A few facts: Yemen’s Houthis are still harassing shipping and lobbing increasingly advanced missiles at the Israelis to support the Palestinians in the Gaza war. As of this writing, the U.S. has no naval presence in the Red Sea. There’s an amphibious assault group in the Eastern Mediterranean and a carrier group hanging around the Persian Gulf; last week, a second carrier group in the Gulf began its schlep over to the western Pacific, which had spent some weeks under the coverage of two amphibious groups. The British and the French are still making gestures at fighting the Houthis with their own ships, and the Russians are escorting their own shipping through the Sea, but the U.S. has retired from the area, prompting a nasty headline in the British Telegraph, “The Houthis have defeated the US Navy.” The sole spot of good news amid this bleak spread is that the abandoned and burning oil tanker MT Sounion has been towed to safety, and so presumably will not cause an environmental disaster that would make the Exxon Valdez spill look like knocking over the pepper shaker.  

Here we leave the facts and enter the world of speculation and the policy that follows in its wake. A Houthi spokesman told an Al Jazeera organ Monday that the U.S. had offered diplomatic recognition of his government, an offer that was declined; anonymous American State Department officials issued stentorian denials characterizing the remark as “a total fabrication” and “misinformation.” (“Misinformation?” Golly, that must be pretty bad.) In short, a ridiculous suggestion.

Taking these brave anonymous diplomats at their word, we have to ask the question: Why aren’t we using diplomatic recognition as a bargaining chip?

To be sure, we wouldn’t break out the welcome wagon if the Houthis moved into our neighborhood—their prolix and remarkably uncatchy official slogan calls for death to America, death to Israel, and a curse upon the Jews—but Yemen is very, very far away. The main American interest there is keeping the Suez–Red Sea shipping lane open—for our own economic interests, sure, for our maritime hegemony, fine, but also so Egypt, which is propped up by canal fees, doesn’t collapse—and arresting the ongoing regional escalatory spiral from the Israel–Gaza war. The Houthis produce and deploy increasingly sophisticated weapons including maritime drones and, now, hypersonic missiles; despite a decade and change of Saudi- and American-backed bombing and a rolling famine, they control the nation’s capital and a third of its territory. 

By my lights, if you’re producing your own weapons and gamely holding on to the capital and a territory the size of a country—one of the countries that was merged to make the modern Republic of Yemen, in fact—you are a state. We should be dealing with the Houthis as we deal with a state, a hostile one, to be sure, but a state nonetheless. In getting states to do what you want them to do (here, ending the harassment of shipping and the attacks on Israel), it is a severe limitation to neglect the diplomatic toolkit and rely solely on force. All the more so when you cannot or will not use force, as is now the case in the Navy-free Red Sea. Perhaps the Houthis are just so itchy to blow up Israelis and set oil tankers on fire that they will decline to bite at any diplomatic carrots, but why should such vegetables be off the table entirely?

The Trump administration, for the many flaws of its cowboyish, fly-by-night foreign policy, was willing to cut deals with nasty characters like the Gulf monarchs to pursue American interests in the region and beyond, most spectacularly by the Abraham Accords, but also by the now much-maligned Doha deal with the Taliban and the overtures to North Korea. The sad truth of it is that the U.S., while still the most powerful nation this increasingly shabby planet has ever seen, does have limits; the era of the Highway of Death and unconditional military victories in multiple theaters is over. The naval abandonment of the Red Sea is a tacit acknowledgment of this truth. Do we care more about protecting American interests or about the principle of not dealing with ugly people?

The Navy is all but admitting that rebuilding fleet strength in the near future is a fantasy, thanks to the fabulous dysfunction of the military–industrial complex and particularly the shipbuilding sector. Especially as warhawkish eyes drift toward Formosa and the Persian Gulf, an actually serious campaign to secure the Red Sea does not seem to be in the cards; at the same time, the current situation is highly undesirable. After almost 15 years of bombing the problem, and about a month of quietly ignoring it, let’s give some other techniques a spin.