It’s a fool’s game to predict how the array of wars in the Middle East will evolve or end, but one thing can be said with high confidence: The Biden administration’s sanctions against the Houthis will have no effect whatever—except, perhaps, to embolden the Houthis to act still more brazenly.
The decision to declare the Houthis a “specially designated global terrorist group,” which Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday, makes sense on a literal level. After all, the Houthis—the armed Shiite sect that rules a stretch of Yemen holding two-thirds of the country’s 32 million people—has, since November, attacked dozens of commercial and military vessels with hundreds of drones and missiles, threatening lives and impeding freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. As national security adviser Jake Sullivan stated, these attacks “fit the textbook definition of terrorism.”
In previewing the announcement on Tuesday, a senior U.S. official explained that the designation and its sanctions were meant to “apply additional pressure on the Houthis to change [their] behavior and turn away from Iran”—their chief supplier of arms, training, and other goods and services. At that point, it is hoped that the Houthis will choose “to become a constructive member” of the international system.
This is where the administration has gone wrong. This is a way too ambitious, thoroughly unrealistic goal. Yes, the Houthis are terrorists. They should be designated as such. But U.S. officials shouldn’t have made a big deal of it; certainly, they shouldn’t have expressed such high expectations for the pronouncement’s effects. If it fails to meet those expectations, if the Houthis continue to attack ships and ally with Iran, the policy will be seen as a failure for the U.S. and a success—even a morale-boosting victory—for the Houthis and for Iran.
Indeed, ever since the U.S. called them out as terrorists, the Houthis have continued to attack at least a ship a day, one of them owned by a U.S. shipper and hoisting an American flag.
In fact, the Houthis have been reveling in the designation. Hisham Al-Omeisy, a Yemeni activist and analyst with the European Institute of Peace, told the Associated Press that the U.S. is playing into the Houthis’ narrative that they are standing up to a superpower in their support of Muslims. In the past, Al-Omeisy said, the Houthis were angry that “the U.S. was basically treating them as a bug on the windshield.” Now “they’re like, ‘You know what, they respect us. Yeah, we can go toe to toe with the Americans!’”
Senior U.S. officials noted, in their background briefing on the new policy, that the sanctions are just one piece of a broad package of measures against the Houthis, not least military measures. Since Jan. 9, when the Houthis launched 21 drones and missiles in a coordinated attack on commercial and military vessels, the U.S., sometimes along with Britain, has retaliated on five separate occasions, launching dozens of missiles and drones of their own against Houthi radar, missile storage centers, drone launch sites, and—in a couple of preemptive attacks—missiles that the Houthis were about to fire.
Yet those attacks have done little, if anything, to slow down, much less halt, the Houthis’ adventurism. That being the case, sanctions are unlikely to add much pressure.
Vali Nasr, a former State Department official, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and co-author of a forthcoming book How Sanctions Work, told me that, generally speaking, sanctions rarely have their desired effect. “They cause pain to the population,” he said, but usually “have no effect on a country’s [or terrorist group’s] behavior.” Sanctions are often a way for officials in Washington to say, “We’re doing something.”
Sanctions are likely to have still less effect on the Houthis. One of the most potent effects of sanctions is to deny access to the international financial network. Yet the Houthis have scant access to this network as is, and neither does Iran. In recent days, the Houthis have announced they will not attack ships owned by Russia or China—two countries that are skilled at evading Western sanctions. Moscow and Beijing thus might become another source of supplies that evade sanctions.
Nor is there any realistic prospect of the Houthis steering away from Iran, or vice versa. Iran’s special forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are openly supplying, training, and advising the Houthi militias on Yemeni soil. Neither U.S. airstrikes nor sanctions are expected to drive them back home.
In his final days in office, President Donald Trump declared the Houthis a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Biden reversed the move in his first few weeks of his term, concerned that the sanctions would cut off humanitarian aid for the Yemeni people, many of whom are living in near-famine conditions. The sanctions that Biden imposed this week—while calling the Houthis a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”—are less harsh than the FTO’s. For instance, it doesn’t outlaw all contact and supplies. Biden has delayed enforcement of the new sanctions for 30 days, to let officials, bankers, NGOs, and other parties work out a way to send in food, medicine, fuel, and other supplies without violating the law.
However, sanctions—whether FTO or SDGT—often make legitimate banks and air groups skittish about engaging with the target nation at all, lest they run afoul of legal limits. At the same time, rogue elements (smugglers, arms suppliers, and governments like Iran) or countries outside the international financial system (such as, in certain cases, Russia and China) disregard the sanctions, often with success.
In other words, it is possible that the policy will hurt Yemeni people and have no effect on the Houthis’ fortunes.
Meanwhile, the Houthis have been fighting in civil wars in Yemen since 2004, off and on, mainly on, sometimes under fierce bombardment from the neighboring Saudis, who thought that defeating the militias would be a cakewalk but who have since given up that fantasy and negotiated a truce. It is unlikely that a few more missile and drone strikes—which have “degraded” but not destroyed the Houthis’ ability to strike ships—would make a dent on the Houthis’ behavior.
Elisabeth Kendall, an Arabist and Yemen specialist at the University of Cambridge, put it this way in a recent CNN interview:
Let’s say you’re 22 years old, and you’re in the Houthi territories, particularly those up in the north, which is very populous. You will barely remember anything other than war. And that’s really important because we think of war as a last resort. They think of it as a way of life.
