By Chad Kunkle, Fall 2024 Marcellus Policy Fellow

The crisis in the Red Sea has caused serious troubles for global trade and American prestige. The current approach towards the Houthis is failing due to the material and strategic realities that constrain U.S. policy in the Middle East, primarily that the United States has a limited arsenal and a declining interest in the region. These factors are glaringly apparent when challenged with the proliferation of cheap weaponry that enhances the effectiveness of disruptive actors, who can increasingly rely on rivals to U.S. global leadership to supply and aid them in their endeavors. The United States’ failure to deter the Houthi’s is partially due to an overstretched and overcommitted defense industrial base that is already struggling to meet the high demands of the U.S. military, as well as its allies and partners. That issue is intensified by the fact that the Middle East has limited trade and resource interests for the United States, especially when compared to other theaters, namely the Indo-Pacific. The incongruence of interests for the United States between the two regions, combined with the limitations of U.S. military supplies, necessitates a re-prioritization of U.S. military resources away from the Middle East and towards the Indo-Pacific.

With that necessity in mind, it would be beneficial to the United States to have a diplomatic deal or alternative security structure in the Red Sea as it draws down its presence. This development would help facilitate the drawdown by easing concerns over the threat to global trade that current Houthi actions entail and show that the United States maintains the capacity to be a credible partner. This paper will expand upon the failures of the current approach and the need for an alternative. It will then investigate three historical samples that provide lessons to be drawn for how the United States has previously dealt with threats to maritime trade. It will culminate with several alternative policies, both diplomacy and security focused, that the United States can pursue, while examining the strengths and weaknesses of each proposal. Many of these proposals can be combined and should not be considered exclusionary to each other, and all are designed to ease the potential downsides of the necessary military drawdown from the Middle East and the Red Sea.