No. of Recommendations: 4
At any rate. Just The Tip isn't a sustainable foreign policy.
There might not exist any ideal sustainable foreign policy to address this issue. Our current approach might still be the least bad foreign policy, even if it falls short of achieving our goals. Any other foreign policy approach might simply be worse?
For example, why don't we just invade Yemen and slaughter the Houthi rebels, rather than just waiting for them to attack us? Because we know that such an invasion would be costly beyond belief (in both resources and US soldiers), and would probably end up with us leaving in a decade or three with Yemen still a massive problem. So even though just playing defense against Houthi drones is deeply unsatisfying, it's still a better policy option than invading Yemen.
The policy alternative of going to war with Iran to get them to stop supplying the Houthis is also worse than just trying to defend against the Houthi attacks. The latter is a lousy option, but a direct war between the US and Iran is a worse option - infinitely more costly to our interests than just taking some hits to Red Sea shipping. And Iran knows this.
So threatening an Iranian ship isn't going to solve this problem for us - regardless of whether that threat came from Biden or Trump, the Iranians are just not going to credit it as an actual threat.
