As he sized up a U.S. plan to strike Houthi militants in Yemen in March, Vice President JD Vance didn’t think such an aggressive move was a good idea — at least not now. The vice president’s initial comment in the Signal chat that has gotten so much attention this week was that such a strike would be “a mistake.”
Among other things, he didn’t think the American public would understand why we were doing it and worried that it might cause oil prices to spike. In that message, he wrote:
3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.
I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded by arguing that the strike wouldn’t even be about the militants the U.S. sought to kill. Instead, it was about signaling American power to the world.
Though most of the commentary about the Signal group chat this past week has focused on the accidental inclusion of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg — an outrageous breach of national security protocols — the scandal has also provided us an extraordinary window into Trump’s inner circle’s thinking about foreign policy strategy.
It underscores how farcical Trump's pledge to be president of "peace" and focus narrowly on American interests has already turned out to be.
What it reveals is a cavalier attitude toward new open-ended bombardment campaigns. And it underscores how farcical Trump’s pledge to be president of “peace” and focus narrowly on American interests has already turned out to be. Trump didn’t need to drop bombs on scores of sites across the poorest country in the Middle East now or with such intensity — and his whole team admitted it.
Vance was not wholly opposed to the strikes, but saw them as a deviation from a narrow focus on American interests. In some ways, he seemed to be holding the strictest interpretation of “America First" principles in the chat. His thinking was why attack Houthi militants if doing so wasn’t that important for the U.S. economically, but could hurt U.S. consumers and politically hurt Trump?
Multiple principals in the chat pushed Vance to adopt an expansive vision of U.S. national interests.
Hegseth argued, “This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause.” And national security adviser Michael Waltz contended: “Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.”
In a later exchange Vance says he defers to the group but that he hates the idea of “bailing Europe out again.” Hegseth replies, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”
In the discussion, Hegseth and Waltz represent a more traditional view of America as the world’s police officer. They’re saying this isn’t about defending the U.S. against the militants who are being targeted, and it isn’t about the U.S.’s own economic interests. Rather, it’s an intervention on behalf of U.S. allies and a pre-emptive signal to the U.S.’s nemesis in the region, Iran. It functions as a way “to send a message” about American geopolitical supremacy. It is the kind of argument that could easily be advanced by a Democratic liberal internationalist or a Republican neoconservative — both factions that some MAGA types have correctly lambasted as war hungry.
Weeks after Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Israel began its retaliation, Houthi rebels began launching missiles and drone attacks at Israel and commercial ships in the Red Sea, citing Israel's bombing of Gaza and stating it wouldn't stop until “Israeli aggression stops." The Biden administration launched airstrikes against the Houthis in 2024, but that did not stop them. Rather, the Houthis announced a pause when Israel and Hamas struck a ceasefire deal. (In the meantime, many shipping companies have taken up routes avoiding the Red Sea, and after an initial rise in the price of shipping, those companies adapted and prices came down again this year.) Now, in light of Israel’s decision to torpedo the ceasefire deal and impose a starvation blockade on the entire population of Gaza — with Trump's blessing — the Houthis had warned that they would resume missile attacks. But they hadn’t yet. Multiple Pentagon officials told Military.com that the Houthis last launched an attack in December. In other words, Trump approved a pre-emptive strike, not a protective one; as Hegseth put it, the U.S. got to "start this on our own terms." The U.S. has been carrying out such attacks on a daily basis since March 15 and released few details about them, and it’s unclear when they’ll stop.
These attacks have serious consequences for the civilian population of Yemen. Yemeni officials say the strikes have hit residential areas. Indeed, in the chat discussion in the aftermath of the strikes, Waltz appears to admit that the U.S. targeted civilian infrastructure. “The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote on Signal.
“Excellent,” Vance replied.
The Yemen Data Project, an independent nonprofit that monitors attacks in the country, reports that it “recorded 53 civilian casualties in 38 U.S.-led strikes from 15 to 21 March.” And according to Military.com, citing two defense officials, the Trump administration is striking a broader range of targets than President Joe Biden did and harbors “less reluctance to hold off striking targets based on the casualties that may result.” All this is all happening in a war-torn, destitute country where most of the population is food insecure.
There's reason to be doubtful that these attacks will deter the Houthis. “The group withstood seven years of Saudi-led airstrikes and a year of U.S. strikes under the Biden administration, which yielded little effect,” Luca Nevola, a senior analyst for Yemen and the Gulf at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a crisis monitoring group, told The New York Times. Given that resilience, there’s not a lot of reason to believe that Trump’s apparently open-ended campaign will in fact make a huge dent using air power alone.
America First, as we’re coming to see in Trump’s second term, is not fundamentally about reducing conflict in the world; nor does it reflect a serious commitment to restraint. Since news of the Signal chat broke, Democrats and liberal commentators have slammed Trump’s national security team for discussing military plans on a chat that included a journalist. They’ve laughed at the misspelling of “principals” in the group chat, and derided those officials’ hokey use of prayer emojis in anticipation of the strikes. Granted, it was an idiotic and concerning lapse in security protocol. However an important part of the story isn’t just the lapse itself, but what it teaches us about how Trump’s inner circle sees the United States’ role in the world, and how that vision is contiguous with that of previous stewards of American empire. That this seems to have largely gone unnoticed speaks to how numb Americans have become to dropping bombs in the Middle East.
