Trump Should Resist Another America-Last War in the Middle East

In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump made clear that he wants history to remember him as a “peacemaker and a unifier.” In his telling, “we will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

That goal is in jeopardy. Forces inside and outside his administration are trying to drag the president into more wars in the Middle East. One possibility would be an expansion of the low-level war his predecessor Joe Biden lost to the Houthis in Yemen. Another, more consequential possibility would be a full-blown war with Iran. Both wars would be losers that would damage both the country and Trump’s legacy.

Start with Yemen. In that small, impoverished country, the Houthi movement has been attacking shipping in the Red Sea since Israel attacked Gaza after the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. 

The economic damage from the disruption to Red Sea shipping has been consequential, but survivable. A glance at a map makes clear who pays the cost of the disruption, however: Asia-Europe trade. Because of easy U.S. access to both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans—big, beautiful oceans, as the president might say—trade with either continent mostly doesn’t rely on the Middle East.

“Freedom of navigation operations” and “protect global shipping” sound like noble goals in the abstract, but, by trying to protect shipping through the Red Sea, American policy is effectively subsidizing China’s trade with Europe. As the chart below shows, container shipping has increased in price since the Houthi campaign began, but not nearly as much as during Covid-19, and not for most U.S. trade (those flat lines at the bottom):

And here, as ever, the United States is doing the heavy lifting for Europe—and China. The European Union puffed up its chest in January, announcing that its $8.3 million campaign had eliminated 19 Houthi drones and four missiles—a tiny fraction of the hundreds of missiles and drones downed by Washington’s Operation Prosperity Guardian. Meanwhile, Chinese purchases of Iranian oil are funding the very drones and missiles Americans are trying to defend Asia-Europe trade against. Whose prosperity are we guarding, anyway?

But even the U.S. effort has been ineffectual. The campaign’s absurdity was demonstrated in a Joe Biden response to a January 2024 question whether American strikes against the Houthis were working. Biden replied, “When you say ‘working’—are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

In a long and storied U.S. military tradition, this unsuccessful campaign is also eye-poppingly expensive. The U.S. Navy has fired more air defense missiles during the campaign against the Houthis than it had in the previous 30 years, at a cost of over $1 billion. Using gold-plated systems in an effort to defend European and Chinese shipping from low-tech Houthi drones and missiles is hardly putting America first.

Trump now appears inclined to escalate the air campaign against the Houthis, but there is little reason to think this will work, either. Yemen was pulverized during the seven year Saudi air campaign, and while it did great harm to the civilian population, Houthi control over territory did not recede. A bigger U.S. air campaign is unlikely to produce a different result.

Meanwhile, the Red Sea campaign has combined with the war in Ukraine to become a big enough draw on American resources that senior U.S. military officials have issued unprecedented complaints. INDOPACOM commander Samuel Paparo admitted during a November speech at the Brookings Institution that these wars were “eating into the high-end capability of the United States of America… Inherently, it imposes costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions because the PRC is the most capable potential adversary in the world.”

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a renewed air campaign against the Houthis is a bad idea. Another conclusion would be that it’s time to go big: to strike the Houthis’ patron, Iran. Now-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz hinted at this case last November when he said, “We are burning readiness to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for what really amounts to a ragtag bunch of terrorists that are Iran proxies. Iran is the core of the issue.” 

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that “some national security aides”—presumably including Waltz—“want to pursue an even more aggressive campaign” aimed at dislodging the Houthis from control over the territory they currently hold. The Times added in an aside that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been pushing Mr. Trump to authorize a joint U.S.-Israel operation to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities.”

Netanyahu trying to get the United States to attack Iran is nothing new, but it is hard to overstate how central Iran is in the thinking at CENTCOM and in Middle East policy circles in the military more generally. CENTCOM commander Michael E. Kurilla summed up this attitude during a March 2024 hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, when he lamented that “Iran is using all its proxies in the region [and] they are not paying the cost.” Implication? We should impose costs on Iran.

The officers who have served in and around CENTCOM over the last couple of decades have a bone to pick with Iran, understandably. Iraqi militias linked to Iran killed hundreds of U.S. servicemembers during the American occupation of Iraq, and Iran continues to complicate U.S. plans for the region.

But for the United States to plunge into a war with a Middle Eastern country much larger and more populous than Iraq would be throwing gasoline onto a fire, which would then probably spread across the region. For his part, Kurilla will retire in a matter of months, which would leave the cleaning-up from any expanded conflict to Trump and Kurilla’s successor.

As Vice President J.D. Vance described U.S.-Israel relations last October, “Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”

Vance was right then, and he is right now. Squandering more American munitions in a ticky-tack campaign against the Houthis is throwing good money after bad, and plunging into a war with Iran is the exact opposite of the solution Trump says he wants: a deal. To protect his legacy and to put Americans first, President Trump should say no to those pushing him into another Middle Eastern war—if not “you’re fired.”