I find your argument that over a long enough timeframe leaving the terrorists alone, would result in the probability of a second holocaust approaching one, obviously mistaken. You don’t seem to take adequate note of the difficulty of causing such large scale bloodshed to Israel from Yemen, especially once you remember that Israel has nuclear weapons. Your analogy with nuclear war doesn’t work because in fact, the probability of nuclear war over a long enough time span is also not one. We could all die of a pandemic or artificial intelligence or new technology could render nuclear weapons obsolete or future governments could do nuclear disarmament, even if we don’t do it now. Similarly, just because you leave them alone, doesn’t mean they somehow inevitably succeed at an incredibly difficult task, especially when suffering a civil war is the biggest predictor of future civil wars.
Your analogy to Nazi Germany in 1935 doesn’t work because they had an obviously realistic ability to do what they did, unlike the terrorists in Yemen. Also, you are slightly cheating there because you already know what happened. If we were only working with the information available in 1935, a very strong argument could be made for not starting World War II. After all Hitler and nazi leadership seem to be genuinely interested in forcing the Jews, to leave Germany at that point and only started to implement the final solution years later when the government had gotten a lot crazier. It would have been genuinely difficult to predict just how insane Hitler would have been in both his foreign policy and racial animous. And even so if other countries had been more willing to accept refugees from Germany a lot fewer people would have died. And most leaders don’t treat their promises with such contempt, so it was genuinely surprising that Hitler proved completely impossible to negotiate with.
I actually think the bombing of Drezden was a very bad thing because it contributed very little to the war effort, but killed a bunch of civilians so that analogy, hardly makes your point for you.
I don’t really get your punching Nazis principal, especially because it seems to be in considerable tension with your opposition to unnecessary civilian casualties. after all, I suspect a lot of the civilian population has very hateful views. Also, it leads to pretty bizarre conclusions if applied to other situations. Did Julius Caesar and his soldiers deserve to be punched for all the war crimes he did during the Gallic war? Except his soldiers didn’t actually do anything that any other Romans would not have done if they had been part of his army. And not being part of his army, didn’t have anything to do with moral objections and was nothing more than just getting lucky for completely unrelated reasons. In fact, being willing to do completely outrageous things to your out group is something loads of people in history would have been willing to do so. Your principal would imply that it was a tragedy that something like at least a fifth of the human population in history didn’t get bombed to death, which is a completely absurd conclusion.
I also just find morally implausible because I already find retributive justice unpersuasive and your principal takes it to the next level by merely making holding sufficiently evil political views punishable with the death penalty or at least a major risk of death. Also, I don’t really see why your principal only applies to nazi like beliefs. Communism has killed more people then even Hitler managed so by your standard, the Vietnam war was likely justified. For that matter, why people who cause immense amounts of suffering through their opposition to immigration or consumption of factory farmed animals not similarly deserving of being punched. All these confusing situations become much simpler if you think of punching Nazis as being for the purpose of deterrence. So, we have a social norm in favour of punching such people because it discourages other people from adopting their beliefs and if they do adopt them, discourage them from acting on them in any way or coordinating with each other to achieve their aims. But if it’s merely a consequentialist social norm, your argument doesn’t really work, especially because I don’t actually think that America sending its Army into Yemen will actually discourage such attitudes and movements in the middle east.
Finally, your claim that America should do something like the Marshall plan is just utopian. The Marshall plan happened because of several unusual circumstances like the need to contain the Soviet union and the fact that western Europe would make an important trading partner. I find the probability of America not doing a repeat of the Afghanistan mess to be pretty low, barring anything unusual like this.
> just because you leave them alone, doesn’t mean they somehow inevitably succeed at an incredibly difficult task
True, the "probability goes to 1" bit is probably best read as facetious (I write these at midnight ish, honestly no idea if I meant this seriously or not), but leaving the Houthis alone seems plausibly linked to lots of suffering—both in Yemen, where they have, at best, an 8% approval rating, and in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Red Sea shipping lanes which they insist on shooting lots and lots of missiles at. I think we can admit that they were driven, in part, to do this by various outside factors (Saudi bombing, Israel's war on Hamas), but that doesn't change the fact that, at this point, they're an extremely crazy terrorist group with extremely crazy terrorist desires. A) They will continue to shoot missiles at Israel so long as Israel continues to attack nasty people like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, and B) if you stop on their account, it just legitimates "being Nazis who shoot at container ships" which I think is #problematic.
> suffering a civil war is the biggest predictor of future civil wars.
By that logic, every country everywhere should be having civil wars all the time. Even if the Houthis will eventually lose power, I think it's a good idea for it to happen on American terms so that we can do some rebuilding, rather than letting some other Iranian / Saudi satellite group take over and do similarly-Nazish things.
> Also, you are slightly cheating there because you already know what happened. If we were only working with the information available in 1935, a very strong argument could be made for not starting World War II.
Yeah, I am cheating a bit. But my point is that, if we've learned anything from WW2, it's to be less tolerant of Nazis even before they start doing Holocausts! So I think the analogy is rescued in that sense.
> I don’t really get your punching Nazis principal, especially because it seems to be in considerable tension with your opposition to unnecessary civilian casualties. After all, I suspect a lot of the civilian population has very hateful views.
This is a good point. I should be clearer that I don't support blowing people up for being Nazis, I support defeating governments that are explicitly Nazist. This often involves blowing up the people that are in that government's military, and sometimes also means blowing up civilians. I want to minimize civilian-blowing-up while also enforcing the post-WW2 principle that if you are a political entity with lots of weapons, you're not allowed to be Nazist.
> Communism has killed more people then even Hitler managed so by your standard, the Vietnam war was likely justified.
Communists tend to kill internally, Nazis tend to seek out Jews everywhere so they can kill more of them. This sort of genocidal maximalism is what makes Nazism the "ultimate evil"—communism's bad, and I think we're sometimes justified in fighting against it, but not nearly to the same degree that we're justified in fighting Nazis.
> The Marshall plan happened because of several unusual circumstances like the need to contain the Soviet union and the fact that western Europe would make an important trading partner. I find the probability of America not doing a repeat of the Afghanistan mess to be pretty low.
I generally agree that an invasion of Yemen would not result in a Marshall Plan under the Trumpist regime, so we probably shouldn't invade Yemen *right now.* But once I'm in charge...
I guess I don't understand why you think America should attack the Houthis but support Israel. Sure, the Houthis say "death to the Jews," and the Israeli government usually says "death to the Palestinians" under their breath–though they're increasingly saying the quiet part out loud. The Houthis have very limited capabilities and they're clearly not trying to commit genocide; they're only attacking ships in the Red Sea and they're doing this because of Israel's heinous war on Gaza. During the ceasefire, the Houthis stopped attacking ships. When Israel broke the ceasefire, they began again.
Why do you consider the Houthis pure evil but think the Israelis are just fighting for their lives? From the Houthi perspective, they're risking their own lives to stand up for beseiged innocent Palestinians. (I don't share this view.) Many people (not me) view the Israelis as "pure evil," because the Gaza War obviously would have never happened if Israel hadn't illegally occupied, settled, and repressed Gaza for half a century.
The "pure evil" narrative tends to push us toward maximally belligerent foreign policy where we view our enemies as hell-bent on committing grave crimes, and the only way to stop them is through some disastrous war.
In reality, peoples' intentions, ideologies, and military actions are shaped by circumstance, and very few people and groups are implaccably evil. That's why all these Manichaean wars end up making things far worse than they were before hand (think Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc.) and making millions of people hate America.
I do university debate, and whenever someone drops a Hitler analogy in a round, it's considered bad form. There's really nothing analogous to Hitler. That's why Hitler was so uniquely evil—he was different than everyone else, and we have yet to see anyone remotely like him.
This is an interesting point. The Houthis certainly did become more Nazi-like in the early ‘00s, and weren’t before. At a certain point, though, you take people at their word, especially if their actions then start to match up—if it walks like a Nazi and it quacks like a Nazi…
Yeah, Hitler analogies are often bad, it’s possible I’m being careless here. Then again, if we walked by a neo-Nazi shouting “death to Jews” and pointing his gun at a bunch of Jews, I think I’d be justified in saying, “wow, that guy is super Hitlery, we should stop him from killing those Jews.” The Houthis seem exceptionally Hitlery to me, in a way that no one else who’s a government is anymore.
(Also, to pre-empt the “Israeli leaders say scary, Hitlery things too” objection: many of those quotes are mistranslated / way out of context [cf. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/] and, for now, the Israeli deep state keeps all these nasty people in check. Whereas if the Houthis had a deep state, it would be a Nazi one—the Nazism is built in at a fundamental level.)
I'll check out the quote thing. And it really doesn't seem like Israel's behaviour is being restrained to me. I predict that in the next three years Israel will begin to resettle Gaza and either completely ethnically cleanse its inhabitants or turn it into a more horrible version of the West Bank where Palestinians are kept in bantustans and have no rights.
OK, if we want to call the Houthis Nazis or Hitler-esque because they hate Jews, that's fine. What we can't do is then jump to the implication that we must go to war with them. This is because they pose little threat, and it would be far easier (and far more just) to dissuade their antics by forcing Israel to accept a ceasefire.*
The main good reason IMHO to go to war against Nazi Germany was because they were on the verge of becoming a regional hegemon in Europe (like the US is in the Americas). If the Houthis were on the verge of achieving regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, I would encourage America to intervene. But the Houthi airforce consists of one fighter jet and their navy is a smattering of small patrol ships (at least according to Wikipedia).
Now regarding genocide:
A key difference between the Nazis and the Houthis is that the Nazis planned to enslave, rape, ethnically cleanse and/or exterminate ~80 million Slavs and Jews in eastern Europe, and—crucially—the Nazis had the means to carry this out.
Perhaps it would have been good to attack Germany earlier to prevent the Holocaust. It would be, however, very unwise to attack Yemen now to prevent another holocaust—because there is no way in hell the Houthis will ever be able to pull this off against Israel and America. In the mid-1930s, Germany had a population of ~65 million, a military with ~600,000 active personnel and ~1.2 million reserve, and an industrial base that rivalled that of the USSR and Britain. If one day the Houthis achieve a military build-up like this, I'll reconsider my position.
Also, while the Houthis seem to lack irredentist ambitions, the Nazis were already talking about Lebensraum in the early '30s.
*Even if we didn't do this, it would be better to let them fire at ships than launch a full war to destroy them, which would clearly require troops on the ground and a massive counter-insurgency operation (considering that a decade-plus of constant aerial assault has only left them stronger).
Thanks for sending me the Atlantic article on mistranslated quotes. I read it, revised my article, and wrote a correction. I had included the quote where Gallant says "we will eliminate it all" but "it all" was mistranslated as "everything." I added a note to another quote in my article to specify that Gallant was referring to Hamas one of the times he said "human animals," though I kept the quote in because I thought the most important part was when Gallant said "I have released all restraints" to Israeli troops who were about to fight in Gaza. Most of the quotes I included were not mentioned by the Atlantic article.
Genuine question: why shouldn't we just invade Iran tomorrow? I recently made the argument that if we had invaded Iran back in 2003, a significant number of lives would have been saved, *as opposed to invading Afghanistan and occupying Iraq*. But, we didn't and here we are. Now Iran is funding the Houthis.
The answer for me is that invading Iran is very difficult and expensive, and it would be preferable to use that money to bribe Iran into being nicer, as we have in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan.
I think any attack on the Houthis needs to be part of a larger carrot and stick diplomatic effort. Attack the Houthis, sure, but offer Iran a deal where we make peace in exchange for a relief of sanctions.
But wasn't that already tried by Biden, and it led to October 7th? Maybe. Maybe Biden was simultaneously not aggressive enough and also, at the same time, not offering Iran enough goodies to stop funding terrorists.
In my opinion, you should be offering the Iranians a trillion dollar deal (in sanctions relief, trade deals, favored nation status) if they give absolute assurance to cut off all support for terrorists (Hezbollah and Houthis). If the Iranians don't take this deal, ratchet up the sanctions much, much further, including secondary sanctions on Russia and China for any cooperation with Iran.
There is a problem of enforcement: if the Iranians take the deal, how do you ensure genuine good faith follow-through? Well, if the Houthis and Hezbollah are funded, you immediately slap sanctions back on Iran and its allies (Russia and China). There's a way to do this where Iran understands that the deal is very strict and they are incentivized to not try to cheat.
But this only works when you have an extremely focused and consistent foreign policy apparatus. If Biden is disinterested and limp-wristed, or Trump is erratic and unpredictable, none of this works. And I'd argue that if we temporarily bomb the Houthis, and then get distracted by something else, it would basically be better if we just never bombed the Houthis at all.
The gap between "optimal foreign policy" and "how democracy actually works" is pretty significant. Especially in an age of populism where the deep state is constantly undermined and scapegoated.
I think I have some post advocating for lots of hawkishness toward Iran from a while ago... certainly would've preferred it to the Iraq mess!
> I think any attack on the Houthis needs to be part of a larger carrot and stick diplomatic effort.
Agreed—I want the Houthis disempowered, and if we can achieve this via strong-arm diplomacy, that's obviously better than brutal war.
> But this only works when you have an extremely focused and consistent foreign policy apparatus.
Also agreed. There are good practical reasons to not do stuff in general these days, which is a shame. But if e.g. FDR were in charge, I'd be very glad to do all the stuff! Or, yeah, if the deep state regained control...
The whole principle here is extremely confused. There are millions of “Nazis” stashed away in every corner of the world, but it would be insane to go to war with them. North Korea has concentration camps — is it time to bomb them? India is committing serious human rights abuses — what about them? What about Hungary — the fact that they’re not invading their neighbors or killing people *yet* is irrelevant — in fact, it’s *more* reason to bomb them now so they don’t start doing it later. For that matter, it’s *possible* that Britain might finally wipe out Ireland or try to recolonize Africa while we least suspect it, so we might as well firebomb London. Wouldn’t you bomb the Nazis in 1935?
If we took “punching Nazis” seriously as the basis of our foreign policy we would start about a million wars, kill a billion people, and do even more damage to the world than Nazi Germany did.
Specific to Yemen: “Defeating” the Houthis, as any other insurgency, would require killing at least hundreds of thousands of people, and even then they’d probably just ramp up recruitment and make up most of the losses. It’s really astounding that you would make the comparison to Gaza. Anyone who would willingly start a Gaza-style war *by choice* — which is what the campaign against the Houthis is and has been for a decade — is a very ill informed or evil person. In fact, I think we would have a much greater reason to “punch” someone who’s already murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, who is actively killing more of them right now, and who bombed the poorest country in the Middle East back to the fucking Stone Age, than we do to “punch” (great euphemism for mass murder, by the way) some qat-chewing fanatics with asymmetric weapons.
I think it would be fair for anyone to disregard your whole argument unless you actually make reference to what’s likely to happen absent a(nother) Yemen war and with one. Absent one, you get continued minor disruption to international shipping, drone attacks against Saudi Arabia and Israel (unless, you know, they stop committing industrial scale slaughter in Gaza), and extremely repressive and incompetent rule in Yemen — all bad things. With a war, you murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, still have extremely repressive and incompetent rule, and potentially further radicalize the Houthis, who were actually fairly moderate until the U.S. invaded Iraq and started droning Yemen in the 2000s. Not to mention, the reason Iran has been arming the Houthis during the war (they had virtually no relationship prior to 2014) was to bait the Saudis into spending tens of billions of dollars on an idiotic military campaign they couldn’t win. Getting the United States to do the same would make the Iranians’ investment pay off more than they ever could have imagined and probably rally insurgents across the region just like Iraq did.
Bottom line: I cling to the apparently Tankie position that mass murder isn’t justified to make some idiotic, totally symbolic point about the imagined moral purity of American foreign policy (ironically while you partner with a country whose leadership is under indictment for war crimes and a despotic absolute monarchy that beheads people for fake crimes like witchcraft). At the very least, I think the people you’d be killing would disagree that the operation is so high and mighty.
> There are millions of “Nazis” stashed away in every corner of the world that it would be utterly insane to do anything about militarily.
Right, mostly because they aren't a government for tens of millions of people, with lots of Iranian funding and lots of ballistic missiles. And if they are a government, like North Korea or India or Hungary or Britain (??), they aren't Nazis! North Korea is very bad and I think there might be a strong case to be made for attacking them too, but India, Hungary, and Britain especially don't have a line in their constitution that says, "Oh, and by the way, our entire national project is aimed at eradicating the Muslims / Balkans(?) / Irish(???)." I think that if you want to be a government, you shouldn't be allowed to be a Nazi—none of these are good counterexamples to that point. Human rights abuses are bad; explicitly declared genocidal intent & capacity to carry it out is another thing altogether.
> “Defeating” the Houthis, as any other insurgency, would require killing at least hundreds of thousands of people, and even then they’d probably just ramp up recruitment and make up most of the losses.
Yes and no. I'll admit this is probably the strongest case against punching Nazis—it can make them look sympathetic. Then again, Gazans are protesting against Hamas in a way that they couldn't and didn't before the war (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g71lk09npo). Similarly, as the war against the actual Nazis went on, pro-Nazi sentiment in Germany waned, and we were eventually able to put a good, normal government in charge. I'm doubtful that a defeat of the Houthis and reformation of Yemen is as difficult as you say—I know, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.: none of these guys were Nazis! "The Houthis are Deeply Unpopular in Yemen" (https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/the-houthis-are-deeply-unpopular-in-yemen-and-thats-an-opportunity): approval is at 8% in Houthi-controlled areas, and 3% elsewhere. (https://sanaacenter.org/the-yemen-review/july-sept-2024/23516)
Also, "potentially further radicalize the Houthis"—what? A) Who would they even be radicalized against? The US, I assume, the people who are bombing them. So, B) What does that look like? They'd be more likely to do violence against the US... a country they would be at war with? And also one they're already declaring "death to," and have been since Iraq—what's done is done, man. Hitler was fairly chill about the Jews until the Treaty of Versailles—still good to punch Nazis.
> I don’t think mass murder is justified to make some idiotic, totally symbolic point about the imagined moral purity of American foreign policy
Right, my point is that this moral purity isn't "imagined." We used to make a point of fighting "ultimately evil" ideologies and people—now we don't. I think we should do that again. It's good to show the world that you can't get away with ultimate evil, it's good to free the Yemenis from deeply unpopular Houthi oppression, and it's good to stop Nazis from terrorizing global shipping and attacking Israel and the Saudis.
Also, symbolic ≠ meaningless, in fact it's the opposite—"America is a morally trustworthy Nazi-puncher" is a totally indefensible statement now, in a way that it wasn't in 1945, and that's a bad thing that undermines anti-Nazists everywhere! Also, it's not "totally symbolic"—I hate to trot out the "military strikes are an extremely cheap way to help foreigners" thing again, but Gaddafi was super-duper popular in Libya, which maybe helps explain why it went so wrong when that the Marshall Plan went so right.
> great euphemism to obscure the fact that you’re talking about mass murder, by the way
I'm not being shy about the idea that war kills people, but I am drawing a parallel between violence against Nazis and violence against the Houthis, for reasons I think I make clear. "Mass murder" is a charged term too; you could just as accurately use something like "large civilian casualties," but you'd rather portray all war deaths as unjustified premeditated killing. I'd rather portray them as tragic and unfortunate means to a very justifiable end.
1. But the principle you’re endorsing here seems to be “we should bomb any entity with racism and shittiness > 0 because on a long enough time horizon the chance they commit genocide approaches 1.” On this principle it wouldn’t matter if an entity is explicitly genocidal or not, just that p(genocide) in any particular year > 0 (which is true of literally any entity on Earth). If that’s the principle, then you have to think we should firebomb London. If not, you have to very carefully consider the costs and benefits of a Houthi campaign, which you don’t do in the article.
2. First, you’re not even addressing the point of civilian deaths here. The Saudis killed 400,000 people and the Houthis only got stronger. How many more people do you think should be killed to get rid of a group whose greatest capabilities are some suicide drones and cruise missiles that don’t work half the time? 500,000? 1,000,000? That’s psychotic. The damage the Houthis can do is nowhere near the atrocity that would have to be committed — and indeed, already has been committed — to defeat them.
Second, every person who has ever advocated or planned a counterinsurgency war has seriously underestimated the resilience of insurgents. The Taliban was probably as unpopular as the Houthis, then held out for 20 years and won. Hamas has recruited nearly as many fighters as have been killed in the past year and a half. The Houthis were already widely unpopular during the Saudi war but got stronger anyway. As for radicalization, they haven’t yet attacked the thousands of U.S. troops throughout the region, even though they could easily lob a few missiles their way — seems like an obvious target if the U.S. would go full-bore against them anyway.
Also, the so-called Yemeni government is a joke. You’d basically be looking at an open-ended occupation and insurgency until the U.S. can’t accept any more losses and pulls out in shame.
3. Tangentially: This is straight up historical revisionism. The U.S. fought Nazis because it didn’t want a single country to take over Europe. If the balance of power had been different, it would have sided with the Nazis to stop the Soviets (something Harry Truman actually said in 1941). It fought the Cold War as a struggle for supremacy, not liberal democracy — or else it wouldn’t have propped up totalitarianism in Latin America and elsewhere. That the U.S. has been primarily motivated to fight “ultimate evil” is an obvious fiction.
In Yemen, the main destructive influence over the past decade has been Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States. No serious observer who isn’t a Senior Fellow of Laundering Blood Money at the Scoop Jackson Institute for Security Affairs can possibly look at the conflict and think the U.S. and the Saudis have been the “good guys,” or that there are any “good guys,” which is a childish and idiotic way to think about these things. Needlessly murdering hundreds of thousands of people automatically disqualifies you from taking the moral high ground. This should be the most obvious thing on Earth.
4. I have explicitly said before that killing civilians is sometimes justified. But when you aren’t accomplishing a legitimate objective, or you’re killing people totally out of proportion with your objective, that’s mass murder.
[You're remarkably good at turning arguments into numbered lists; I envy that talent]
1. No, that would be a weird principle. Probably I shouldn't have included the reference to your nuclear war point, because it definitely implies that. My bad! I only meant to point out that the counterfactual benefits of beating up on Nazis with ballistic missiles are, in fact, quite substantial.
2. Why would I think that a certain number of civilian deaths is the tipping point for defeating the Houthis? Saudi Arabia's war has been, as I said, corruptly and ineptly carried out. The Hamas war, on the other hand, has been much more precise, much less deadly for civilians, and much better at reducing Hamas' capabilities. Same for the strikes on Hezbollah. I don't see why we couldn't model a war against the Houthis on those examples.
The Taliban is Houthi-levels of unpopular now, sure, but I don't think they were so unpopular back in the post-Soviet-invasion days. I'm having trouble finding direct data on this, but in 2011, at least, Afghans were far more likely to criticize the US-backed government (for instability and corruption) than the Taliban for Taliban-ing (https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Afghanistan_2011-Survey-of-the-Afghan-People.pdf). Maybe much of this is just, "Yemen and Afghanistan are shitty places to live, and so people blame whoever's in charge." But it seems like we could solve this by doing a not-awful-job of putting someone new in charge of Yemen, which, yes, is hard, but no, is not impossible. It certainly doesn't have to be the Yemeni government in its current form—do an occupation, build some bridges and some ports, make Yemen the Japan of the Red Sea.
3. Agreed that this is tangential, disagreed that I'm engaging in revisionism. America might've been not-so-anti-Nazi in the early 40s, but by 1945, we'd realized that the Nazis were ultimately evil and that we, America, should oppose ultimate evil. This is the main point of Yglesias' writing—what we did in WW2 was good, nothing to do with whether it was inevitable the US would oppose the Nazis or whether they were considered to be the ultimate evil in 1941. Now we know: Nazis are evil.
"There are no good guys in deadly wars" is a really annoying take. Yes, the Saudis suck and did a bad job of fighting the war justly. This suggests that it would be hard to fight the war justly and non-suckily in the future, and yet I'm arguing that it's probably quite doable.
If America ever did conduct a successful anti-Hezbollah/Hamas-style offensive against the Houthis, that would make us the good guys! Either this is practically possible or it isn't—there's lots of debate to be had there—but the question in no way hinges on whether I'd ever be allowed to claim the moral high ground, I simply am.
Unless I'm missing something, the Houthis pose the least threat to Israel of all the Iranian puppets. I understand "immediate threat" is different from the long term risk potential, but I see two issues with this:
1. Anecdotally, I've seen western antizionists (who obviously want to see the Houthis in the best possible light) celebrate their drone program, which is apparently like one drone. They'll say "well the next drone will reach Tel Aviv!" but it's still one drone my guy. The immediate threat is small, and consequently the horizon of this longterm risk is really far away.
2. Is there a way to win a conflict with the Houthis without drawing in Iran? Because if not, then we should be debating that instead.
Nazi Germany was a reactionary state with a big military in Central Europe. The government practiced a sort of quasi state atheism, and was primarily concerned with both rooting out internal dissent and conquering Eastern Europe. All it has in common with the Houthis is anti-Semetism.
If America conquering Nazi Germany is the best thing ever - first this has to be justified. Apparently it was great because the Nazis were evil - but the same people who invented that definition now say that all white men are evil, so whatever. Possibly it was great because Nazi Germany was a big threat that wanted America gone - but so was the Soviet Union, and all of our efforts to stop Nazi Germany just meant that the Soviets would come out stronger in the ensuring Cold War. Possibly it was good because it meant seizing control of Europe's resources - but I have yet to see a single buck from that effort, and all the Europeans we have 'saved' seem happy to live off America's military while complaining constantly. If it was justified because the Nazis were reactionary and we should be replacing all governments with left wing ones - then that would also mean getting rid of Israel sooner rather than later. Hmmmmm.
If the definition of Nazi here is just anti Semites, the Houthis barely register as a threat to Jews across the world. The Houthis want Yemen to be free of Saudi influence and launch nuisance attacks on world trade in the Red Sea. The main loser from Houthi attacks in this area is Egypt. The Houthis are probably going to continue being anti Semetic for a long time, just like the Taliban. Y Bother?
> Apparently it was great because the Nazis were evil - but the same people who invented that definition now say that all white men are evil, so whatever.
This is exactly the sort of viewpoint that Yglesias dismantled yesterday. I'll quote:
"while [Robert] Harris posits [in "Fatherland"] a certain structural similarity between America’s relationship with a victorious Nazi Germany and our real world relationship with the Soviet Union, he’s also drawing a distinction. You’re supposed to read Harris’s history and be glad that you’re living in the real timeline. The Soviet Union was bad, but Nazi Germany was a kind of ultimate evil, and the characters in that book are working to expose that evil."
There's a Mike Huemer post which talks about DEI as a school that only teaches true bad things about Jews (https://fakenous.substack.com/p/can-teaching-the-truth-be-racist)—the Nazis were men with guns that only taught bad things, false and true, about the Jews, and also said repeatedly, "we want to kill all the Jews." Similarly, the Hutu militias were men with guns that only said bad and genocidal things about the Tutsis. The Houthis are men with guns that only say bad and genocidal things about the Jews—this is cause for concern!
I agree that it's unlikely they'll carry out an entire genocide, but I think there are still reasons we should strike at them hard: a) if we don't, they'll continue to swim in Iranian funding and shoot missiles at container ships and Tel Aviv, and b) if we do, we tell the world that America is the kind of power that dislikes (in a very active way) governments with Nazi ideologies. That's an important thing for the world to know, and very bad for the world to doubt.
Yglesias wants to live in a reality where the nice, nebbish liberals set the cultural mood, and there are only a few bad apples on the left who can be silenced by ignoring them. One would hope that the last 80 years would finally be proof enough that the real world doesn't work like this.
The use of Nazi and fascist as cheap epithets was part and parcel of the radical communist's worldview, and it's only with that being absorbed into the liberal left that we even cease to recognize it as communist. The constant vigilance and hatred for any sort of dominant racial group was inevitably going to create DEI, woke, anti-white-ism, whatever else you want to call it. Nice, moderate centrists have never stopped the liberal-commies. At best they have slightly moderated their excesses. It hasn't stopped them from pushing some countries to the brink already, like South Africa. And, of course, Israel is next on their hit list. Why wouldn't it be, considering how bad the carpet bombing of Gaza looks to even the Yglesiases of the world?
"I agree that it's unlikely they'll carry out an entire genocide, but I think there are still reasons we should strike at them hard: a) if we don't, they'll continue to swim in Iranian funding and shoot missiles at container ships and Tel Aviv, and b) if we do, we tell the world that America is the kind of power that dislikes (in a very active way) governments with Nazi ideologies. That's an important thing for the world to know, and very bad for the world to doubt."
If we do hit them, they will still have Iranian funding, because hitting them does not stop Iran from funding them. Any intended signaling that America hates genocidal groups will also fall on deaf ears when our apparent 'solution' to Hezbollah has been to sic genocidal Turkish Sunni proxies in Syria.
I find your argument that over a long enough timeframe leaving the terrorists alone, would result in the probability of a second holocaust approaching one, obviously mistaken. You don’t seem to take adequate note of the difficulty of causing such large scale bloodshed to Israel from Yemen, especially once you remember that Israel has nuclear weapons. Your analogy with nuclear war doesn’t work because in fact, the probability of nuclear war over a long enough time span is also not one. We could all die of a pandemic or artificial intelligence or new technology could render nuclear weapons obsolete or future governments could do nuclear disarmament, even if we don’t do it now. Similarly, just because you leave them alone, doesn’t mean they somehow inevitably succeed at an incredibly difficult task, especially when suffering a civil war is the biggest predictor of future civil wars.
Your analogy to Nazi Germany in 1935 doesn’t work because they had an obviously realistic ability to do what they did, unlike the terrorists in Yemen. Also, you are slightly cheating there because you already know what happened. If we were only working with the information available in 1935, a very strong argument could be made for not starting World War II. After all Hitler and nazi leadership seem to be genuinely interested in forcing the Jews, to leave Germany at that point and only started to implement the final solution years later when the government had gotten a lot crazier. It would have been genuinely difficult to predict just how insane Hitler would have been in both his foreign policy and racial animous. And even so if other countries had been more willing to accept refugees from Germany a lot fewer people would have died. And most leaders don’t treat their promises with such contempt, so it was genuinely surprising that Hitler proved completely impossible to negotiate with.
I actually think the bombing of Drezden was a very bad thing because it contributed very little to the war effort, but killed a bunch of civilians so that analogy, hardly makes your point for you.
I don’t really get your punching Nazis principal, especially because it seems to be in considerable tension with your opposition to unnecessary civilian casualties. after all, I suspect a lot of the civilian population has very hateful views. Also, it leads to pretty bizarre conclusions if applied to other situations. Did Julius Caesar and his soldiers deserve to be punched for all the war crimes he did during the Gallic war? Except his soldiers didn’t actually do anything that any other Romans would not have done if they had been part of his army. And not being part of his army, didn’t have anything to do with moral objections and was nothing more than just getting lucky for completely unrelated reasons. In fact, being willing to do completely outrageous things to your out group is something loads of people in history would have been willing to do so. Your principal would imply that it was a tragedy that something like at least a fifth of the human population in history didn’t get bombed to death, which is a completely absurd conclusion.
I also just find morally implausible because I already find retributive justice unpersuasive and your principal takes it to the next level by merely making holding sufficiently evil political views punishable with the death penalty or at least a major risk of death. Also, I don’t really see why your principal only applies to nazi like beliefs. Communism has killed more people then even Hitler managed so by your standard, the Vietnam war was likely justified. For that matter, why people who cause immense amounts of suffering through their opposition to immigration or consumption of factory farmed animals not similarly deserving of being punched. All these confusing situations become much simpler if you think of punching Nazis as being for the purpose of deterrence. So, we have a social norm in favour of punching such people because it discourages other people from adopting their beliefs and if they do adopt them, discourage them from acting on them in any way or coordinating with each other to achieve their aims. But if it’s merely a consequentialist social norm, your argument doesn’t really work, especially because I don’t actually think that America sending its Army into Yemen will actually discourage such attitudes and movements in the middle east.
Finally, your claim that America should do something like the Marshall plan is just utopian. The Marshall plan happened because of several unusual circumstances like the need to contain the Soviet union and the fact that western Europe would make an important trading partner. I find the probability of America not doing a repeat of the Afghanistan mess to be pretty low, barring anything unusual like this.
> just because you leave them alone, doesn’t mean they somehow inevitably succeed at an incredibly difficult task
True, the "probability goes to 1" bit is probably best read as facetious (I write these at midnight ish, honestly no idea if I meant this seriously or not), but leaving the Houthis alone seems plausibly linked to lots of suffering—both in Yemen, where they have, at best, an 8% approval rating, and in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Red Sea shipping lanes which they insist on shooting lots and lots of missiles at. I think we can admit that they were driven, in part, to do this by various outside factors (Saudi bombing, Israel's war on Hamas), but that doesn't change the fact that, at this point, they're an extremely crazy terrorist group with extremely crazy terrorist desires. A) They will continue to shoot missiles at Israel so long as Israel continues to attack nasty people like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the IRGC, and B) if you stop on their account, it just legitimates "being Nazis who shoot at container ships" which I think is #problematic.
> suffering a civil war is the biggest predictor of future civil wars.
By that logic, every country everywhere should be having civil wars all the time. Even if the Houthis will eventually lose power, I think it's a good idea for it to happen on American terms so that we can do some rebuilding, rather than letting some other Iranian / Saudi satellite group take over and do similarly-Nazish things.
> Also, you are slightly cheating there because you already know what happened. If we were only working with the information available in 1935, a very strong argument could be made for not starting World War II.
Yeah, I am cheating a bit. But my point is that, if we've learned anything from WW2, it's to be less tolerant of Nazis even before they start doing Holocausts! So I think the analogy is rescued in that sense.
> I don’t really get your punching Nazis principal, especially because it seems to be in considerable tension with your opposition to unnecessary civilian casualties. After all, I suspect a lot of the civilian population has very hateful views.
This is a good point. I should be clearer that I don't support blowing people up for being Nazis, I support defeating governments that are explicitly Nazist. This often involves blowing up the people that are in that government's military, and sometimes also means blowing up civilians. I want to minimize civilian-blowing-up while also enforcing the post-WW2 principle that if you are a political entity with lots of weapons, you're not allowed to be Nazist.
> Communism has killed more people then even Hitler managed so by your standard, the Vietnam war was likely justified.
Communists tend to kill internally, Nazis tend to seek out Jews everywhere so they can kill more of them. This sort of genocidal maximalism is what makes Nazism the "ultimate evil"—communism's bad, and I think we're sometimes justified in fighting against it, but not nearly to the same degree that we're justified in fighting Nazis.
> The Marshall plan happened because of several unusual circumstances like the need to contain the Soviet union and the fact that western Europe would make an important trading partner. I find the probability of America not doing a repeat of the Afghanistan mess to be pretty low.
I generally agree that an invasion of Yemen would not result in a Marshall Plan under the Trumpist regime, so we probably shouldn't invade Yemen *right now.* But once I'm in charge...
I guess I don't understand why you think America should attack the Houthis but support Israel. Sure, the Houthis say "death to the Jews," and the Israeli government usually says "death to the Palestinians" under their breath–though they're increasingly saying the quiet part out loud. The Houthis have very limited capabilities and they're clearly not trying to commit genocide; they're only attacking ships in the Red Sea and they're doing this because of Israel's heinous war on Gaza. During the ceasefire, the Houthis stopped attacking ships. When Israel broke the ceasefire, they began again.
Why do you consider the Houthis pure evil but think the Israelis are just fighting for their lives? From the Houthi perspective, they're risking their own lives to stand up for beseiged innocent Palestinians. (I don't share this view.) Many people (not me) view the Israelis as "pure evil," because the Gaza War obviously would have never happened if Israel hadn't illegally occupied, settled, and repressed Gaza for half a century.
The "pure evil" narrative tends to push us toward maximally belligerent foreign policy where we view our enemies as hell-bent on committing grave crimes, and the only way to stop them is through some disastrous war.
https://theoshouse.substack.com/p/what-is-pure-evil
In reality, peoples' intentions, ideologies, and military actions are shaped by circumstance, and very few people and groups are implaccably evil. That's why all these Manichaean wars end up making things far worse than they were before hand (think Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc.) and making millions of people hate America.
I do university debate, and whenever someone drops a Hitler analogy in a round, it's considered bad form. There's really nothing analogous to Hitler. That's why Hitler was so uniquely evil—he was different than everyone else, and we have yet to see anyone remotely like him.
This is an interesting point. The Houthis certainly did become more Nazi-like in the early ‘00s, and weren’t before. At a certain point, though, you take people at their word, especially if their actions then start to match up—if it walks like a Nazi and it quacks like a Nazi…
Yeah, Hitler analogies are often bad, it’s possible I’m being careless here. Then again, if we walked by a neo-Nazi shouting “death to Jews” and pointing his gun at a bunch of Jews, I think I’d be justified in saying, “wow, that guy is super Hitlery, we should stop him from killing those Jews.” The Houthis seem exceptionally Hitlery to me, in a way that no one else who’s a government is anymore.
(Also, to pre-empt the “Israeli leaders say scary, Hitlery things too” objection: many of those quotes are mistranslated / way out of context [cf. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/01/israel-south-africa-genocide-case-fake-quotes/677198/] and, for now, the Israeli deep state keeps all these nasty people in check. Whereas if the Houthis had a deep state, it would be a Nazi one—the Nazism is built in at a fundamental level.)
I'll check out the quote thing. And it really doesn't seem like Israel's behaviour is being restrained to me. I predict that in the next three years Israel will begin to resettle Gaza and either completely ethnically cleanse its inhabitants or turn it into a more horrible version of the West Bank where Palestinians are kept in bantustans and have no rights.
OK, if we want to call the Houthis Nazis or Hitler-esque because they hate Jews, that's fine. What we can't do is then jump to the implication that we must go to war with them. This is because they pose little threat, and it would be far easier (and far more just) to dissuade their antics by forcing Israel to accept a ceasefire.*
The main good reason IMHO to go to war against Nazi Germany was because they were on the verge of becoming a regional hegemon in Europe (like the US is in the Americas). If the Houthis were on the verge of achieving regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, I would encourage America to intervene. But the Houthi airforce consists of one fighter jet and their navy is a smattering of small patrol ships (at least according to Wikipedia).
Now regarding genocide:
A key difference between the Nazis and the Houthis is that the Nazis planned to enslave, rape, ethnically cleanse and/or exterminate ~80 million Slavs and Jews in eastern Europe, and—crucially—the Nazis had the means to carry this out.
Perhaps it would have been good to attack Germany earlier to prevent the Holocaust. It would be, however, very unwise to attack Yemen now to prevent another holocaust—because there is no way in hell the Houthis will ever be able to pull this off against Israel and America. In the mid-1930s, Germany had a population of ~65 million, a military with ~600,000 active personnel and ~1.2 million reserve, and an industrial base that rivalled that of the USSR and Britain. If one day the Houthis achieve a military build-up like this, I'll reconsider my position.
Also, while the Houthis seem to lack irredentist ambitions, the Nazis were already talking about Lebensraum in the early '30s.
*Even if we didn't do this, it would be better to let them fire at ships than launch a full war to destroy them, which would clearly require troops on the ground and a massive counter-insurgency operation (considering that a decade-plus of constant aerial assault has only left them stronger).
Thanks for sending me the Atlantic article on mistranslated quotes. I read it, revised my article, and wrote a correction. I had included the quote where Gallant says "we will eliminate it all" but "it all" was mistranslated as "everything." I added a note to another quote in my article to specify that Gallant was referring to Hamas one of the times he said "human animals," though I kept the quote in because I thought the most important part was when Gallant said "I have released all restraints" to Israeli troops who were about to fight in Gaza. Most of the quotes I included were not mentioned by the Atlantic article.
Let the Substack foreign policy wars begin. I was getting sick of arguing about shrimp welfare anyway.
Genuine question: why shouldn't we just invade Iran tomorrow? I recently made the argument that if we had invaded Iran back in 2003, a significant number of lives would have been saved, *as opposed to invading Afghanistan and occupying Iraq*. But, we didn't and here we are. Now Iran is funding the Houthis.
The answer for me is that invading Iran is very difficult and expensive, and it would be preferable to use that money to bribe Iran into being nicer, as we have in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan.
I think any attack on the Houthis needs to be part of a larger carrot and stick diplomatic effort. Attack the Houthis, sure, but offer Iran a deal where we make peace in exchange for a relief of sanctions.
But wasn't that already tried by Biden, and it led to October 7th? Maybe. Maybe Biden was simultaneously not aggressive enough and also, at the same time, not offering Iran enough goodies to stop funding terrorists.
In my opinion, you should be offering the Iranians a trillion dollar deal (in sanctions relief, trade deals, favored nation status) if they give absolute assurance to cut off all support for terrorists (Hezbollah and Houthis). If the Iranians don't take this deal, ratchet up the sanctions much, much further, including secondary sanctions on Russia and China for any cooperation with Iran.
There is a problem of enforcement: if the Iranians take the deal, how do you ensure genuine good faith follow-through? Well, if the Houthis and Hezbollah are funded, you immediately slap sanctions back on Iran and its allies (Russia and China). There's a way to do this where Iran understands that the deal is very strict and they are incentivized to not try to cheat.
But this only works when you have an extremely focused and consistent foreign policy apparatus. If Biden is disinterested and limp-wristed, or Trump is erratic and unpredictable, none of this works. And I'd argue that if we temporarily bomb the Houthis, and then get distracted by something else, it would basically be better if we just never bombed the Houthis at all.
The gap between "optimal foreign policy" and "how democracy actually works" is pretty significant. Especially in an age of populism where the deep state is constantly undermined and scapegoated.
I think I have some post advocating for lots of hawkishness toward Iran from a while ago... certainly would've preferred it to the Iraq mess!
> I think any attack on the Houthis needs to be part of a larger carrot and stick diplomatic effort.
Agreed—I want the Houthis disempowered, and if we can achieve this via strong-arm diplomacy, that's obviously better than brutal war.
> But this only works when you have an extremely focused and consistent foreign policy apparatus.
Also agreed. There are good practical reasons to not do stuff in general these days, which is a shame. But if e.g. FDR were in charge, I'd be very glad to do all the stuff! Or, yeah, if the deep state regained control...
The whole principle here is extremely confused. There are millions of “Nazis” stashed away in every corner of the world, but it would be insane to go to war with them. North Korea has concentration camps — is it time to bomb them? India is committing serious human rights abuses — what about them? What about Hungary — the fact that they’re not invading their neighbors or killing people *yet* is irrelevant — in fact, it’s *more* reason to bomb them now so they don’t start doing it later. For that matter, it’s *possible* that Britain might finally wipe out Ireland or try to recolonize Africa while we least suspect it, so we might as well firebomb London. Wouldn’t you bomb the Nazis in 1935?
If we took “punching Nazis” seriously as the basis of our foreign policy we would start about a million wars, kill a billion people, and do even more damage to the world than Nazi Germany did.
Specific to Yemen: “Defeating” the Houthis, as any other insurgency, would require killing at least hundreds of thousands of people, and even then they’d probably just ramp up recruitment and make up most of the losses. It’s really astounding that you would make the comparison to Gaza. Anyone who would willingly start a Gaza-style war *by choice* — which is what the campaign against the Houthis is and has been for a decade — is a very ill informed or evil person. In fact, I think we would have a much greater reason to “punch” someone who’s already murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, who is actively killing more of them right now, and who bombed the poorest country in the Middle East back to the fucking Stone Age, than we do to “punch” (great euphemism for mass murder, by the way) some qat-chewing fanatics with asymmetric weapons.
I think it would be fair for anyone to disregard your whole argument unless you actually make reference to what’s likely to happen absent a(nother) Yemen war and with one. Absent one, you get continued minor disruption to international shipping, drone attacks against Saudi Arabia and Israel (unless, you know, they stop committing industrial scale slaughter in Gaza), and extremely repressive and incompetent rule in Yemen — all bad things. With a war, you murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, still have extremely repressive and incompetent rule, and potentially further radicalize the Houthis, who were actually fairly moderate until the U.S. invaded Iraq and started droning Yemen in the 2000s. Not to mention, the reason Iran has been arming the Houthis during the war (they had virtually no relationship prior to 2014) was to bait the Saudis into spending tens of billions of dollars on an idiotic military campaign they couldn’t win. Getting the United States to do the same would make the Iranians’ investment pay off more than they ever could have imagined and probably rally insurgents across the region just like Iraq did.
Bottom line: I cling to the apparently Tankie position that mass murder isn’t justified to make some idiotic, totally symbolic point about the imagined moral purity of American foreign policy (ironically while you partner with a country whose leadership is under indictment for war crimes and a despotic absolute monarchy that beheads people for fake crimes like witchcraft). At the very least, I think the people you’d be killing would disagree that the operation is so high and mighty.
> There are millions of “Nazis” stashed away in every corner of the world that it would be utterly insane to do anything about militarily.
Right, mostly because they aren't a government for tens of millions of people, with lots of Iranian funding and lots of ballistic missiles. And if they are a government, like North Korea or India or Hungary or Britain (??), they aren't Nazis! North Korea is very bad and I think there might be a strong case to be made for attacking them too, but India, Hungary, and Britain especially don't have a line in their constitution that says, "Oh, and by the way, our entire national project is aimed at eradicating the Muslims / Balkans(?) / Irish(???)." I think that if you want to be a government, you shouldn't be allowed to be a Nazi—none of these are good counterexamples to that point. Human rights abuses are bad; explicitly declared genocidal intent & capacity to carry it out is another thing altogether.
> “Defeating” the Houthis, as any other insurgency, would require killing at least hundreds of thousands of people, and even then they’d probably just ramp up recruitment and make up most of the losses.
Yes and no. I'll admit this is probably the strongest case against punching Nazis—it can make them look sympathetic. Then again, Gazans are protesting against Hamas in a way that they couldn't and didn't before the war (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g71lk09npo). Similarly, as the war against the actual Nazis went on, pro-Nazi sentiment in Germany waned, and we were eventually able to put a good, normal government in charge. I'm doubtful that a defeat of the Houthis and reformation of Yemen is as difficult as you say—I know, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.: none of these guys were Nazis! "The Houthis are Deeply Unpopular in Yemen" (https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/the-houthis-are-deeply-unpopular-in-yemen-and-thats-an-opportunity): approval is at 8% in Houthi-controlled areas, and 3% elsewhere. (https://sanaacenter.org/the-yemen-review/july-sept-2024/23516)
Also, "potentially further radicalize the Houthis"—what? A) Who would they even be radicalized against? The US, I assume, the people who are bombing them. So, B) What does that look like? They'd be more likely to do violence against the US... a country they would be at war with? And also one they're already declaring "death to," and have been since Iraq—what's done is done, man. Hitler was fairly chill about the Jews until the Treaty of Versailles—still good to punch Nazis.
> I don’t think mass murder is justified to make some idiotic, totally symbolic point about the imagined moral purity of American foreign policy
Right, my point is that this moral purity isn't "imagined." We used to make a point of fighting "ultimately evil" ideologies and people—now we don't. I think we should do that again. It's good to show the world that you can't get away with ultimate evil, it's good to free the Yemenis from deeply unpopular Houthi oppression, and it's good to stop Nazis from terrorizing global shipping and attacking Israel and the Saudis.
Also, symbolic ≠ meaningless, in fact it's the opposite—"America is a morally trustworthy Nazi-puncher" is a totally indefensible statement now, in a way that it wasn't in 1945, and that's a bad thing that undermines anti-Nazists everywhere! Also, it's not "totally symbolic"—I hate to trot out the "military strikes are an extremely cheap way to help foreigners" thing again, but Gaddafi was super-duper popular in Libya, which maybe helps explain why it went so wrong when that the Marshall Plan went so right.
> great euphemism to obscure the fact that you’re talking about mass murder, by the way
I'm not being shy about the idea that war kills people, but I am drawing a parallel between violence against Nazis and violence against the Houthis, for reasons I think I make clear. "Mass murder" is a charged term too; you could just as accurately use something like "large civilian casualties," but you'd rather portray all war deaths as unjustified premeditated killing. I'd rather portray them as tragic and unfortunate means to a very justifiable end.
1. But the principle you’re endorsing here seems to be “we should bomb any entity with racism and shittiness > 0 because on a long enough time horizon the chance they commit genocide approaches 1.” On this principle it wouldn’t matter if an entity is explicitly genocidal or not, just that p(genocide) in any particular year > 0 (which is true of literally any entity on Earth). If that’s the principle, then you have to think we should firebomb London. If not, you have to very carefully consider the costs and benefits of a Houthi campaign, which you don’t do in the article.
2. First, you’re not even addressing the point of civilian deaths here. The Saudis killed 400,000 people and the Houthis only got stronger. How many more people do you think should be killed to get rid of a group whose greatest capabilities are some suicide drones and cruise missiles that don’t work half the time? 500,000? 1,000,000? That’s psychotic. The damage the Houthis can do is nowhere near the atrocity that would have to be committed — and indeed, already has been committed — to defeat them.
Second, every person who has ever advocated or planned a counterinsurgency war has seriously underestimated the resilience of insurgents. The Taliban was probably as unpopular as the Houthis, then held out for 20 years and won. Hamas has recruited nearly as many fighters as have been killed in the past year and a half. The Houthis were already widely unpopular during the Saudi war but got stronger anyway. As for radicalization, they haven’t yet attacked the thousands of U.S. troops throughout the region, even though they could easily lob a few missiles their way — seems like an obvious target if the U.S. would go full-bore against them anyway.
Also, the so-called Yemeni government is a joke. You’d basically be looking at an open-ended occupation and insurgency until the U.S. can’t accept any more losses and pulls out in shame.
3. Tangentially: This is straight up historical revisionism. The U.S. fought Nazis because it didn’t want a single country to take over Europe. If the balance of power had been different, it would have sided with the Nazis to stop the Soviets (something Harry Truman actually said in 1941). It fought the Cold War as a struggle for supremacy, not liberal democracy — or else it wouldn’t have propped up totalitarianism in Latin America and elsewhere. That the U.S. has been primarily motivated to fight “ultimate evil” is an obvious fiction.
In Yemen, the main destructive influence over the past decade has been Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States. No serious observer who isn’t a Senior Fellow of Laundering Blood Money at the Scoop Jackson Institute for Security Affairs can possibly look at the conflict and think the U.S. and the Saudis have been the “good guys,” or that there are any “good guys,” which is a childish and idiotic way to think about these things. Needlessly murdering hundreds of thousands of people automatically disqualifies you from taking the moral high ground. This should be the most obvious thing on Earth.
4. I have explicitly said before that killing civilians is sometimes justified. But when you aren’t accomplishing a legitimate objective, or you’re killing people totally out of proportion with your objective, that’s mass murder.
[You're remarkably good at turning arguments into numbered lists; I envy that talent]
1. No, that would be a weird principle. Probably I shouldn't have included the reference to your nuclear war point, because it definitely implies that. My bad! I only meant to point out that the counterfactual benefits of beating up on Nazis with ballistic missiles are, in fact, quite substantial.
2. Why would I think that a certain number of civilian deaths is the tipping point for defeating the Houthis? Saudi Arabia's war has been, as I said, corruptly and ineptly carried out. The Hamas war, on the other hand, has been much more precise, much less deadly for civilians, and much better at reducing Hamas' capabilities. Same for the strikes on Hezbollah. I don't see why we couldn't model a war against the Houthis on those examples.
The Taliban is Houthi-levels of unpopular now, sure, but I don't think they were so unpopular back in the post-Soviet-invasion days. I'm having trouble finding direct data on this, but in 2011, at least, Afghans were far more likely to criticize the US-backed government (for instability and corruption) than the Taliban for Taliban-ing (https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Afghanistan_2011-Survey-of-the-Afghan-People.pdf). Maybe much of this is just, "Yemen and Afghanistan are shitty places to live, and so people blame whoever's in charge." But it seems like we could solve this by doing a not-awful-job of putting someone new in charge of Yemen, which, yes, is hard, but no, is not impossible. It certainly doesn't have to be the Yemeni government in its current form—do an occupation, build some bridges and some ports, make Yemen the Japan of the Red Sea.
3. Agreed that this is tangential, disagreed that I'm engaging in revisionism. America might've been not-so-anti-Nazi in the early 40s, but by 1945, we'd realized that the Nazis were ultimately evil and that we, America, should oppose ultimate evil. This is the main point of Yglesias' writing—what we did in WW2 was good, nothing to do with whether it was inevitable the US would oppose the Nazis or whether they were considered to be the ultimate evil in 1941. Now we know: Nazis are evil.
"There are no good guys in deadly wars" is a really annoying take. Yes, the Saudis suck and did a bad job of fighting the war justly. This suggests that it would be hard to fight the war justly and non-suckily in the future, and yet I'm arguing that it's probably quite doable.
If America ever did conduct a successful anti-Hezbollah/Hamas-style offensive against the Houthis, that would make us the good guys! Either this is practically possible or it isn't—there's lots of debate to be had there—but the question in no way hinges on whether I'd ever be allowed to claim the moral high ground, I simply am.
4. Cool, we're agreed here.
Maybe I'm just too isolationist, but... no.
Unless I'm missing something, the Houthis pose the least threat to Israel of all the Iranian puppets. I understand "immediate threat" is different from the long term risk potential, but I see two issues with this:
1. Anecdotally, I've seen western antizionists (who obviously want to see the Houthis in the best possible light) celebrate their drone program, which is apparently like one drone. They'll say "well the next drone will reach Tel Aviv!" but it's still one drone my guy. The immediate threat is small, and consequently the horizon of this longterm risk is really far away.
2. Is there a way to win a conflict with the Houthis without drawing in Iran? Because if not, then we should be debating that instead.
I can not see who these guys think they are… ‼️
Get it, cause not see like Nazi and who these like Houthis
Really leaning into the definition of Nazi as "thing I do not like" here.
ok, nazi.
Nazi Germany was a reactionary state with a big military in Central Europe. The government practiced a sort of quasi state atheism, and was primarily concerned with both rooting out internal dissent and conquering Eastern Europe. All it has in common with the Houthis is anti-Semetism.
If America conquering Nazi Germany is the best thing ever - first this has to be justified. Apparently it was great because the Nazis were evil - but the same people who invented that definition now say that all white men are evil, so whatever. Possibly it was great because Nazi Germany was a big threat that wanted America gone - but so was the Soviet Union, and all of our efforts to stop Nazi Germany just meant that the Soviets would come out stronger in the ensuring Cold War. Possibly it was good because it meant seizing control of Europe's resources - but I have yet to see a single buck from that effort, and all the Europeans we have 'saved' seem happy to live off America's military while complaining constantly. If it was justified because the Nazis were reactionary and we should be replacing all governments with left wing ones - then that would also mean getting rid of Israel sooner rather than later. Hmmmmm.
If the definition of Nazi here is just anti Semites, the Houthis barely register as a threat to Jews across the world. The Houthis want Yemen to be free of Saudi influence and launch nuisance attacks on world trade in the Red Sea. The main loser from Houthi attacks in this area is Egypt. The Houthis are probably going to continue being anti Semetic for a long time, just like the Taliban. Y Bother?
> Apparently it was great because the Nazis were evil - but the same people who invented that definition now say that all white men are evil, so whatever.
This is exactly the sort of viewpoint that Yglesias dismantled yesterday. I'll quote:
"while [Robert] Harris posits [in "Fatherland"] a certain structural similarity between America’s relationship with a victorious Nazi Germany and our real world relationship with the Soviet Union, he’s also drawing a distinction. You’re supposed to read Harris’s history and be glad that you’re living in the real timeline. The Soviet Union was bad, but Nazi Germany was a kind of ultimate evil, and the characters in that book are working to expose that evil."
There's a Mike Huemer post which talks about DEI as a school that only teaches true bad things about Jews (https://fakenous.substack.com/p/can-teaching-the-truth-be-racist)—the Nazis were men with guns that only taught bad things, false and true, about the Jews, and also said repeatedly, "we want to kill all the Jews." Similarly, the Hutu militias were men with guns that only said bad and genocidal things about the Tutsis. The Houthis are men with guns that only say bad and genocidal things about the Jews—this is cause for concern!
I agree that it's unlikely they'll carry out an entire genocide, but I think there are still reasons we should strike at them hard: a) if we don't, they'll continue to swim in Iranian funding and shoot missiles at container ships and Tel Aviv, and b) if we do, we tell the world that America is the kind of power that dislikes (in a very active way) governments with Nazi ideologies. That's an important thing for the world to know, and very bad for the world to doubt.
Yglesias wants to live in a reality where the nice, nebbish liberals set the cultural mood, and there are only a few bad apples on the left who can be silenced by ignoring them. One would hope that the last 80 years would finally be proof enough that the real world doesn't work like this.
The use of Nazi and fascist as cheap epithets was part and parcel of the radical communist's worldview, and it's only with that being absorbed into the liberal left that we even cease to recognize it as communist. The constant vigilance and hatred for any sort of dominant racial group was inevitably going to create DEI, woke, anti-white-ism, whatever else you want to call it. Nice, moderate centrists have never stopped the liberal-commies. At best they have slightly moderated their excesses. It hasn't stopped them from pushing some countries to the brink already, like South Africa. And, of course, Israel is next on their hit list. Why wouldn't it be, considering how bad the carpet bombing of Gaza looks to even the Yglesiases of the world?
"I agree that it's unlikely they'll carry out an entire genocide, but I think there are still reasons we should strike at them hard: a) if we don't, they'll continue to swim in Iranian funding and shoot missiles at container ships and Tel Aviv, and b) if we do, we tell the world that America is the kind of power that dislikes (in a very active way) governments with Nazi ideologies. That's an important thing for the world to know, and very bad for the world to doubt."
If we do hit them, they will still have Iranian funding, because hitting them does not stop Iran from funding them. Any intended signaling that America hates genocidal groups will also fall on deaf ears when our apparent 'solution' to Hezbollah has been to sic genocidal Turkish Sunni proxies in Syria.