As Washington continues to help arm and finance the Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Gaza, White House rhetoric has increasingly centered on preventing the war from expanding across the region. But the Biden administration’s actions in Yemen and the Red Sea are having exactly the opposite effect.

Beginning shortly after the Israeli assault on Gaza started in early October, Houthi militants from Yemen launched a series of attacks on commercial ships, some of them connected to the Israeli economy, in the shipping lanes in, and around the Red Sea. The militants announced that their attacks were conducted to support the people of Gaza and would continue until a cease-fire was put in place. While relatively little damage was done, the threat was taken very seriously, and shipping and insurance companies began rerouting large container ships away from the Red Sea to a longer route around Africa — adding significant time and cost to global shipping. This rerouting has the potential to cause serious problems in countries around the world that depend on global shipping lanes for export and import of everything from crude oil to children’s toys.

The day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the United States sent an entire aircraft carrier group to the region that was soon joined by two other destroyers and a ten-country armada of additional warships. On December 31, the US used helicopter gunships to sink Houthi attack boats in the Red Sea, killing ten Houthi fighters. Less than two weeks later, on January 12, the United States, backed by the UK, attacked twenty-eight sites inside Yemen, killing at least five Houthi fighters and injuring six — the strike included Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a ballistic missile submarine. And early on January 16, Washington launched another cruise missile attack inside Yemen, allegedly targeting Houthi anti-ship missiles. Overall, violence is rapidly escalating across the already tense and highly militarized region.