[vlovich123]

Is this serious? Like literally one of the things the US navy does is provide protection to ships flying the US flag. That’s literally one of the main things the navy does in peacetime. Remember the Somali pirates? These are ships traveling through international waters being attacked - what other response would make sense?

As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.

[tptacek]

It's a little odd to talk about "historical" Houthi trends since the founder of the movement was young enough to have almost certainly seen Die Hard. The Houthi movement was created to replicate the Iranian Revolution on the Arabian Peninsula, and borrows its slogal from Iran, including "Death to Israel, a Curse On The Jews". One of the very first things the Houthis did after taking over their stronghold of Sada'ah was to eject the remaining Yemeni Jewish residents. Houthi antipathy towards Israel isn't an elaborate geopolitical issue; they are foundationally an anti-semitic movement.

Moving a step away from facts towards analysis: the Houthis are widely considered to be an arm of the IRGC (the IRGC counts them in their "axis of resistance"). The Houthi/Saudi war seems to have been instigated in large part by Iran, whose long term conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in MENA.

It probably doesn't make much sense to talk about what set of concessions would get the Houthis to stop; they've attacked ships indiscriminately, and have been doing so long before October 7.

[vlovich123]

Yeah for sure. Concessions also don’t work when they’re perceived as a weakness which tends to culturally be true in the Middle East.

The only thing I’ll note is that groups can have multiple goals. While destruction of Jews/Israel may be a rallying call and was a founding principle, Houthis can want other things and do have other enemies (Saudia Arabia is disliked by Houthis independently of Iran’s conflict with them).