The Blockade That Shook the World

On November 19, 2023, Houthi fighters boarded the Israeli-linked Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea, marking the first naval blockade in history imposed by a force without its own navy. From that moment, Yemen effectively corked one of the world’s most vital trade routes, disrupting a third of global container traffic and nearly a quarter of all maritime trade between non-neighboring countries. The economic shock waves were immediate. Shipping giants rerouted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope for the first time in over 150 years, sending transit times, costs, and insurance premiums soaring.

When the blockade began in November 14, 2023. It had initially only targeted ships bound for Israel. From the outset, the Houthis were committed to ending the genocide in Gaza by placing economic pressure on Israel.  The United States responded with Operation Prosperity Guardian, a twenty-nation coalition — a number of whose members refused to be named publicly — meant to secure Red Sea trade.

Yet Ansar Allah’s blockade continued. Its strategy exposed a fundamental shift in naval warfare: a nonstate actor, using cheap and domestically produced technology, had outmaneuvered the most powerful military alliance in history.

At the start of 2025, a fragile cease-fire took hold—and with it, the Red Sea blockade was temporarily lifted. But by March, as Israel shattered the truce and escalated its starvation campaign in Gaza, Ansar Allah moved swiftly to reimpose its maritime siege. This time, the US launched a unilateral bombing campaign against Yemen, with Britain — ever the loyal junior partner — quickly falling in line.

The Power of Geographic Choke Points

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a twenty-mile-wide passage between Yemen and Djibouti, is one of the most critical bottlenecks in global trade. Roughly 12–15 percent of all global commerce passes through it, including 12 percent of the world’s oil and 30 percent of containerized goods. When Ansar Allah closed it, the economic fallout was enormous.

Disruptions at Bab el-Mandeb cost the global economy an estimated $23 billion annually under normal conditions — let alone during a full-blown blockade. Without access to the strait, ships were forced to take the long, stormy detour around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks to transit times and millions in fuel costs per voyage.

The United States and its allies could not simply bomb their way out of this problem. Yemen’s control of the coastline meant that even a few well-placed missiles or drones could deter commercial shipping indefinitely.

Domestic Arms Production and Iranian Backing

Geography alone does not explain the success of Ansar Allah’s strategy. Over the past decade, it has built a formidable domestic arms industry, producing cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones capable of striking ships hundreds of kilometers away.

Iran has played a crucial role in this development, supplying technical expertise, missile components, and training. Since at least 2014, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force has smuggled advisors and weapons into Yemen via air and sea, helping Ansar Allah establish missile production facilities in Sa’da.

But Yemen’s ability to adapt commercial technology for military use — such as repurposed Chinese-made drones — has been just as important. This blend of domestic innovation and foreign support allowed Ansar Allah to wage an asymmetric war against far wealthier adversaries.

The Fragility of Global Shipping

The United States and its allies’ inability to stop Ansar Allah blockade has exposed the costs underlying the efficiency of modern maritime capitalism. The shipping industry’s decades-long march toward consolidation and scale has undermined the stability of maritime trade routes. This fragility has been exploited to devastating effect by groups like Ansar Allah.

Today global trade moves through an increasingly narrow funnel. Over the past half decade, three to four shipping alliances have controlled upward of 90 percent of container traffic between Asia, Europe, and North America. These alliances’ fleets consist of ultralarge container vessels (ULCVs) that would have been unimaginable just decades ago. In the 1980s, the largest ships carried 4,500 containers; today a typical ULCV hauls 24,000.

But embracing large-scale shipping also came at a cost. This new model had three major consequences:

• The port squeeze: ULCVs require deepwater ports with specialized infrastructure, leaving only a handful of global hubs capable of handling them. Where hundreds of ports once participated in global trade, now a disruption in Singapore, Rotterdam, or Shanghai sends shockwaves worldwide.
• The efficiency trap: The quest to maximize capacity has eliminated all slack from the system. Modern shipping runs on just-in-time precision where delays measured in hours can trigger weeks-long backups. When the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in 2021, it choked 12 percent of global trade for six days.
• The alliance stranglehold: With near-total control of vital routes, the shipping alliances created a system where their risk aversion became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When insurers balk at rising premiums, the alliances reroute en masse — as they did during Ansar Allah’s blockade.

The container revolution of the 1960s made this system possible by boosting port productivity a hundredfold. But it also eliminated the buffers that once absorbed shocks. In the past, dockworkers moved cargo piece by piece, creating natural redundancies. Today automated machines move mountains of containers in hours — until something goes wrong.

Ansar Allah seemingly understood this calculus perfectly. It didn’t need to defeat the US Navy; it simply had to make the Red Sea’s risk premiums outweigh its profits. Commander Eric Blomberg, who oversaw Operation Prosperity Guardian, made the reluctant admission that “we [the United States] only have to get it wrong once. . . . The Houthis just have to get one through.”

This is the paradox of twenty-first century capitalism: the same efficiencies that generate staggering profits also create catastrophic vulnerabilities. The system’s greatest strength — its tightly woven interdependence — became its greatest weakness when confronted with a movement capable of exploiting its pressure points.

Israel’s Economic Crisis

The blockade hit Israel particularly hard. About 60 percent of its GDP comes from trade, and 99.6 percent of that (by weight, 65 percent by volume) is seaborne. This makes Israel a de facto island state, reliant on imports for raw materials, consumer goods, and energy resources excluding natural gas. Three ports — Haifa, Ashdod, and Eilat — handle 80 percent of the country’s maritime traffic.

But by mid-2024, Eilat — Israel’s Red Sea lifeline to Asia — was effectively dead, having officially declared bankruptcy to the Knesset. Ships refused to risk the journey, opting instead for the 11,000-nautical-mile detour around Africa. Insurance premiums surged by 900 percent, and shipping costs from China to Europe quadrupled.

Even Israel’s vaunted natural gas exports were crippled. Israel lost out on fulfilling its dream of becoming a regional liquefied natural gas (LNG) export hub given the difficulty and expense of getting large tankers to its ports.

A New Chapter in Asymmetric Conflict

Ansar Allah’s blockade of the Red Sea marked more than a tactical success — it revealed how smaller actors can leverage the vulnerabilities of an interconnected global economy. By disrupting one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes, it demonstrated that in an era of hyperefficient trade, even limited military capabilities can have outsized strategic effects.

The United States and its allies, despite their overwhelming firepower, struggled to counter a campaign that targeted not just ships but the underlying economics of maritime trade. Where traditional military doctrine prioritizes brute force, Ansar Allah’s approach exploited systemic weaknesses — consolidated shipping routes, just-in-time logistics, and risk-averse insurance markets. The result was a crisis that could not be solved by missiles alone.

This conflict has broader implications for how power is projected in the twenty-first century. Military dominance no longer guarantees control when economic pressure points — shipping lanes, supply chains, financial systems — can be contested by unconventional means. The tools of globalization, designed to maximize efficiency, have also created new vulnerabilities.