Trump's Looming War for a Key Trade Route Will Be Costly

As President Donald Trump seeks to assert U.S. influence across the globe by implementing stiff tariffs and threatening to seize the Panama Canal, his first economically motivated hot war looms in the turbulent seas off Yemen.

While promising to oversee a more peaceful era for the Middle East, Trump, just two months in office, has already embarked on the most intensive military campaign of his second term, targeting Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, a formidable faction of the Iran-aligned Axis of Resistance. The strikes come amid a new, dangerous cycle of escalation in the Middle East in which Ansar Allah has resumed its long-range offensive against Israel and ships navigating the Red Sea and surrounding waters.

With Trump now threatening Iran directly over its Yemeni ally’s actions, the conditions for the kind of conflict that the U.S. leader had vowed to avoid appear to be ripe. But it’s not a war that’s inevitable, nor, according to some observers, advisable, considering the level of resources it may expend for an uncertain outcome.

“In my view, this is not an operation the United States needs to be involved in,” Jennifer Kavanagh, former RAND Corporation senior political scientist now serving as senior fellow and director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities think tank, told Newsweek.

One former U.S. government official, speaking to Newsweek on background, put it even more succinctly: “It’s a waste.”

Newsweek has reached out to the White House for comment.

The Battle by the Numbers

Since launching its operations in the wake of the war sparked by the Palestinian Hamas movement’s surprise attack against Israel in October 2023, Ansar Allah has attacked commercial vessels 145 times and U.S. Navy ships 174 times, according to the U.S. State Department. Traffic through the Suez Canal has plummeted by nearly two thirds, effectively setting back maritime trade by 150 years, while shipping costs have soared by more than 200 percent in some instances.

Ansar Allah suspended attacks in January, after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement just days before Trump took office. But with the truce in Gaza unraveling over the past week, the battle is back on for one of the world’s busiest maritime trade corridors.

On paper, Ansar Allah, even with its vast arsenal of missiles and drones and sizable support base, pales in comparison to the world’s most powerful military. But the group has excelled in asymmetrical warfare, having resisted the intervention launched a decade ago by a Saudi-backed coalition seeking to restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

“The genius of the Houthis’ strategy is that their missiles do not have to hit anything or do much damage for the group to achieve its objective of disrupting shipping through the Red Sea,” Kavanagh said. “Just the threat and uncertainty of missile strikes has been enough to drive most shipping carriers away from the region—and keep them away.”

“The drones and missiles that they use are also often cheap and fairly easy to get and hide deep underground, but they are very expensive for the United States to counter,” she added. “Houthi drones, for instance, can cost as little as $2,000 but the missiles the United States uses against them cost upwards of $2 million. Even the expanded airstrikes that the Trump admin has ordered are unlikely to eliminate these cheap weapons or the Houthis’ ability to get them.”

Absent Allies

While the Pentagon has recently begun to invest in cheaper options, such as the AGR-20 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS), a protracted battle is still likely to cost the U.S. dearly. Such an expense comes at a time when the Trump administration was looking to reduce government spending and offset the price of global security commitments by calling on allies and partners to spend more on a campaign that may ultimately benefit them more than the U.S.

“The United States doesn’t really depend on trade through the Red Sea and cost increases for Americans have been small,” Kavanagh said. “I’d recommend letting countries that are more affected, especially those in Europe and the Gulf, decide how to address the problem.”

“If the Trump administration feels strongly that the United States must respond, it should be demanding that European allies and Arab partners contribute in major ways, with ships, munitions, combat support, or just money,” she added. “Defending freedom of navigation should be a shared responsibility.”

When then-President Joe Biden announced the first multinational effort to combat Ansar Allah’s campaigns back in December 2023, known as Operation Prosperity Guardian, a dozen nations signed up to the coalition. But only one Arab country, Bahrain, aided the effort, with the likes of Red Sea-adjacent Egypt and Saudi Arabia notably absent from America’s most intensive naval combat since World War II.

Tom Sharpe, former United Kingdom Royal Navy commander, reiterated this point.

“The big issue here, and one that makes this current escalation a little surprising, is that the U.S. relies very little on this chokepoint,” Sharpe told Newsweek. “China is by far the biggest user, followed by Korea, Europe etc. It’s tailor made for a ‘you sort this out’ America first ‘solution.’ Going after a distant terrorist org on which U.S. trade barely depends will not satisfy the MAGA base or Congress.”

“Then there is the rate at which they are burning through munitions, many of which cost millions a shot,” Sharpe said. “Many will consider these would be better saved for use against China, especially as the U.S. (and everyone but China) is unable to make complex weapons fast enough anymore.”

A Superpower Spread Thin

Being drawn into the kind of “forever war” in the Middle East that Trump had campaigned against is a daunting prospect for the Pentagon at a time when U.S. military planners have sought to refit a two-decade focus on counterinsurgency to match the needs for renewed great power competition.

It’s an issue Army General Joseph Votel faced firsthand as head of U.S. Central Command from March 2016 to March 2019.

Responding to Newsweek‘s question during a virtual conference hosted by the Middle East Institute on Tuesday, Votel said that taking on Ansar Allah militarily “will require us to continue to sustain a level of military effort in the region that will come at the cost of other things that we want to do, whether it’s focus on the Pacific or other priorities that the administration has.”

While the Pentagon has so far rebuffed Ansar Allah’s repeated claims of successful strikes on U.S. warships, most recently the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, Votel said that the risks were real.

“There always is an element of risk in this,” Votel said. “Damage to a U.S. vessel, loss of an aircraft, loss of life in these situations, I think, are things that could impact a long-term campaign, bring more pressure onto the administration to end it or not.”

As for Beijing, considered the paramount rival to Washington’s superpower status, he warned of the potential for Chinese capabilities “falling into the hands of the Houthis,” which then “could be used against U.S. resources in the region, and I think could make things much more difficult for us in the long run.”

Chinese military bloggers have already drawn links between Ansar Allah’s missiles and older Chinese models, believed to have been modified by Iran. Chinese officials, however, have vehemently denied any support to the group on the part of the People’s Republic, with Chinese Ambassador to Israel Zhang Guoping telling i24NEWS in January that “China is not an initiator of or a participant in the current conflict that keeps escalating,” nor has it “sat idly by, still less fanned the flames.”

“On the contrary, we have been committed to promoting talks for peace and calling on the relevant parties to uphold security of waterways in the Red Sea,” Zhang said at the time. “We are ready to continue playing a constructive role in this regard.”

Economic Incentives

Amid the global tensions being fueled on a number of fronts, from Eastern Europe to East Asia, the clashes in the Red Sea also come at a time of economic anxiety for the U.S. And while the Trump administration has portrayed its scaled-up campaign against Ansar Allah as a bid to ease consumer woes, this economic uncertainty appears to stem far more from the White House’s own policies than the unrest playing out thousands of miles away.

“Geopolitical confrontation has increasingly taken the form of challenges to freedom of navigation and commercial shipping (Red Sea with the Houthis, Black Sea with Ukraine and Russia, and maybe one day disruption to shipping in Taiwan Strait if China invades),” Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Newsweek.

“But today’s conflicts are not the kinds of events that are materially impacting our view of trade and global economic growth anywhere near tariffs,” he added.

Colyar noted that the rising price of goods as a result of shipping disruptions may indicate an “inflationary impact” of the conflict. At the same time, he also offered indications of mitigating factors, pointing out that “demand is softening and shipping capacity is not constrained.”

And while he said Trump’s mere two months in office have yet to offer a true look at the “real economic data,” such as metrics concerning industrial production, job growth, home-building and inflation, Colyar believes Trump’s policies thus far have led to a “shift in expectations,” with investors selling off U.S. equities in anticipation of corporate losses due to tariffs.

“Business sentiment and consumer confidence have also fallen meaningfully because of a belief that things will cost more, interest rates will be slower to come down and demand will ultimately weaken,” Colyar said.

Still, the Trump administration has advertised the economic angle of its intensified fight with Ansar Allah. Hours after the first round of U.S. strikes overseen by Trump on Saturday, the White House released a fact sheet outlining how Ansar Allah’s campaigns have disrupted U.S. imports and exports, rerouted 75 percent of U.S.- and U.K.-flagged vessels from the Red Sea to circling around Africa and “probably increased global consumer goods inflation between 0.6 and 0.7 percent in 2024.”

“It has been over a year since a U.S.-flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden,” the White House said. “No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”

“Our economic and national security have been under attack by the Houthis for too long,” the White House added. “Today, President Trump’s action and leadership are moving to end this.”

Ansar Allah’s Advantages

But as Trump pivots toward the latter half of his “peace through strength” doctrine, Ansar Allah also holds a number of cards in a looming confrontation.

“The Houthis benefit from many elements, including geography,” Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni analyst serving as a research fellow at the Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program, told Newsweek. “Yemen is 455,000 square kilometers. It’s 44 times bigger than Lebanon. So, it’s hard to tackle them.”

“They also benefit from geography in a different way, which is that they can cause a maximum harm to world trade and to the West with very low cost, keeping in mind where they sit in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb. They also benefit from their indifference.”

Ansar Allah has thus far yet to back down from a conflict with the U.S. In fact, shortly after Ansar Allah announced its maritime campaign in November 2023, a senior official of the group told Newsweek that it counted hundreds of thousands of fighters whose “dream in life is to fight the Zionists and the Americans.”

More recently, an Ansar Allah source told Newsweek in the aftermath of the U.S. strikes that “if the Americans escalate, we will confront their escalation with an escalation they do not expect.” Such a conflict, the source said, “will be paid for by the American citizen, who pays taxes and incurs increased shipping costs as a result of the Trump administration’s foolishness.”

Muslimi argued that, in many ways, Ansar Allah was “even more reckless” in its approach than other Axis of Resistance factions, including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Syria under recently deposed President Bashar al-Assad, all of whom have paid a heavy toll amid the recent regional upheaval emanating from the war in Gaza.

In other words, “they don’t give a damn,” according to Muslimi.

They also have deep roots within Yemen, constituting a vanguard of the majority-Sunni Muslim nation’s sizable Zaidi Shiite Muslim minority that once ruled for a millennium prior to the 1962 coup that established the first modern republic in the north. Southern Yemen remained under British colonial rule for another five years until a 1967 socialist uprising, followed by a period of north-south tensions and conflict that ultimately gave way to unification under then-North Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 1990.

Saleh, who had already led the north since 1978, would go on to rule a united Yemen until 2012, when he was overthrown amid the regional Arab Spring protest movement. His ouster, along with the accompanying instability and popular discontent that lingered after him, helped pave the way for Ansar Allah’s advances, ultimately seizing the capital in 2015.

The Saudi-backed government continues to operate from the southern port city of Aden, also home to the United Arab Emirates-backed, separatist Southern Transitional Council. Neither faction, nor their foreign supporters, have attempted to challenge Ansar Allah on the battlefield since signing a 2022 ceasefire brokered by the United Nations.

With Yemen today a deeply broken and once again divided state, the former U.S. government official with whom Newsweek spoke warned that the failure of both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to defeat Ansar Allah despite an “outrageous commitment of resources” was “not a bad example of what might happen to the U.S. involvement” should Trump press forward with a sustained military campaign.

“The hard work of fixing Yemen nobody seems to want to do, not the Arabs on the Arabian Peninsula, certainly not the United States, with any type of administration, I don’t think either side wants that,” the former official said.

“I think the reason we’re failing, or we are likely to fail, is that we’re working on the symptomology. We’re not really working on how we got to this problem,” the former official added. “If there were a sort of commitment to fixing these things, it might actually end up being less expensive.”