© Gage SkidmoreUS President Donald Trump • 2017 CPAC • National Harbor, Maryland
Just two days before Israel resumed the full scale of its genocide in the Gaza Strip, the United States began a bombing campaign in Yemen. The U.S. aggression is a significant part of the recipe for endless war and devastation of the Middle East that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are cooking up.
While Israel and the U.S. clearly communicated about these operations, each country has presented its actions as independent of, but cooperative with, the other. Of course, this is partially an attempt to obscure the reality that Israel cannot pursue its relentless genocide in Gaza without the material support it gets from the United States.
But there's another piece for Trump. He prefers to present his and Netanyahu's approach as one of independent, if allied, countries acting in their own perceived interests. He likes to present an image of Israel charting its course and the U.S. pursuing its own interests, an image that crumbles the moment Trump wants Israel or anyone else to act according to his wishes.
U.S. attention is focused not on Gaza, but on Yemen, allowing Netanyahu to resume his full-scale genocide, to which Trump is indifferent. Yet, while Trump can fantasize all he wants about lounging repulsively on Gaza's beach with Netanyahu, there are American businesses that have a stake in preventing Ansar Allah (often called the Houthis) from acting in defense of and in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Trump's motivations are always a bit of a muddle, and that is as much by design as it is the result of his impetuousness, ignorance, and short attention span. But the U.S. clearly has an interest in stopping Ansar Allah's attacks on Red Sea shipping, and there is still an absolute refusal in Washington to do the one thing that is certain to accomplish that: force Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza. These realities seem to have been part of the calculus in the U.S. attacks on Yemen, which are ongoing.
It's about Iran
In the bigger picture, it is, as always, also about Iran. It is not a coincidence that the attacks first on Yemen and then on Gaza came in the wake of Trump sending a letter in early March to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling for new talks on a nuclear deal.
On Wednesday, it was reported that in that letter, Trump gave Iran a two-month deadline to reach a new deal. Iran already said they were not going to be threatened and bullied into new talks. That statement came in response to Trump threatening war if Iran did not come across.
Trump told reporters on March 7:
"We are down to final strokes with Iran. We are down to the final moments. We can't let them have a nuclear weapon. Something is going to happen very soon. I would rather have a peace deal than the other option but the other option will solve the problem."The two-month deadline also seems to line up with a U.S. intelligence assessment developed in the last days of Joe Biden's administration and supported by an early Trump administration assessment, that Israel would attack Iran's nuclear facilities sometime during the first half of 2025.
If that is part of Trump's thinking, he would not need to carry out his threat directly but simply support Israel in doing so.
This possibility also clarifies why Trump has gone out of his way to blame Iran for Ansar Allah's activities. Most informed experts agree that Iran and Ansar Allah have a friendly relationship and that Iran supports the Yemeni group, but that Ansar Allah does not act on Iran's orders or under Iran's control. Iran's reported request on Monday that Ansar Allah tone down their confrontation with the U.S. was rebuked in no uncertain terms, hardly the behavior of a proxy.
Ansar Allah has vowed that they would maintain their attacks in the Red Sea until Israel ends their blockade of Gaza. This has been their position since they began their attacks in solidarity with the Palestinians, and they did, in fact, suspend those attacks during the so-called "ceasefire" in Gaza, even though Israel repeatedly violated it. They only resumed when Israel reinstated its complete blockade of Gaza.
What is Trump hoping to accomplish in Yemen?
Ansar Allah's attacks in the Red Sea have had a profound effect on shipping in the region. Where ships could once travel from Asia and eastern Africa along the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, many now sail south, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and back up north. That significantly increases shipping expenses on all manner of goods, and, when added to rising insurance costs due to Ansar Allah attacks, has had a significant economic impact on the shipping industry and the export and import of goods that goes far beyond the loss of ships and merchandise in the attacks.
That economic impact is the most significant material cost that anyone has managed to impose on Israel's genocidal behavior. Of course, it has not deterred Israel or the United States.
But Ansar Allah has accomplished what even the combined efforts of Hezbollah, Iran, and various other armed militias have not by imposing some cost on Israel's genocidal activities. The fact that, aside from these attacks and a handful of drones and missiles, Ansar Allah is obviously no match for the United States militarily means Yemen meets the criteria for Trumpian bullying by a cowardly but physically strong state.
Trump's overall preference is to be able to issue orders and diktats and have them obeyed, whether out of respect or fear. He knows that one thing many of his supporters want to avoid is another foreign war. Thus, he'd prefer to threaten Iran into abandoning their nuclear capacity, and whatever other conditions he might seek to impose on them. Failing that, he is likely to strongly consider offering the necessary support to Israel for it to attack Iran.
Given that such an action could cause major problems for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the rest of Trump's Gulf Arab allies, it's not his first choice. It is also true that those states will have the leverage and influence in Washington to potentially convince Trump that an all-out Israeli attack on Iran is a bad idea. Regardless of what the American intelligence assessment says, Israel cannot carry out a major attack on Iran's nuclear facilities without American help.
Since that is a complicated road, Trump is using force against helpless people as a means to his ends. Trump's plan, as it was with Ukraine, is to make it clear that the people he is dealing with have no realistic options. Ansar Allah has said they would "meet escalation with escalation," but while they can attack more ships, and possibly even launch some rockets at U.S. allies in the region, they have no hope of actually harming American targets to any significant degree. Thus, Trump hopes, he'll be able to force Ansar Allah to back down, and he also hopes that will create a sense of hopelessness in Tehran.
It's a plan that is unlikely to work, for all the same reasons that Israel, with all of that U.S. backing, has been unable to defeat Hamas in Gaza even after all this time and all this murder and carnage. Iran is trying to do all it can to avoid more confrontation with the United States, but it's not going to simply bow down to Trump's diktats.
Ansar Allah has greatly enhanced their own reputation in the region, and in Yemen, where many oppose them. Their support for the Palestinian cause gives them a big boost and is overwhelmingly popular, even among their opponents. They're not likely to back down, and Trump is not likely to try to invade Yemen, which is probably the only military option he has to stop the attacks. Instead, he is likely to intensify the bombing of major Yemeni cities, devastating an already devastated country and driving up an already appalling body count.
All of that just avoids allowing the people of Gaza some food, water, medicine, and shelter.
Reader Comments
Quote: "Trump's motivations are always a bit of a muddle, and that is as much by design as it is the result of his impetuousness, ignorance, and short attention span." This simply shows that we don't know the behind the scenes. Clearly Trump and team are shrewd and know what they are doing. Some of it is to create a position of strength for negotiations. A caveat: Israel could be Trump's Achilles heel.
A perspective out of the box. Obama set up the JCPOA with Iran supposedly to limit Iran's ability to create a nuclear weapon. What if that was not the globalist power structure objective? Instead it was creating the ability for Iran to create nuclear weapons. Trump by ending JCPOA and sending a letter to Iran to create new nuclear arms talks indicates his goal to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This fits some globalist narrative that a nuclear war would be created in the Middle East.
What are examples of behind the scenes? " According to a joint study published by the Jusoor Center in the summer of 2023 , the number of Iranian military sites in Syria has increased to 570 sites, including 55 military bases and 515 military points, marking the largest foreign influence on the Syrian map. "