What happens when the missiles come from Chinese, Russian, or Iranian vessels or aircraft? From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:
The main significance of the Houthi attack is that that the era of ballistic missile warfare against ships at sea has begun.
In scoring a direct hit on the MSC Palatium 3 vessel with their anti-ship ballistic missiles, Yemen’s rag tag Houthi militia have ushered in a new era in naval warfare not only in the Red Sea but further afield as well.
With BP pausing all oil tanker transits through the Red Sea, the Houthis have certainly made a splash. The Houthi’s success, if success it was, is being carefully studied by Iran, China, Russia, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines and all others caught up in the naval wars that lie ahead.
Although the Palestinians, desperately fighting their own regional war, might regard this attack as a victory, tactically it pales in comparison to NATO’s attacks on Russian shipping in the Black Sea and Norway’s terrorist attack on the Nordstream pipeline. The European lie of the land is that Russia must devote much more military resources to fend off NATO’s land armies and Germany, despite sending 5,000 troops to Lithuania, is economically and militarily kaput. As far as the European front goes, for the United States, it is game over as Germany is down and Russia is permanently locked out of dealing with Europe, so much so that all of Western Europe is now in bondage to Uncle Sam for the foreseeable future. Europe, for all intents and purposes, is no longer an independent or even important actor; geopolitically, it is an irrelevance.
Yemen, meanwhile, feels it can control the world’s third busiest major choke point, even though a number of countries, China most notably, have military bases nearby. Perhaps, as the crayon and colouring book strategists say, Yemen is the new Britannia and rules the waves, or at least those waves that lap up to the shorelines of Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt and Eritrea that border The Red Sea.
