Our great powers have many old traditions. Russia is known for throwing political challengers in jail, and the US is known for bombing the hell out of developing countries. The stripes rarely go out, woe betide anyone who challenges Putin for power, and if an American aircraft carrier appears on your coastline, you know your days are numbered.
Well, maybe these ideas are changing, and I’m thinking in particular of the American version. The projection of power was perhaps the Atlantic Empire’s main weapon and intimidation tactic; parking an aircraft carrier at the right distance was often enough to make the other side back down. Agreements or diplomacy were rarely sought, favouring fear and submission.
As the now famous leaked chats with Trump’s inner circle reveal, it wasn’t about contacting the other side and asking them what they really want, and maybe arranging a peaceful solution, no, it was about beating them over the head until they shut up. Basically.
That’s why the Americans sent an aircraft carrier to Yemen to teach the Houthis a lesson. This Islamic group has been threatening and firing on ships in the region for some time, blocking the vital entrance to the Suez Canal. Note that it is a very small part of US trade that passes through there. The US military action was about helping others, European or Israeli, whose economies are more dependent on the Suez Canal.
And there seems to be a growing reluctance within the American power elite to continue with this kind of freelance mission. That’s why many were surprised when the US suddenly started bombing Yemen. Here we go again, the good old American tradition of bombing developing countries, nothing new under the sun. It seemed that Trump was continuing in the footsteps of Bush, Obama and Biden.
Many believed that there would be change this time, and much has pointed to it. Major austerity programmes and upheavals in the US government, and a partly new political line have been presented by Trump and his staff, who have achieved a lot in their short time in power. The bombing of Yemen came as a surprise, a reminder of the old America under the previous presidents. We remember Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and others.
This time, however, the American power projection did not seem to yield satisfactory results. The aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman came under missile fire and, for safety reasons, the huge ship was moved away from the target. The problem with such a craft is that its countermeasures are limited and very expensive, and its fighters require air superiority to be truly effective. Otherwise, the equally expensive fighters are shot down and rendered ineffective.
What is really happening? Is the region no longer as backward as we think? Who is supplying them with such advanced missiles, which threaten both ships and planes? Or have they learnt to build the weapons themselves? Toufan, Soumar and Quds-2 missiles are considered to be copies or further developments of American or Russian predecessors, and they are manufactured in the region at a fraction of the cost of effective countermeasures.
The bottom line is that the Houthis basically scared off a US aircraft carrier. And now it has been decided to send another aircraft carrier to assist.
I get the uneasy feeling that this one is not going to end well. The Houthis does not need to sink an aircraft carrier, its enough to damage one of them, and it becomes an easy target, with thousands of Americans on board. Such an event would make the Americans look like fools. Perhaps the shame and hopelessness would make the Americans resort to tactical nuclear weapons, and then we would truly enter a new era of power politics.
It seems that the Americans are falling into the trap, just as they did in Ukraine, an unwinnable war, and most of their previous adventures in the Middle East and South-East Asia, where they finally retreated home with their tails between their legs, or else created more chaos than before, leaving the world to deal with huge refugee flows, reborn slavery and civil war.
Unless the aim is to create chaos around the world? I don’t really know how to read the situation? After all, the US has not been very successful in any of its war adventures. Wouldn’t it make military, economic and diplomatic sense to pull out of the Middle East, and stop bombing distant countries altogether?
