Yemen Monitor/Sana’a/Exclusive
US President Joe Biden will host the NATO summit, which will begin on Tuesday. The Houthi group’s attacks from Yemen on commercial ships in the Red Sea are expected to be on the foreign agenda of the upcoming summit.
As NATO leaders – along with dialogue partners from across the Indo-Pacific region – begin their July 9 consultations in Washington, they will have the opportunity to formulate strategic responses to external transformations and challenges to preserve global trade, and the challenges posed by competition between the great powers.
Among those agendas related to the region is the assessment of the multiple threats posed by Iran in the Middle East and how to deal with its tools, as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen and the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq together form the “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran throughout the Middle East: from Iran to the eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as far west as the Mediterranean coast in Syria, Lebanon and Israel, and south to the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
John Sitilides, a senior fellow at the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that the attack on global shipping at the vital choke point in the Red Sea would be on the agenda of the NATO summit.
As to why, he said: The Houthis continue to attack global shipping in the Red Sea, strangling regional maritime communication lines between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, disrupting European supply chains and redirecting commercial and energy shipping.
Sitilides added that shipping in the Red Sea has collapsed by 80%, and container ships are being rerouted around Africa, causing delays of two to three weeks, straining African ports with increased shipping traffic, and adding costs to international trade between Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The British newspaper “Financial Times” said last week that the US has invited the foreign ministers of Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and “Israel” to the NATO summit among the 31 countries it has invited to partner with Washington.
Since the end of last year, the Houthis have been targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and have recently expanded their operations to the Indian Ocean. They have said they are targeting ships linked to Israel, which is waging a brutal offensive in Gaza Strip. But the Yemeni government and experts say the Houthis’ targets are domestic aiming to escape internal crises and improve their image in the region.
In response, US and Britain have been carrying out an airstrike campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels since January 11. As a result, the Houthis have announced the expansion of their operations to target US and British ships.
Since November, the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) has recorded more than 190 attacks on US commercial or military ships off the coast of Yemen, including nearly 100 attacks since the start of US airstrikes on Yemeni lands.
In February, the EU launched a military operation in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden called “Aspides”, aimed at combating the growing security threats in the Red Sea, promoting freedom of navigation and supporting regional stability. In response to repeated Houthi attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, which have disrupted trade and raised the prices of goods.
Red Sea attacks are being discussed alongside the rise in terrorist attacks on Europe in recent years. And “the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine, gradually destroying the country’s economy, infrastructure and productive capacity”, including European countries such as Moldova, which lies between Ukraine and NATO member Romania; Georgia, which was invaded by Russia in 2008 to establish two Moscow-backed breakaway republics; and the ongoing conflict between energy-rich Azerbaijan and increasingly impoverished Armenia; and the Balkans, where ethnic Serbs threaten to secede from Bosnia after 30 years of regional conflicts that have killed 150,000 Europeans.
In addition, the NATO summit discusses the strategic rivalry between China and Western countries as tensions continue in the South China Sea and with Taiwan. Alongside Beijing’s dominance of global supply chains.
