[kmlevitt]

>” That suggests a strong, long-term Iranian focus on strengthening Houthi anti-ship capabilities and a potential attempt to export Iran’s model of naval coercion from the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to the geopolitically important Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait.”

Can anyone who understands this conflict explain this more? What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping? For that matter, how do they benefit from naval coercion in the Gulf?

[tptacek]

Yemen is adjacent to Saudi Arabia. Iran's conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in all of the Middle East and Northern Africa, more so than the "west vs. Arabia" conflict we default to thinking about. The Houthis (Ansar Allah), named for a dude who died just a few years ago, were trained in Iran, and are an effort to replicate the Iranian Revolution in Arabia.

The Houthis are often thought of as an arm of the IRGC (Iran refers to them as part of their "axis of resistance", along with Hezbollah and Hamas), but they are their own thing, although Iran is believed to be actively assisting them with spotter ships in the Red Sea.

This is just a shotgun blast of additional details. Nobody really knows what Iran's game plan is here.

[NeverFade]

Iran is using the Houthis to apply pressure on a regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.

Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.

Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.

[walrus01]

> but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away

Autocratic rulers like MBS deciding to cut up journalists/opposition political figures into tiny pieces with bone saws inside Saudi consulates didn't help matters. The whole Khashogghi incident really illustrated exactly what the Saudi regime thinks of rule of law and human rights of their own citizens when it's boiled down to the the barest essentials. US senators, congressmen, foreign service career people have taken note.

It's still worth noting that the Saudi military/air force/other armed forces are extremely large customers of US/NATO spec equipment and UK origin equipment.

It would be worth remembering that something like 85% of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and there were very clear financial/funding connections from wealthy persons within the Kingdom to the pre-9/11 training program. Highly reputable journalists and intelligence sources have also extensively documented the Saudi funding sources that supported (and still support to this day) wahabbist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the "V1.0" of the Taliban in the 1990s, and other fundamentalist salafist jihadi groups.

Invading saudi arabia for regime change instead of iraq in 2003 would have been much more logical if anyone in the US and UK had the fortitude to do it. It would have also been vastly more messy.

It's well known in people who study foreign affairs that Iran funds and arms Shia and shia-adjacent armed groups (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc). But this doesn't happen in a vacuum - to some extent this is the IRGC and Iran's reaction to the well documented and widely known Saudi support for salafist jihadism.

It's also well known and documented that the saudis have been investing vast amounts of their oil wealth in the US stock market, real estate and other equities since the mid 1960s, so the financial and interconnected realtionship between the US and Kingdom would be extremely difficult if not impossible to dis-entangle at this point in 2024.

Despite the Khagoggi affair and other problems descrived above, I think it's pretty clear that US decision makers still consider saudi arabia a much more trustworthy regional "partner" compared to Iran. Ongoing US/UK contractor support of all of their armed forces (and US/UK relationship with Saudi Aramco) and ongoing exports of munitions to saudi arabia back up this theory.

[NeverFade]

Yes, MBS is terrible, and his regime is autocratic.

Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.

The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.

While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?

[JumpCrisscross]

> intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik

The Khashoggi affair was stupid and incompetent enough to call into question Riyadh’s qualifications as our chief regional ally.

Their subsequent de facto defeat in Yemen underscores that their value is in oil first and maybe geography second.

[tety]

They keep proxy organizations in every failed or quasi state in the region such as Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

As these are non-state actors using civilian infrastructure, the international legal order cannot handle these, as they are not party to any law. Therefore when a western aligned country needs to fight these they are in an extreme disadvantage. Any real attack will kill the civilians whose infrastructure said organizations are providing and misusing, eventually pressured to stop retaliating. This was used by Iran in Saudis/UAE vs Houthis, Israel vs Lebanon/Hamas or US vs Iraq.

The approach of having a full fledged state yet declaring it is not a state gave them invisibility, allowing these organizations to grow in strength. Due to their extreme ideology and brinkmanship, ironically this still means someone will need to fight these eventually (see Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis), but in a much greater civilian loss than when was possible previously.

Later on, Iran improved this strategy by creating an alliance of these organizations. They train each other and have planned to fight together in the case of war (partially successful in the last conflict). Currently, they are on the verge of losing two such proxies (Hamas, PIJ) and are in the risk of another one (Hezbollah), and that's why Iran is trying to exert pressure on western countries through attacking civilian shipping.

[duxup]

Iran’s government has a sense of being under siege / surrounded by powerful enemies, the US, Isreal, etc.

Fighting back conventionally is obviously not realistic, but the time honored tradition of funding allies and fighting proxy’s is the next best thing. The idea of the policy is also that this is a deterrent to their enemies to think twice about striking them directly.

How true or effective any of this is another matter entirely.

[TkTech]

> Iran’s government has a sense of being under siege / surrounded by powerful enemies, the US, Isreal, etc.

The well-educated government of Iran does not at all consider this. They are an autocratic, theocratic dictatorship. No one has any interest at all in annexing Iran. Like all governments of such a type, there must always be external, powerful, and yet weak enemies at the border or they cannot retain power. Iran has nothing the world wants except hydrocarbons, and their current level of production can easily be replaced by their fellow OPEC members. Anyone actually invading Iran would get nothing but 30 million citizens that live in abject poverty, with the UN expecting another 40% (!) of the country to fall below the poverty line in the next 2 years. Without China (40%) and Turkey (20%) importing from Iran, the country would fail overnight.

[vasac]

Yeah, no one ever wanted to overthrow democratically elected government in Iran, no one ever had interest in wrecking Libya, Syria... It's all just their imagination.

[jacquesm]

Iran is a democracy now?

Iran registers very clearly as an authoritarian country, what democratic institutions exist are not powerful enough to dislodge the ultimate rulers of the country.

[tmnvix]

I think the comment you replied to was pointing out that Iran had a democratically elected government until the 1953 coup instigated by the U.S. and Britain. Their paranoia is not without reason.

[codezero]

Because of sanctions, Iran has adapted to operating without fitting into global supply chains. By disrupting supply chains, they are participating in asymmetrical warfare. It's an announcement: "We can keep doing this." They are playing against the idea that because they are acting by proxy, other nations won't act directly against Iran.

[nntwozz]

Well you know what they say, foo around and find out.

Carl Sagan comes to mind:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

[samus]

Carl Sagan can go breathe vacuum if he really thinks those generals and emperors spilled all that blood for nothing. That fraction of a dot is a very special part of the universe: it is so far the only known planet that is able to support human life. Meaningless on the grand cosmic arena (if such a notion even makes sense), but invaluable for humans.

[Morte42]

Maybe its the only known planet because we dont know many other planets though. The universe is a largely unknown quantity and aside from the Asians space isnt interesting to most people anymore.

[samus]

That would still leave us with the problem of reaching them. We know now that the solar system is right out.

[pm90]

Their control of the Houthis is not believed to be strong. Their support may just have been to counter the Saudis, but the Houthis are using their capabilities for other purposes.

[hackerlight]

The Iranian regime is separate to Iran the people/country. The interests of the two can diverge.

Supporting the Houthis achieves a few things. It ties up Saudi Arabia, one of Iran's regional rivals. It gives Iran a level of force projection over the crucial gulf shipping route, which is leverage. It gives Iran the ability to have the US or Israel struck without giving the US or Israel the easy narrative ability to strike Iran directly in retaliation.

Also, destabilizing US-aligned Arab countries is in Iran's benefit because secular US-aligned dictators are quite anti-Iran and compliant with the US. For example if the Houthi activity leads to economic troubles in Egypt, it could lead to a popular revolution. The US friendly regimes gets ousted by populists (most likely Islamists win at the end), who will be more pro-Iran bloc than compliant with the US.

Another thing to note is that Iran, like Russia and China, is a revisionist power. They are not a status quo state. The TLDR of this is that they hold a grudge and a lot of their energy is dedicated to changing the world/regional order.

[petesergeant]

> For that matter, how do they benefit from naval coercion in the Gulf?

Various members of the GCC (UAE, Saudi) can't ever really pressure Iran, because Iran's control of the Strait of Hormuz mean they can massively disrupt oil and gas exports, and the Khaleeji countries are heavily reliant on these, despite valiant efforts to diversify.

> What does Iran get out of helping the Houthi disrupt commercial shipping?

Iran's lesson learned from the above is that that's super useful, and they'd like to be able to do the same thing to the rest of the world.

[maxglute]

Iran has access to Persian Gulf. Houthis has access to Red Sea. Together that overseas SLOCs for about 30% of global oil and LNG, both their shipping, and with sufficiently advanced (read not very) missiles, their infra - see Yemen attacks on Saudi refineries. By acquiring theatre range missiles that can actually hit things, they created credible regional power projection capablities, and hence leverage to threaten global energy, which limits what US can do against them since much of it goes to their partners.

[gonzon]

keep in mind that this website bans a lot of people from posting here

[whatshisface]

Maybe the two sides are fighting because they just don't like each other.

[Exoristos]

Exactly. It's a religious war, like the Thirty Years' War in Europe.

[hackerlight]

In conflict between states, like/dislike does play a role, but it's largely the inability to trust. In the absence of a regional/world power, you have to attack the other guy before he attacks you, because there's an impenetrable information asymmetry meaning you can't truly know their intentions. The problem is, both sides are running the same calculus, and both sides knows that the other side is thinking the same thing. So even if you think the other side doesn't want to attack you, you think they may do so out of precaution because they are concerned that you are thinking like this, which gives you an incentive to attack them first before they come to the logical conclusion that you've just arrived at.

It's one reason why violence can be so high in tribal societies. There is no higher power to resolve disputes so you need to front-run the hypothetical violence of the opponent, which creates a game theory situation where the only solution is to attack.

The way to break this dynamic is to have a hegemon, like the US, who can dictate outcomes (e.g. a border) to both sides and enforce it. This can then de-escalate. France no longer side-eyes Germany and vice versa because the US guarantees that neither will do anything. Some attribute this to democratic institutions, prosperity, a common enemy (Russia), etc, which largely does explain things, but it's not the entire picture. If the rest of the world disappeared, tensions between Germany and France would probably go up again due to there being no external power to enforce the status quo.

That said, the Houthis are a non-state actor, so the same logic may not apply.