Houthi rebels aren’t money-hungry pirates, they’re causing chaos in the Red Sea to pressure Israel and we’ll pay for it
THIS year is shaping up to be the world’s most dangerous in decades.
Britain is being sucked in to the Middle East conflict.
On Tuesday, HMS Diamond fired its Sea Viper anti-aircraft missiles in anger for the first time.
All eyes have been on the Gaza conflict, with Israel battering the Hamas terrorist group there.
But the Royal Navy went into action well to Israel’s south in the Red Sea.
There off Yemen the radical Islamist paramilitary group, the Houthis, have been harassing container ships and tanker traffic heading up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal to us.
That’s at least 15 per cent of world trade under threat.
It is a huge error to think that the bloody nightmare in the Middle East doesn’t threaten our way of life.
Think about how many everyday items are imported via the Suez Canal from the Far East.
Finally lost patience
Now the Houthis have got their foot on the neck of the supply chains from the world’s industrial power houses in the Far East. That is soon going to multiply our costs.
Think of all the electronic gadgets in our homes which are made in China, South Korea or Japan. How few are made here.
Just think about Britain’s car industry. Nissan gets core components from the Far East for its assembly plants here.
Just-in-time delivery goes overboard if the Suez Canal is blocked.
Alternative routes are expensive. That was the reason why the Suez Canal was built in the first place.
The Houthis want to create chaos in world trade to pressure Israel to make concessions to the Houthis’ allies in Gaza, Hamas.
Britain and America have finally lost patience with the Houthis for firing kamikaze drones at the jugular of world trade for more than month.
HMS Diamond joined with the US Navy in shooting down scores of Houthi projectiles on Tuesday but the great container and tanker companies are avoiding the Suez route for fear of Houthi attacks.
Sailing around the Cape of Good Hope at the other end of the Earth adds hugely to fuel costs and spikes insurance rates.
Of course, people will say economic hardship here would be nothing compared to the sufferings of Israelis slaughtered by Hamas on October 7 or of Palestinian civilians trapped between the Israeli Army and the Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
But the crisis in the Red Sea could cause more than economic costs to us too.
Both the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza are backed by Iran. It is Iranian drones and missiles which HMS Diamond has been fending off.
Iran is a big power in the Middle East and the paymaster of various anti- Western terrorist groups, especially those targeting Israel.
Iran is sponsoring piracy on a global scale.
If Iran and its allies enter the war against Israel directly, a tsunami of economic catastrophe soon could hit us.
A wider Middle East war could throw the world’s oil supplies into chaos.
The Houthis might seem cartoon villains, an Islamist throwback to the pirate movies of our childhood.
But they are not jokers.
Unlike the Somali pirates made famous in the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips, they’re not in it for the money.
But the Houthis want to hurt our economy and don’t care about the cost to their own people.
Three years ago, the Covid crisis saw a mad scramble to buy all sorts of medical kit from China.
Governments said they had learned the risks of out-sourcing vital supplies to China, but did little.
Iran is watching and calculating how far it can go against the West through its proxies — and when to intervene itself.
Most of our European allies are bizarrely passive in this crisis.
At least Britain is backing an American-led crackdown on the Houthis’ attacks on our economic lifeblood.
Rattle the world economy
Someone has to collar the Houthis. It looks like Britain and America have to be the policemen of the seas.
But fending off the Houthis’ missiles and drones is not enough to stop the Houthis.
Remember, they have to get lucky only once by sinking a container ship to rattle the world economy, unless we knock out the launch sites.
So far the Houthis haven’t hit Chinese ships, but trade is stalled.
Maybe Beijing will pressure Iran to rein in its Houthi proxies.
But depending on the West’s major rival to save our bacon is itself a big risk.
Sure, on Tuesday the Americans led the way in fending off the Houthis’ missiles and drones, but only playing defence won’t stop the Houthis.
Washington and London will have to take bold, aggressive steps to silence that threat.
If America won’t or, worse, can’t maintain order in the world’s trade routes, it will be a dark day for all of us.
Outsourcing our security to China will make it arbiter of the Middle East, instead of America.
Then the world will be turned upside down.