Last week, President Donald Trump declared that his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen was a success and announced a ceasefire deal with the militant group. Since then, reporting from multiple media outlets has revealed that the military operation ended not because Trump believed he was winning, but because the strikes were so ineffective that the he decided the U.S. couldn’t win.
At first blush, this is a classic story of Trump declaring yet another faux victory after a failed initiative. But in another light this is an unusual example of Trump doing something at least partially right. Trump’s skepticism and impatience with protracted foreign entanglements in the Middle East is a rare bright spot in the America First paradigm. And if American presidents were more inclined to manufacture off-ramps to exit pointless and destructive interventions abroad, the world would experience less suffering.
That Trump ultimately found a way out is a better outcome than what would've happened had he tried to stay the course.
Trump’s bombing campaign of Yemen, which lasted nearly two months, did not go well. According to The New York Times, in the first month of the campaign, the Houthis “shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), hampering Central Command’s ability to track and strike the militant group. Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses, making real the possibility of American casualties,” the Times wrote. And one of the $67 million F/A-18E Super Hornets that tumbled off the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier into the Red Sea was caused by the carrier making a hard turn to avoid Houthi fire, according to the Times. Despite the U.S. burning over a $1 billion on its intensive air strikes, the Houthis remained undeterred and were continuing to fire at ships in the Red Sea.
The Trump administration initially refused to lay out the exact parameters for its campaign against the Houthis. But the Times, citing three U.S. officials, reports that the plan was for a long operation expected to last eight to ten months. The objectives were more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s failed air campaign against the Houthis, and included a plan to use tremendous firepower to take out the group’s air defenses and also assassinate Houthi leaders.
But, according to the Times, Trump asked for a progress report after a month and, feeling unsatisfied by the progress, decided to scrap the plan. Instead, the U.S. and the Houthis settled on a ceasefire agreement that the Houthis would stop firing on U.S. ships in exchange for the U.S. suspending its operations. Notably, that agreement did not restrict the Houthis from firing on Israel or shipments it considered helpful to Israel, which in turn has contributed to a growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump framed the ceasefire to the public in a misleading way. He said that the Houthis had “capitulated” and “they don’t want to fight anymore.” In reality, it was Trump that didn’t want to fight anymore, and he was covering up that his billion-dollar operation hardly dented the famously hardy militants’ operational capacity.
But the substance of Trump’s decision matters too, and it was a judicious one. As I argued earlier this year, Trump’s decision to initiate the strikes in the first place was foolish and destructive — the bombings were pre-emptive, highly unlikely to be successful and caused civilian casualties from the get-go, according to the The Yemen Data Project. But letting the operation get drawn out would’ve been worse still.
Often, the longer U.S. military campaigns go on, the more pressure American presidents feel to double down and extend timelines of U.S. involvement, searching for some discernible victory that may justify the bloodshed. In Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, American presidents have presided over the deaths of many millions of civilians and tens of thousands of U.S. service members because leaders didn’t want to admit that their mission was impossible.
Some of Trump’s ceasefire with the Houthis could be attributed to his fickle, impatient nature, a continual inability to see things through, particularly if they become too controversial. But Trump’s operation against the Houthis wasn’t treated as controversial by the mainstream press, in contrast to the (quite reasonable) uproar over the Signal scandal. Moreover, as the Times reports, a number of Trump’s inner circle, including Vice President JD Vance and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, were skeptics of the operation. That they were in Trump’s White House as voices to counsel him against doubling down in Yemen is a testament to the ideological norms Trump generated through America First talking points and his criticism of forever wars in the Middle East.
None of this makes Trump some kind of principled anti-imperialist. His language proposing territorial expansion by taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland hardly shows a regard for the sovereignty of other nations. And he has made policy moves that make military strikes on Mexico increasingly possible. In an ideal world, Trump would have owned the idea of the campaign against the Houthis as a failed, pointless venture instead of selling it as a victory. But even conventional, non-narcissistic heads of state are unlikely to squander political capital with such an admission of incompetence. That Trump ultimately found a way out is a better outcome than what would’ve happened had he tried to stay the course.