Maersk Pauses Red Sea Transits Again

As if right on cue with Noah’s calling out the Biden administration’s weakness this morning, global ocean carrier Maersk has again announced it is indefinitely pausing shipments through the Red Sea.

The Red Sea is vital to global commerce because it acts as the passageway between the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea. The Suez Canal saves time and fuel for ships sailing between Europe and Asia. The alternatives to using the Suez Canal are to sail all the way around the southern tip of Africa or go around the world the other way through the Panama Canal.

Maersk initially paused Red Sea transits on December 15. One sure sign that ocean carriers had lost confidence in the Red Sea’s security was when some started steaming for the Cape of Good Hope immediately after leaving the Strait of Malacca off the coast of Malaysia on December 18. On December 19, Maersk confirmed that all ships previously scheduled to go through the Suez Canal would be rerouted around the southern tip of Africa instead.

The U.S. responded with Operation Prosperity Guardian, which was supposed to restore secure transit to commercial vessels through the Red Sea. Maersk announced on December 24 that it was preparing to send vessels back through the Red Sea. On December 29 it started actually doing so on a vessel-by-vessel basis.

Then one of its ships was attacked again on December 30. So it paused transits again until today, while it reevaluated the security situation. Today’s announcement of an indefinite pause confirms that Operation Prosperity Guardian has failed to restore security in the Red Sea.

Situations like this one are why the U.S. has a global military. Freedom of navigation is not automatic, and ocean trade frequently passes through dangerous parts of the world. It is a tremendous achievement of the U.S. and allied navies that, ordinarily, so much trade can pass through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, which is only about 15 miles wide at its narrowest and is bordered by Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Yemen.

Restoring that security, given the Houthis’ persistence in undermining it, will require more than the Biden administration has so far offered. The U.S. should strike missile bases and aircraft bases in Yemen from which these attacks are arising. The Houthi movement is already committed to the death of the United States, so it’s not as though the U.S. would be making any new enemies.

These actions would not mean deciding who wins the ongoing Yemeni civil war. What the Houthis do inside Yemen is, to a certain extent, a problem for Yemen. When they attack commercial shipping in international waters, that’s a different story, and a U.S. response is justified.

Even attacking the bases in Yemen would not be cutting off the problem at the source. The source, ultimately, is Iran, which backs the Houthis and supplies them with weapons. That is the same ultimate source of attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, which have increased since Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.

Does Iran want to risk a direct conflict with the United States over its proxies in Yemen attacking container ships? In 1988, when an Iranian mine damaged a U.S. naval vessel, the U.S. responded by sinking roughly half of Iran’s navy. Iran knows its navy is much weaker than the U.S. Navy. But Iran also knows that the Biden administration wants to make nice with it and sell a narrative of peace in the Middle East. So it seems to have calculated that it can use its proxies to attack U.S. forces and U.S. interests, such as freedom of navigation, with little to no consequences.

So far, that calculation has been correct. As Noah already said, it’s long past time for the U.S. to change that.