Why no one can defeat the Houthis in the Red Sea

Houthis block Bab el-Mandeb and no one knows how to stop them

No one defeats the Houthis because there is no infrastructure to defeat. The militia that has entrenched itself in the Bab el-Mandeb strait, in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, does not depend on factories, barracks or airfields: it operates from a devastated territory and from there it conditions one of the most important trade routes on the planet. The result, as of this discussion, is a global economy under pressure and a trail of bombings that does not close the file.

The blockade that bombs cannot resolve

The most repeated argument is logistical: cut off the flow and the war ends. Those who hold that thesis add that here there is no fighting on the ground, but against launches from the coast, detectable and destroyable. Against that weighs an uncomfortable precedent: Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam already demonstrated that carpet bombing does not bend an adversary that has nothing to destroy and nothing to lose. The cost of intercepting each projectile is paid by the one who pursues it, not by the one who launches it.

Ormuz, the pipeline and the narrative of chaos

The picture gets complicated in a chain: the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the Saudi East-West pipeline hit by drones and missiles until its preventive closure, and allied militias in Iraq operating against the same infrastructure. There the most skeptical reading emerges: the focus on the Houthis would serve as an alibi to justify prices and decisions made elsewhere. That the contingent seems small — its size has been compared to that of the German army — does not alter the arithmetic of maritime traffic.

What is foreseeable, in light of precedents, is more of the same: air campaigns that do not dislodge anyone and a route that keeps getting more expensive. Any firmer forecast is an act of faith.