Yemen. The unrealistic ambitions of the previous 20 years, especially but not exclusively war in Iraq, cast a long shadow in Washington. Yet the stakes in the Red Sea are greater than they were in Iraq.

That is not to suggest that the United States should march an army into Yemen, but so long as Washington deters itself from destroying the Houthi and Iranian ability to close the shipping lanes the problem will grow. Absent American-led action to do away with this problem once and for all, the United States will be giving Tehran and its allies an effective veto over the functioning of the global economy.

Hesitation will only invite more Iranian provocations, but there are lessons beyond the region. If the United States is hesitant about acting to protect a core interest in the Middle East, its allies and partners in the world must be left wondering whether Washington will deter itself when it comes the Taiwan Strait, Sea of Japan, and elsewhere where American policymakers have previously declared to be central to U.S. security and interational stability.   

Given the profound implications of American apprehension, it's worth risking an escalation spiral to make sure the Red Sea stays open.

Steven A. Cook (@stevenacook) is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of several books on the Middle East. His next book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, comes out this May.