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Before there was a United States, our founders were angry enough about interference with our shipping to go to war over it. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had a long list of complaints against King George III, but three of them involved trade and our merchant vessels. The Declaration's "injuries and usurpations" included "cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world," "plundering our seas," and that our merchant sailors had been "taken Captive on the high Seas" by the Royal Navy. Among other offenses against American sensibilities, these three justified treason against the King.
This country was born in defiance against maritime bullying.
The Continental Congress established a navy almost a year before it got around to the whole independence thing. Just a few years after sending the Brits packing, the new U.S. Congress authorized a naval force of six frigates in 1794, and we weren't messing around. Joshua Humphries served as the principal designer and wrote in a 1783 letter to Founding Financier Robert Morris:
Our frigates must be built of the best materials, with scantlings equal to ships of the line, to combine the speed of a Baltimore clipper with the strength to withstand a long fight. They shall outsail all others and be so formidable as to deter any who would dare to challenge them.
The U.S. Navy's first ships were designed to be both tough and fast, capable of outrunning anything they couldn't outgun and outgunning anything they couldn't outrun. While smaller than the Royal Navy's best ships, our six frigates more than held their own.
Their hulls were made of American live oak so strong that the USS Constitution was nicknamed "Old Ironsides" because cannonballs bounced off her. No other country produced wood anything like it, as though Providence meant for the U.S. Navy to be the toughest fighting force on the seven seas.
Congress more than doubled the size of the Navy just four years later with the Department of the Navy Act of 1798. Why the urgency? Because filthy Barbary pirates and nasty Frenchmen were touching our boats.
If you think having a navy is expensive, which, granted, it is — try not having one. Before President John Adams signed the Department of the Navy Act, payoffs to the Barbary pirates consumed 20% of the federal budget. Building out the Navy far beyond the original six frigates would give President Thomas Jefferson the ability, just three years later, to take the fight directly to the Barbary Coast.
No more ransoms. No more touching our ships.
Killing pirates until they cut out the piracy is in our national DNA. Protecting our trade is, too. Foreigners mess with our merchants and our Navy at their own risk.
We fought the War of 1812 because the British wouldn't stop touching our ships, and they pretty much left us alone after that.
The Civil War didn’t begin with anyone touching our ships, but the U.S. Navy’s blockade strangled Confederate trade and helped give Britain and France a fatal pause in backing the South.
The destruction of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor kicked off the Spanish-American War in 1898, even though the loss of the Maine might not have been due to enemy action. Oops. But that only drives the point home: don't even let us think you touched our ships.
World War I? Imperial German submarines kept touching our ships.
World War II? Imperial Japan touched a bunch of our ships all at once, and didn't even have the decency to announce themselves first. Ending that war with a couple of nuclear bombs seriously drove home the No Touching rule.
Vietnam kicked off with an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving our ships. Even stipulating that the Gulf of Tonkin might have been a CIA op, the CIA knew exactly how to twist our knobs. Don't touch our ships.
There's a Reddit joke that the U.S. invented global warming after an iceberg sank the Titanic. We didn't even build the thing, but it had Americans on board, so close enough for a punchline.
The tale of the 20th century can almost be told as the growth and eventual uncontested dominance of the United States Navy. The increasing chaos of the last 25 years and the challenge posed by everyone from Communist China to Houthi rebels tells a different tale: our Navy's decline.
I won't bore you with an eyewatering set of numbers about how we have too few ships, too many of the wrong ships, or our inability to build the ships we need or even maintain the ones we have. I'll just tell you this. Forty years ago, the U.S. Navy was equipped, manned, and trained to fight extended and bloody campaigns against the Warsaw Pact and Communist China at the same time and on both sides of the globe. The Soviets gave up rather than fight. Most of their once-mighty navy spent the '90s at port, silently rusting away.
Today, we have difficulty mustering enough firepower — and we certainly lack the willpower — to put down primitive tribesmen armed with drones and missiles that aren't exactly state-of-the-art. Although, to be fair to us and our friends in the Navy, part of our problem is who the Houthis are.
Yemen is less of a country and more like two puzzle pieces that look like they ought to fit but never quite come together. The various peoples inhabiting the trading cities in southwestern Arabia have been tribal, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. But no matter how far you go back, no matter how many conquerors came and went, the people were almost always engaged in two things: trade and piracy.
And Another Thing: Our loss of national naval will first manifested during Vietnam. In 1968, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo, an intelligence ship, and we hardly did a damn thing about it. Sure, there were Cold War restraints on how far President Lyndon Johnson could go, but the Pueblo's 82 surviving crewmembers (out of 83) endured 11 months of torture, starvation, and forced confessions. Before long, the Soviets were getting frisky everywhere from the Horn of Africa to Central America. Coincidence?
Two of those invaders helped create today's mismatched puzzle pieces: the Ottomans and the British.
The Turks ruled northern Yemen with a light touch (as was their wont in the extremes of the empire), letting the mountain tribes maintain much of their autonomy. The Brits governed the southern two-thirds as the Aden Settlement/Colony/Protectorate from 1839 to 1967. It's more complicated than all that, but let's not get tangled in trivialities.
The Ottomans vanished at the end of World War I, and the northern, more tribal third gained independence as Yemen. North Yemenis never did get very good at the whole self-rule thing, enduring various coups and whatnot for seven decades after independence.
The formerly British part went overboard with the anticolonial attitude after winning their independence in '67. South Yemen went full Soviet as the People's Republic of Southern Yemen and then as the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen because Commies are always renaming things. By whatever name, Soviet Yemen was Moscow's client state and a thorn in our side until we won the Cold War.
Post–Cold War optimism was so high that the Yemenis agreed to reunification, but this is where we zip up our Bad Idea Jeans. North Yemen was mountainous, tribal, and used to being left alone. South Yemen was coastal, cosmopolitan, and Sovietized from the start. North and south Yemenis share an ethnicity, a language, and pray to the same god five times a day, but otherwise they go together like short fuses and powder kegs.
Following a series of on-again/off-again civil wars, Yemen’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising ousted longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh, and his successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, couldn’t hold the country together. The Houthis filled the vacuum up north with a little help (and a lot of weapons) from their friends in Tehran.
Iran's brand of radical Islam, providing money, weapons, and motivation, is just the latest wrinkle in a fabric woven millennia ago.
At first, arming the Houthis was meant to keep the rival Saudis tangled up in Yemen's troubles. The Israeli-Gaza War allowed Tehran to elevate the Houthis to a global threat. Today's endless fighting is enough to make one pine for the days of foreign flags and quiet tribes. But we have neither the patience, the resources, nor the need to get into another land war in the Middle East — we just want our ships to be left alone.
There's no mystery in how to do that.
Retired naval officer and anonymous blogger CDR Salamander advised last month that "Until the merchant shipping in the Red Sea can sail unmolested," this is what must happen to Houthi-controlled Yemen:
- [They] should have no central electrical power.
- No ships should be able to enter her ports.
- No aircraft should be able to land on her airfields.
- No bridges should be standing.
Sal went on to write that there is "No need for boots on the ground. No reason for aircraft to go feet dry." There's also "No need to wait for significant help from our friends and allies" because "They lack capability and more importantly, will."
"If their attacks stop," Sal concluded, "our attacks will stop."
The question remains: The Houthis keep touching our ships, so why are they still a thing?
President Donald Trump turned the pressure up this month with a series of B-2 bomber strikes out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Sending stealth bombers seems like overkill when dealing with mountain tribesmen whose idea of air defense amounts to "Old Man Yells at Cloud," but I suppose Iran was the intended recipient of the message, if not of the bombs.
It would also be nice to have the Chinese on board, but that's not going to happen. Beijing's goal is to upend the world order, not enforce it. Besides, the Houthis are Iran's proxy, and Iran is part of the solidifying China/Russia/Iran/North Korea (CRINK) alliance, so the Houthis don't touch China's ships. I'm reminded a bit of a 19th-century "Great Game" Britain and Imperial Russia played for control of Central Asia, with the Houthis playing the role of certain Afghan tribesmen — and with the playing board spanning the world's oceans.
Failing to protect freedom of the seas from one group of aggressors encourages others. The Houthis might "only" be able to add a percentage point or two to the price of a gallon of gas, but imagine a world like the one before the Royal Navy put a lid on piracy around the globe. Because I'm sad to tell you, that's the direction the world is headed, with pirates demanding tribute at every chokepoint from Panama to Kuala Lumpur.
And Another Thing: If the next pirate-infested chokepoint turns out to be around the Cape of Good Hope, don't forget that you read it at VodkaPundit first. South Africa is a failing state, and if—when?—it goes the way of Yemen, pirates will take advantage of the chaos.
I also don't mean to imply unwarranted criticism of the Trump administration. This White House, in just three months, has taken the fight to the Houthis like the Biden administration never dared. It's also true that the current situation is more complex than just some Barbary pirates on the North African coast. Because the Houthis aren't merely a tribal menace — they have a state sponsor, Iran, that's also on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons.
I'm also not saying I don't want the Europeans to do more because it is certainly their duty, even though, as Sal pointed out, they lack both the will and the means. I am saying that we cannot afford to do less. As my wife likes to say about America's role in the world, "Somebody has to be the grownup and nobody really wants it to be anybody but us."
We're far from perfect, but we're very good at this stuff. Or at least we used to be. We'd better get good at it again.
Bad guys have to stop touching our ships.
Previously on the Thursday Essay: The Temptation of Artificial Validation
