US now pursuing 'least bad' option in confronting Houthi militants

US officials acknowledge that airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen won’t deter the group from attacks that have roiled commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Yet that doesn’t mean the military campaign will stop anytime soon.

President Joe Biden candidly described the dilemma Thursday when he was asked about the efforts to weaken Houthi capabilities after the Iran-backed group’s series of drone and missile strikes disrupted shipping in in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a vital trade waterway.

“Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,” Biden told reporters in comments .

Analysts and outside critics — not to mention the Houthis themselves — have said the aerial military campaign won’t prevent them from firing on more ships, especially if the US refuses to target the group’s main backer, Iran. Yet in the absence of any better options for now, the Biden administration may have no choice.

“I think that they don’t have any great expectations that this is going to succeed in deterring or degrading or defeating the Houthis,” said Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen, who’s now at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “Basically, they came to the conclusion that this was the least bad of the bad options that they had.”

The comments only further exposed the difficult balancing act Biden faces. He must confront the chaos in the Red Sea caused by the Houthis, who insist they’ll keep up their attacks until Israel halts its bombing campaign on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But he doesn’t want to go to war with Iran or pull in even more participants into the conflict. And he’s rejected calls at home and abroad to press for a cease-fire in Gaza — an idea Israel won’t agree to anyway.

The urgency is only increa­s­ing. The Houthi attacks have driven down shipments through a waterway that previously handled 12 per cent of global seaborne trade.