Tom McTague
Unherd, Jan. 12, 2024
“The Houthis might be plucky little fuckers, but that’s also the point — they have proved remarkably resilient.”
Finally, we’ve found the kind of Middle Eastern war we should be fighting. Still, that doesn’t mean we’ll win.
Let’s start with the first proposition: that this is the right war. Strip away everything else and what do we have? A cheaply-armed, Iranian backed militia in control of one half of a very poor country imposing itself into our domestic affairs. By targeting container ships travelling through the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal and Europe, the Houthis are destabilising Western economies at a time they can least afford it. As one senior Western figure put it to me: “We’ve got to stop the plucky little fuckers.”
There is, then, a refreshing simplicity to this military action. At heart we are asserting our power. We, the West, remain powerful and our interests are being affected by those with less power. And so we act. This is not naive neoconservatism, it’s hard-edged paleoconservatism — and the better for it. Lord Salisbury could be overseeing the policy.
For most of this century, Western foreign policy has been devoid of such clear, understandable logic, gripped by dreams of enlightened hegemony. We spent billions toppling regimes and trying to build new states and cultures in their place. And we failed. Then came the years of austerity, where we convinced ourselves that we could maintain global order on the cheap through the magic of development spending. In Britain, the apotheosis of this fallacious foreign policy was David Cameron’s austerity-era Strategic Defence and Security Review.
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