America's Long Tradition of Fighting Piracy
And how Yemen's civil war birthed the current pirate crisis
A staple of Son of a Diplomat's Running Threads the last month has been the Biden administration’s meek response to the high seas piracy and terrorism of Abdul-Malik al-Houthi’s Yemeni rebels. Since October 7 the Iranian funded and supplied group of terrorists have been launching explosive drones and missiles at commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea and have even gone as far as boarding and capturing ships. This aquatic lawlessness has been going on for several months now but how did we get here?
Thirteen years after a Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation kicked off a region-wide protest movement, the effects of the Arab Spring are still rippling throughout the Middle East. Yemen was rocked with protests in 2011 that eventually led to the ouster of longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. His successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi then oversaw a descent into full-scale civil war in 2014. The Houthis quickly overran the capital, Sanaa which they control to this day. al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula captured their own territorial holdings during the chaos adding to the bloodshed and creating another hotspot of terrorism. After eight war-torn years, Saudi and coalition interventions, and countless civilian deaths, Hadi stepped down in the Spring of 2022:
Yemen's President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who ceded his powers to a presidential council on Thursday, fell foul of foes and allies in his efforts to cling to power from exile in Saudi Arabia, while often blocked from visiting his war-torn nation…Hadi failed to build a power base of his own during decades in uniform. After assuming power, he launched a "National Dialogue" to hash out a new constitution, but matters quickly unravelled. Saleh's army and government allies undermined the transition as al Qaeda militants carved out a mini-state and hit Sanaa with ever bloodier bombings. The Houthis seized Sanaa with help from army units loyal to Saleh, forcing Hadi to share power. When the National Dialogue proposed a federal constitution, both Houthis and southern separatists rejected it for blunting their new-found sway.
Fast-forwarding to today, Houthis are terrorizing the Red Sea with near impunity using Israel’s response to October 7 as their casus belli. The Biden Administration issued a “final warning” to the terror cell on January 3 which the Houthis responded to by launching a sea drone attack the very next day. The administration is clearly terrified of escalating the ongoing war in Gaza to a regional one, but striking Houthi command centers, launch sites, and leaders is necessary to defeat this threat and ensure safe passage of the Red Sea. Opaque warnings haven’t stemmed the steady stream of attacks and this only ends when America embraces its legacy of combatting piracy.
In fact, The United States’ very first “adventures abroad” were dealing with a trigger happy band of pirates on the Barbary coast.1 The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783 but our newfound independence came with a maritime cost; we no longer enjoyed the protection of the world’s largest navy. Realizing that the former colonies were no longer a part of the British Empire, the Barbary States (Morocco, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis) jumped at the opportunity to seize American commercial cargo and hold vessels and crews for ransom.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the Barbary States were nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire but de facto acted as autonomous political entities whose national budgets were largely comprised of state-sponsored piracy. In 1795 President Washington’s administration negotiated to pay off the Dey of Algiers to free American merchants who had been toiling in Algerian mines but this supplication did not stop Barbary pirates from seizing more ships and hostages in the ensuing decade. In the Spring of 1801, The Bashaw of Tripoli declared war on the United States after the Jefferson Administration refused additional tributes for safe Mediterranean passage.
While the United States struggled early in the war due to the limitations of our burgeoning navy, a ground offensive in 1805 that utilized local mercenaries pushed the Bashaw towards signing a peace deal:
Eaton, Hamet, and several marines marched their "army" nearly 500 miles through the desert along the southern shore of the Mediterranean and, on April 27, 1805, they captured the town of Derne, some miles east of Benghazi. The Argus and two sister ships supplied them with provisions along their march and actively supported them in the taking of Derne (where Hamet had been governor three years before under his brother Yusuf). In the meantime, the American blockade of Tripoli had been maintained through the winter and spring.
The first Barbary War was over and American maritime commercial interests were safe for now. However, north African pirates resumed targeting American merchant vessels during and after the War of 1812 and in 1815 James Madison dispatched a fleet to Algiers to decisively end the threat of Mediterranean piracy to the United States once and for all. After a few naval skirmishes, the second Barbary War came to a close in a matter of months.
Jefferson and Madison understood something that Joe Biden does not: pretending a problem doesn’t exist is not a solution and our national honor hinges on our ability to protect our commercial interests in the open sea. Jefferson in particular was keenly aware of the national honor aspect writing to Madison in 1786 arguing for a military intervention in the Maghreb:
1. Justice is in favor of this opinion. 2. Honor favors it. 3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safe-guard to interest. 4. It will arm the federal head with the safest of all the instruments of coercion over their delinquent members and prevent them from using what would be less safe. I think that so far you go with me. But in the next steps we shall differ. 5. I think it least expensive. 6. Equally effectual. I ask a fleet of 150. guns, the one half of which shall be in constant cruise. This fleet built, manned and victualled for 6. months will cost 450,000£ sterling. It’s annual expence is 300£ sterl. a gun, including every thing: this will be 45,000£ sterl. a year. I take British experience for the basis of my calculations, tho’ we know, from our own experience, that we can do, in this way, for pounds lawful, what costs them pounds sterling. Were we to charge all this to the Algerine war it would amount to little more than we must pay if we buy peace.
Like the old aphorism goes—the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s time to take action against the Houthis and eliminate their ability to disrupt global trade.
Ethiopia
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed alarmed the Horn of Africa last November when he declared Ethiopia’s lack of sea access an existential threat:
As well as importing weapons and mobilising his army, Mr Abiy - who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his rapprochement with Eritrea - has been saying that access to the sea is an existential question. Ethiopia's most obvious target is the Eritrean Red Sea port of Assab, which was part of Ethiopia until Eritrean independence more than 30 years ago. Since the 1998 Ethiopian-Eritrean war and the closure of the border between the two countries, the Assab docks have been rusting away, while Ethiopia's trade has been channelled through neighbouring Djibouti.
On January 1, Ethiopia and Somaliland singed a memorandum of understanding that outlined a port leasing deal for Addis Ababa. Somaliland is part of internationally recognized Somalia and Ethiopia’s promise of future recognition in exchange for docking rights could create yet another source of conflict in Africa. To that end, Somalia has already expressed outrage at the deal and taken legislative action to declare it void:
Somalia’s president signed a bill on Saturday voiding a preliminary agreement for Somaliland to provide landlocked Ethiopia with port access to Somaliland’s coast, in a largely symbolic move intended to rebuke both parties over a deal that has inflamed tensions across the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia has been no stranger to war in the past few years, having fought separatists in the Tigray region from 2020-2022.
Islamic State
Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP/ISIS in Afghanistan) attempted to blow up the famous Cologne cathedral on New Year’s Eve:
The three suspects are believed to be linked to a Tajik who was arrested on Christmas Eve, said Cologne police chief Johannes Hermann. The Tajik was detained by German police on the same day, as Austria announced the arrests of another three suspects in Vienna. Bild Daily had reported then that the four suspects were all Tajiks who allegedly wanted to carry out attacks for Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), an ISIS offshoot in Afghanistan.
Thankfully, German police were able to disrupt the plot before the Salafi-Jihadists were able to attack the soft target but ISKP will undoubtedly continue to plan international acts of terror from their safe haven in Afghanistan. As usual, Militant Wire’s Lucas Webber is on top of it:
The Islamic State’s Khurasan Province is emerging as the global movement’s leading branch for violent incitement and external operations. ISKP has now been linked to plots in India, Iran, Germany, Austria, Spain, the Maldives, Qatar, Turkey, and Kyrgyzstan. This coincides with its expanded vision and strategy of regionalization and internationalization. ISKP now publishes materials in more languages than any IS branch since the height of the caliphate and has vastly expanded its propaganda reach. The group is leveraging and weaponizing its robust media apparatus to grow its appeal globally and in the West. The recent plots in Austria, Germany, Spain, and Kyrgyzstan indicate that ISKP poses an increasingly dangerous external threat to countries in the West and throughout Asia.
Turkey/Israel
I mentioned last week the rising tension between Turkey and Israel as the war in Gaza grinds on. Since then, Erdoğan’s government has detained thirty four people it accuses of being Mossad assets:
Turkish authorities have detained 34 people suspected of being linked to Israel's Mossad intelligence service and of targeting Palestinians living in Turkey, a senior Turkish official said on Tuesday, adding Mossad also recruited members in the country. Last month, Turkish officials warned Israel of "serious consequences" if it tried to hunt down members of the militant group Hamas living outside Palestinian territories, including in Turkey. President Tayyip Erdogan warned that would be a mistake.
Sweeping detentions are one of Erdoğan’s favored tools of repression, having previously used the failed 2016 Turkish coup attempt as grounds for mass arresting academics, civil servants, and media members. Who’s to say if these 34 arrestees are actually Mossad agents or just folks who ran afoul of the would-be Sultan.
Iran
After failing to execute the attack in Cologne, ISKP succeeded last week in bombing a memorial for Qassem Soleimani in Kerman, Iran killing many in the process:
Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for two explosions in Iran that killed nearly 100 people and wounded scores at a memorial for top commander Qassem Soleimani. In a statement posted on its affiliate Telegram channels, the militant Sunni Muslim group said two IS members had detonated explosive belts in the crowd that had gathered at the cemetery in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman on Wednesday.
The Ayatollah’s regime was quick to blame Israel and the United States for the attack despite ISIS claiming responsibility almost immediately:
"Washington says USA and Israel had no role in terrorist attack in Kerman, Iran. Really? A fox smells its own lair first," the Iranian president's political deputy, Mohammad Jamshidi, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "Make no mistake. The responsibility for this crime lies with the US and Zionist regimes (Israel) and terrorism is just a tool," he added.
I’m certainly not the first to note the amazing “life-imitating-art” quality of Jamshidi’s statement and ISIS’ response:
Thank you as always for reading. If you like what I’m doing here at Son of a Diplomat consider sharing this post on social media to help grow the newsletter:
This section is largely sourced from my (amazingly preserved) notes from the Fall 2013 U.S. Diplomatic History course at James Madison University taught by the wonderful, late Dr. Steven Guerrier.