President Trump came into office promising to disentangle the U.S. military from its costly forever wars in the Middle East. Three months in, he is embroiled in the same sort of open-ended military campaign that plagued his predecessors, and one that holds the potential for wider war with Iran.
The military, in a controversial mission to stop Houthi attacks from Yemen on commercial ships in the Red Sea, is amassing firepower in the region — sensitive details about which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in a second unsecured conversation on Signal. He’s overseeing an operation in which the United States has not only so far failed to restore regular traffic through the sea lane, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal, but has also sent the Trump administration into an exorbitant, potentially escalatory spiral from which it will be harder to extract American troops with every passing day.
Consider the bill: Two aircraft carrier strike groups, each of which costs about $6.5 million per day to operate, are now parked off Yemen’s coast. Radar-evading B-2 bombers, which were designed to blitz the Soviet Union and cost about $90,000 per flight hour, have conducted airstrikes. In the first month of the operation, those bombers, along with dozens of fighter jets and drones, have dropped more than $250 million worth of munitions. The Navy is firing antimissile interceptors, which can cost some $2 million, to blast Houthi drones and missiles, which can cost just a few thousand dollars apiece. The tally for a military operation in Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest nation, is now expected to reach $2 billion in May, congressional aides say.
One of the deadliest attacks of the campaign came last week, when the United States bombed an oil terminal and killed at least 74 people, according to the Houthis. The next day, the Houthis shot down a $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone and yet another on Tuesday night — the fifth and sixth since the mission began in March. The bombing raids, called Operation Rough Rider, show the United States has yet to establish air dominance above the country, despite hundreds of airstrikes that put pilots at risk as they routinely conduct attacks against Houthi militia forces.
The U.S. Navy has defended commercial vessels against hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles since the Iran-backed group began its maritime attacks in November 2023 in a show of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The Houthis sank two foreign commercial ships last year, killing at least four sailors, and the assaults have raised transport costs as the world’s largest shipping companies have opted to reroute their traffic around the southern tip of Africa. Still, only about 12 percent of world trade annually passes through the Red Sea — and an even smaller share of U.S. trade. Does this warrant spending billions of dollars, risking military preparedness in other regions and imperiling the lives of American service members?
While the newly arrived troops and weaponry have achieved tactical victories in Yemen, restoring routine maritime activity in the Red Sea will be nearly impossible without driving the Houthis from power along the country’s west coast. The Houthis, after all, have been bombed for more than a decade. Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States — under three American presidents — have taken turns pummeling the militia from the air. The Saudis hit the Houthis with an estimated 25,000 airstrikes for seven years, part of a campaign that led to the estimated deaths of 377,000 people in Yemen. But Houthi control over the coast has proved resilient, thanks in large part to the continuing financial support and weapon shipments from Tehran.
Mr. Trump, like every other president throughout the global war on terrorism, is wrong to assume that overwhelming military superiority will usher in a swift and decisive conclusion. Unable to dislodge the Houthis with air power alone, he will soon confront the same no-win decision that bedeviled his predecessors in the Middle East: retreat or escalate.
Yemeni forces, looking to seize the opportunity presented by U.S. airstrikes, are reportedly planning a ground invasion against the Houthis. The administration is considering backing the militias, which are already supported by the United Arab Emirates — a move that would almost certainly spiral into the sort of wide, prolonged conflict Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he seeks to avoid. Brian Hughes, the National Security Council spokesman, said in a written statement the administration wasn’t “going to preview any plans or tactics involving how we defend U.S. interests in the Red Sea from Houthi terrorists.” He went on to add that security in the Red Sea is the responsibility of “our partners in the region and we’re working closely with them” to ensure freedom of navigation.
Mr. Trump also seeks to send a message to Iran: Rein in the Houthis and your expanding nuclear program, or else. The nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran that began this month in Oman offer him his best chance to achieve both goals. He also has a chance for a public relations coup of getting a better deal than President Barack Obama did, by including the actions of Iran’s proxies — like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas — which Mr. Obama failed to address in his landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. But Mr. Trump has so far refused to rule out the possibility of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure if a deal isn’t reached. The threat is now made more menacing with the growing footprint of troops and hardware in the region.
The administration has insisted the mission against the Houthis is “putting American interests first.” The Signal chat logs released by The Atlantic last month revealed Vice President JD Vance’s misgivings about the operation. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote on March 14, the day before the strikes began. Other senior officials publicly criticized the mission when President Joe Biden, rather than their boss, directed a more limited number of strikes in Yemen. “We are burning readiness to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for what really amounts to a ragtag bunch of terrorists that are Iran proxies,” Michael Waltz, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, told Politico in August.
Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, delivered a similar sentiment several months earlier. “It’s truly a mark of how off-kilter our foreign policy is that we are now embarking on ongoing military attacks in Yemen — Yemen! — without any real prospect they will be effective,” he wrote in a January 2024 post on X.
Mr. Colby, like others in the administration, has long argued for the United States to turn away from the Middle East and refocus on China and the Asia-Pacific. The irony has probably not escaped him, then, that much of the arsenal amassing around Yemen was pulled from Asia, where in recent years the United States has expanded military bases and relocated weapons for a possible conflict with Beijing. This month Navy Admiral Samuel J. Paparo, who oversees the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress that an entire U.S. Army Patriot missile defense battalion was recently transferred from Japan and South Korea to the Middle East. It took 73 cargo flights in all, he said.
Here, again, the Yemen mission is cutting against the administration’s stated goals. Mr. Hegseth told Asian allies that the United States will focus on their struggles against Chinese aggression. “What the Trump administration will do is deliver, is to truly prioritize and shift to this region of the world in a way that is unprecedented,” he said at a March 28 news conference in Manila.
Mr. Trump is the latest commander in chief to arrive at the White House with an eye toward China, only to be diverted. Long-term strategic success in the Middle East will continue to remain elusive if it isn’t coupled with intense diplomatic and political efforts. If we’ve learned anything in a quarter-century since 9/11, it’s that a president can’t bomb himself out of a problem.
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