Five months after the Houthis began striking commercial and military vessels, the Red Sea is still at the centre of international attention. The offensives launched by the Yemeni group have transformed a local crisis into one of international proportions, triggering profound consequences for maritime security and global trade.
Lina Raafat is a non-resident scholar for the Countering Terrorism and Extremism Program at the Middle East Institute. She previously served as Deputy Research Director at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) where she led a $3.4M multi-year project studying the tactics of the violent extremist nexus for online media radicalization and audience susceptibility.
Early attention to the region’s latent crises
The foreign policy team of the Biden administration has signaled a scaled-down approach when it comes to the Middle East. Grand ambitions of reshaping the regional order through regime change, military intervention, and settling the region’s myriad conflicts have given way to a more modest but still challenging agenda of containing Iran’s nuclear program, ensuring a modicum of stability to enable the downsizing of the U.S. military presence in the region, and extricating the U.S. from indirect involvement in Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the Yemen war.
This aligns with a trend toward recalibrating American interests in the region, focusing primarily on containing the twin threats of weapons of mass destruction and counter-terrorism.