Yesterday, the New York Times posted a story with the headline: “Why Trump Suddenly Declared Victory Over the Houthi Militia.” The answer, as reported by the Times, is quite simple. The campaign, despite the weight of applied military power being orders of magnitude greater than what the Houthis had available to them, was failing. That dovetailed with Trump’s lack of toleration for lengthy campaigns that weren’t generating results. “The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis,” the Times said. “Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.” The costs included two F-18 Super Hornet jet fighters that rolled off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman—one while being towed as the ship was engaging in evasive maneuvers to avoid a Houthi missile, and the other about 10 days later when it failed to catch the arrester cable on landing—at least 7 MQ-9 Reaper drones shot down by the Houthis (out of 22 shot down since October 2023), and about a billion dollars’ worth of very expensive, precision-guided weapons.
After 30 days of that, President Donald Trump “had had enough.” So, Omani officials, through Presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, offered the “perfect off ramp” for Trump. “The United States would halt the bombing campaign and the militia would no longer target American ships in the Red Sea, but without any agreement to stop disrupting shipping that the group deemed helpful to Israel.”
