13 January 2024 , 19:58
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News of British strikes in Yemen will have surprised some but this context has been brewing for several weeks.
The Houthis are one of the major parties in the war that has blighted Yemen since 2011 and have an anti-Israel agenda woven deep into their DNA.
Correspondingly, they have, since November, been attacking Israeli-linked cargo, increasingly broadly defined, passing through the narrowest strip of the Red Sea - one of the world's main shipping lanes.
From a global economic and security perspective, this is unacceptable.
The limited strikes made avowedly against discrete targets by the US and UK, members of the the UN Security Council, are designed to both degrade Houthi capability to menace Red Sea cargo and send them a warning to desist.
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The Houthi response has been predictably bellicose.
Is there a danger of escalation? Of course, though the calculation will have been that the risks of inaction outweighed those of action: this situation already represented some escalation of the Middle East crisis.
The key player here is Tehran, the Houthis’ principal backer, as with Hamas. It seems unlikely but unknowable if they will risk taking this to another level.
There is another important consideration.
Only 12-months ago the UN Yemen dubbed the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Finally, a fragile, peace process has been emerging in recent months. We should be attentive to the balance that has enabled this precious development. There are other levers that can be considered to restrain the Houthis.
General Lord Dannatt is a patron of Street Child. Street Child protect children in war-zones across the world. The British Government is matching all donations to Street Child made before 31st January, to a limit of £500k. Donate via www.street-child.org