By M.A. AL-GHARIB
The U.S. military reports that it has conducted over 800 air strikes in the last month on the Houthi-administered area of Yemen. On April 28, the Houthis’ Civil Defense organization claimed that a U.S. strike on a prison holding African migrants killed at least 68 people and wounded 47 others. At the same time, at least eight people were killed in a U.S. attack on the capital city of Sana’a. In the deadliest U.S. air strike to date, the April 18 attack on the Ras Isa fuel port, 74 people were killed. The following article reviews the background of this war and future perspectives—including the danger of a wider conflict.
On March 15, U.S. President Donald Trump started a near-daily bombing campaign on Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians. Why did Trump end the year-long pause of U.S. attacks on Yemen, a country that, according to the United Nations, was already experiencing widespread famine 10 years ago as a result of a U.S.-backed Saudi-UAE siege war, and that the U.S. had been bombing on and off since 2002, killing thousands of civilians. And what are the implications for the resistance to Zionist colonialism and U.S. imperialism?
U.S. backs Israel’s “right” to continue the genocide
The unsurprising answer to the first question is that the Houthi (Ansar Allah) movement has achieved impressive results in its asymmetrical warfare against shipping in the Red Sea that is linked to Israel, the U.S., and Britain, and it has posed a credible threat of drone attacks on Israeli territory. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Houthis have attacked over 100 ships passing through the Bab al Mandab strait, sinking two of them, and have caused about 70 percent of shipping to reroute away from the Red Sea and around the African continent. The Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat has shuttered as a result of the attacks, with the costs to Israel only mitigated by collusion with the rancid and collaborationist Emirati regime, striking deals with Tel Aviv to reroute trade over the Arabian Peninsula.
The Houthis, in short, act in support of Palestine where others—such as the regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf—have only offered words or, as in the case of the Emirati and Moroccan states, stab Palestine in the back. Moreover, as Yemen expert Helen Lackner says, “Aside from the economic costs, the attacks also matter due to their political symbolism: the idea that one of the world’s major maritime passes could be controlled by a group of rebels doesn’t sit well with the Global North.”
This U.S. administration is even more committed—a mind-boggling statement—to the defense and expansion of Israeli colonialism. Mind-boggling because the Biden administration, of course, gave Israel whatever it wanted in military and political support as it has prosecuted its genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023. The fact that Trump has moved U.S. policy from the liberals’ sotto voce endorsement of the worst crime against humanity of the 21st century to open support of concentration camps, population displacement, and settler colonialism should not only embarrass but end the political careers of all those “leftists” and other useful idiots who saw in the current U.S. president a “peace” candidate.
U.S. militarism stretches itself thin
The U.S. regime—whether under Republican or Democratic leaders—believes, simplistically, that the Houthis are a proxy for Iran. The Israelis have been pushing their U.S. patrons to militarily attack Iran for decades, and this pressure has been heating up since Oct. 7, 2023. Whether Trump will do so, despite his typically unhinged rhetoric, remains an open question. What is clear is that the recent and ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen is not only about deterring Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping but also a part of what the U.S. and Israel understand to be a “rollback” of Iranian influence.
However, the Yemeni bombing campaign and the related shift in weapons and personnel, exemplified by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordering one-third of the U.S. B-52 bomber fleet at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, has been receiving criticism from within the ranks of U.S. imperialism. Pentagon officials worry that materiel and personnel deployed to Middle East after Oct. 7, 2023 have been pushed at a “high operating tempo,” referring to a grinding workload for personnel and the undermining of equipment maintenance. This was a year and a half before the latest round of bombing.
They also worry about the undermining the U.S. effort to confront a rising China. With recent news of DeepSeek AI and BYD EV batteries, PR China seems to have caught up if not surpassed the U.S. tech sector in terms of technical capability, if not market dominance. From the perspective of U.S. imperialism, this can only mean that the recourse to military threats becomes even more central to its strategy.
An Israeli attack on Iranian military sites could exacerbate the tensions erupting between the U.S. president and the military officer stratum. In such a scenario, the U.S. would devote even more resources to the Middle East. As The New York Times reported on April 4, the Yemen bombing campaign has been much larger than the Pentagon has publicly disclosed, consuming about $200 million worth of munitions “in the first three weeks alone … The costs are much higher—well over $1 billion at this point—when operational and personnel expenses are taken into account.”
The Houthis will not likely be defeated
Pentagon officials have also admitted in closed briefings—again according to the April 4 NYT—that the bombing campaign has had only “limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers.” Should a conflict break out in East Asia, Pentagon officials worry about a risk of “real operational problems.”
Zooming out, for the past 15 months shipping companies had already adapted to uncertainty in the Red Sea, switching to the route around Africa, more costly but offset by charging shipping customers more. Furthermore, the Houthis have been a resilient fighting force for over a decade, as they proved through eight years and tens of thousands of bombing incursions by the Saudis from 2014 to 2022.
The only time the Houthis stopped their attacks on Red Sea shipping was when Israel paused its military operations in Gaza. Their position is clear. As recently reported in Newsweek, the Houthis maintain that “we will stop sending missiles and drones off the Yemeni coast when Israel agrees to a permanent halt in hostilities against Hamas and withdraws its troops from the enclave.” They have never wavered from this position.
What is also becoming clear is that the U.S. has entangled itself in a web of contradictions, above all the one between perpetuating the Israeli genocide, on the one side, and, on the other, strengthening the U.S. presence in East Asia. That contradiction is not exceedingly amenable to resolution by Trump et al., with their fantasist tendencies. As the bond markets’ chastening of Trump and his willingness to talk to Iran suggest, the reality principle ultimately intrudes on even the most deluded sectors of the ruling class.
Perspective on a possible wider Middle East conflict
On March 18, Israel “broke” the ceasefire with Hamas that it never observed in the first place and began intensifying a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. It is becoming clearer by the day that the Israelis and Trump are aligned and taking concrete measures to forcibly remove Gazans—first to Somalia and Sudan, which refused, and then to Indonesia, which, disgustingly, has been more cooperative. The forced exile of 100 Palestinians from Gaza to Indonesia, which the Israelis chillingly call “a pilot program” for “voluntary transfer,” is nothing other than ethnic cleansing pure and simple.
There is a significant chance that the U.S.-Israeli maximalism will trigger a regional war. The masses in Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, the Gulf, and beyond are already at a boiling point, and the Israel-U.S. axis moving to population removal would threaten the stability of the Egyptian, Jordanian, the Emirati-aligned Southern Yemeni government, and even the Saudi regimes. How all this would affect another Trump-Israeli agenda item, the so-called Abraham Accords, is to be seen.
If a regional war were to break out, the U.S. role in the Middle East would only increase. The diversion of resources—materiel, personnel, intelligence etc.—would further undermine the Asia-Pacific strategy of U.S. imperialism. This comes at a time when China has successfully called Trump’s bluff on tariffs. South Korean, Japanese, and PRC officials recently set aside seemingly intractable conflicts over territorial claims and geopolitical alliances to strategize together in the face of U.S. tariffs. It would not be surprising if Vietnam, the Philippines, and other major ASEAN players who have so far allied with Washington move toward Beijing in the near future. The U.S. under Trump so far has achieved one major success, albeit inadvertent; they have fortified the Chinese side of inter-imperialist rivalry.
No to the Democrats, yes to revolutionary socialism
There is, fortunately, a mass movement emerging in the United States that is uniting around opposition to Trump’s attacks on working-class living conditions, rights to organize, and more broadly, on what passes for liberal democracy in the U.S. Also, for the first time in the history of polling, a majority of the U.S. population opposes Israel. The objective conditions exist for the cohering of a broadly socialist, anti-imperialist mass movement in the United States.
Unfortunately, prominent leaders of the left want to bring this movement back into the Democratic Party and to channel mass anger at Trump and Israel into the voting booth. The Democrats, however, are not our friends. We should remember that though they differ on some domestic issues, there is basic agreement between the two ruling parties on the prerogatives of U.S. imperialism. As Belén Fernández reminds us, “Joe Biden pursued exactly the same illegal bombing approach to Yemen as the Republicans are now using, with Biden pledging in January of last year that massive air strikes would continue despite his own admission that they were not ‘working.’”
The recent Signalgate episode, in which Hegseth et al. used the non-secure app to share military secrets, drew the ire of politicians from both parties. But for neither Republicans nor Democrats was the anger because of the criminality against Yemen that Hegseth and his colleagues were casually discussing. No. The outrage was directed at the supposed “threat” to U.S. military secrecy.
While we do not take the ultra-left position that voting is unimportant, it cannot be the core of the strategy against Trump. Trump is a symptom and a representative of the class politics of US imperialism in the current moment. To combat Trump, we must fight the class politics of which he is a representative and an accelerant.
We need to fight not only for democratic demands such as defense of immigrants and other targeted communities, for democratic rights of political expression and political organizing, but for a revolutionary socialist vision that replaces our current system with one serving human needs and flourishing. Strategically, our movements need to cohere around class independence and to build a labor party that fights for workingclass interests. Only revolutionary socialism can inspire the independent politics we need now more than ever.
