The Houthis have done what no navy could: they have shut down the Red Sea. In an interview with Tom Switzer on the channel Switzerland with Tom Switzer, the University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer lays out how Yemen’s campaign against Saudi Arabia has paralysed global energy markets and left Washington without a workable military answer.
Mearsheimer, author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, describes a Saudi kingdom in deep trouble. The Houthis, he says, ‘struck the main international airport in Riyadh’ and ‘have basically shut down the flow of Saudi oil into the Red Sea’. Riyadh has told the Europeans there will be no oil deliveries for the rest of September, nor for all of October, while the Saudis themselves are ‘effectively fishing in European markets’ for their own supplies.
The geography is unforgiving. Saudi crude that crosses the kingdom by pipeline to the Red Sea must exit either south through Bab el-Mandab or north through Suez. With the port of Yanbu shut down, Mearsheimer argues, neither route works: ‘even if oil comes through the pipeline, it can’t get into the Red Sea’. Should the US somehow reopen Bab el-Mandab, the Houthis would simply close Yanbu again.
Asked why the world’s most powerful military cannot simply destroy Houthi infrastructure, Mearsheimer is blunt: ‘Just can’t do it. It’s very hard to do from the air alone.’ Bringing the Houthis to heel would require an invasion, and ‘air power alone just doesn’t work well’. He compares the dilemma to Hormuz, where Washington never sent ground forces because ‘the cost would be too great’.
Trump, he notes, has already tried. Between March and May last year the administration ‘picked a fight with the Houthis’, with the president promising to succeed where Joe Biden had failed. ‘Well, that didn’t work out very well, and we quit the war against the Houthis in May of last year.’ The reason was simple: ‘we running out of munitions… and we were not having any success’. Mearsheimer’s verdict on the enemy is admiring: ‘the Houthis are among the toughest hombres that have ever walked the face of the earth.’
Reports that Washington is weighing a large-scale operation, as CNN and the Wall Street Journal have suggested, leave him sceptical. Any such assault would be constrained by the same munitions shortage that has kept the US from attacking Iran. And the signals are contradictory: Trump returned early from Camp David on Saturday, 19 September, days after saying he was close to a decision on ‘annihilating Iran’. ‘Most people at first didn’t know whether we were going to attack Iran or we were going to attack the Houthis,’ Mearsheimer recalls.
His conclusion is that neither target offers a viable military option. ‘We’ve been there, done that, it didn’t work out. And we’re out of munitions for all intents and purposes.’ Trump may still go on the offensive, but ‘it’s hard to see how that produces the desired result’ — and, if anything, it would only ‘make the global economic situation worse’.
For Global South readers, the interview matters because it punctures the myth of unlimited US power. A movement Washington calls a rebel militia has, with drones and missiles, forced a Gulf monarchy to ration oil and pushed the world’s largest military into a corner it cannot bomb its way out of. That is the multipolar reality in the Red Sea, and it is being narrated from Chicago, not from the Pentagon.