The Patriot Post® · Trump's Houthi Deterrence vs. Biden's Fetal Position

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump sent a message to the Houthi terrorist organization¹. As you may recall, the Houthis, a terror group based in Yemen, have been attacking vessels on a crucial shipping lane in the Red Sea. Former President Joe Biden strangely declassified them as terrorists — and then eventually reclassified them².

The Houthis have attacked 145 commercial vessels and committed 175 attacks on U.S. warships. The group had been relatively quiet since the Gaza/Israel ceasefire but decided last month to start stirring up trouble again.

Therefore, Trump ordered airstrikes to take out several pirate leaders. Thirty Houthis³ are no longer around to tell the tale. Trump then posted a statement on Truth Social:

To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE! To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!

This is significant for many reasons. The Biden administration’s ineffectual way of addressing the Houthis involved U.S. military personnel shooting down individual drones that were attacking them, expending costly missiles in exchange for neutralizing a cheap drone. This was a classic tactic of the former administration — addressing only the symptom (i.e., the drone) and not the problem (the terrorists). Ergo, the Houthis correctly saw this as a sign of weakness. They continued their effective terror campaign, creating a chokehold for shipping vessels and demanding a toll in exchange for not being molested.

Shipping traffic through the Suez Canal dropped 82% as a result.

But with President Trump again in office, the Houthis are relearning what American strength is. “This isn’t a one-night thing,” said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth³. “This will continue until you say, ‘We’re done shooting at ships. We’re done shooting at assets.’ We don’t want a long limited war in the Middle East. We don’t care what happens in the Yemeni civil war. This is about stopping the shooting at assets in that critical waterway to reopen freedom of navigation which is a core national interest of the United States.”

Another reason this move is so critical is that Trump is addressing the elephant in the room: Iran, the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. The Iranian mullahs use the Yemeni Houthis as a proxy, supplying them and funding their malevolent activities. As the head of the terrorism snake in the Middle East, Iran also controls Hamas, Hezbollah, et al. As our Brian Mark Weber noted last week⁴, Iran is closer than ever to developing its first nuclear bomb. Trump recently sent a letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to make a deal and end their nuclear program. Khamenei has yet to respond to or even acknowledge the president’s letter directly.

In the meantime, Khamenei has taken to social media to saber-rattle with regard to the strikes against the Houthis.

The nation of #Yemen⁵ is definitely victorious. The only path is that of resistance. That which has caused the US and its allies to panic today is the fact that the Muslim nations are standing firmly and that this resistance will prove to be effective.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) March 16, 2025⁶

While Trump is much more inclined toward peace, he is not opposed to using the big stick to achieve deterrence. (See the vaporization of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani⁷ during Trump’s first term.) The Houthis, along with so many others who got away with terrorism under Biden, are about to find out the hard way what messing with U.S. interests and our allies gets them for their troubles. Fool around and find out.