Fireside this week! The semester has started up in earnest and I am pushing hard to try to finish a draft of something I have promised by the end of the month (so this may not be the only Fireside this month). That said, it seemed like a good time to discuss trade, the sea and great powers, both given current events but also that this semester I’m teaching U.S. Naval History again and so we’re discussing things like ‘what is seapower?’ and ‘what are navies for?’ And I had planned to muse on this before the United States began airstrikes in Yemen, but given that I was going to argue that history suggests such strikes were almost certainly imminent…well, here we are.
The sea is, militarily speaking, an odd place. Almost none of the resources that people fight over are actually in the sea. Relatively few wars – not no wars, mind you – have been fought over fishing rights, much less things like off-shore oil resources. Humans have been using the sea for warfare for at least 3450 years;1 the exploitation of maritime resources beyond fish is a lot younger than that. Instead, as A.T. Mahan famously pointed out, the value of the sea is as a conveyance.
And my goodness, what value it has. Roughly 80% of all goods move by sea; sea-freight is thus larger by share of tonnes-per-kilometer than every other method of conveyance combined. Of course, for anything too bulky to profitably transport by air, the sea is the only way to move something from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas or Oceania, but even a lot of bulk transport that could happen by land goes by sea because it is cheaper. Shipping a cargo container by truck from Boston to Los Angeles might cost around $9,000 (I don’t have exact figures, but rail-freight is around half that). For the same cost or less, you can ship a cargo container full of stuff anywhere in the world.
Transport by sea is so much cheaper and thus so valuable that we (as a species) sawed an entire continent in half to make it easier. Twice.
And it is important, in order to understand why countries act the way they do about the sea, to understand the practical impacts of those low costs and our systems built on them. Without cheap sea-freight, humanity is much poorer; poorer in ways that are real. For folks in wealthy countries, those pressures express themselves as inflation: things that were cheap get more expensive because of disrupted supply chains. We’ve all now experienced such a disruption with COVID and the absolute havoc it caused as countries closed up and locked down. But for poor countries, the situation can be far more dire as the rising cost of imports can do things like spike the prices of basic necessities out of reach of much of the population or cause food shortages. A 50% increase in the price of basic foods is an inconvenience in the developed world, but a life-threatening catastrophe in the developing world.
Unsurprisingly, then, keeping the seas clear and open for business has long been a major priority of many states. Piracy suppression was a major priority for the Romans, for instance. Roman military successes in the second century removed the other major Mediterranean naval powers, leading to an increase in piracy, to which the Romans responded with an escalating series of anti-piracy operations, culminating in the passage of the Lex Gabinia to give Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) extraordinary powers to suppress piracy. Even after the Romans dominated the entire Mediterranean littoral, they ended up maintaining two permanent fleets – despite a total lack of enemy naval powers – in part for piracy suppression.
As international maritime law emerged, the disruption of the sea lanes by private groups – that is, pirates – was already understood to fall under the legal term of art hostes humani generis. ”Enemies of all human-kind.” The consequence of that was that it was understood to be the obligation of all states to suppress piracy (as distinct from privateering – the chartering of ships during war by one country to prey on the shipping of an enemy country) and that individuals or groups engaged in piracy enjoyed effectively no legal protection if found guilty.
That sort of thing, I suspect, sounds to most of you like the kind of thing that probably went out of fashion sometime in the 1800s, so you may be surprised to learn that is still the state of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) sets out international law related to piracy (defining it as any illegal act of violence or detention committed for private ends by the crew of a private ship or aircraft) and establishes universal jurisdiction, both allowing any state to seize pirate ships on the high seas and to prosecute those pirates by whatever laws they may have, regardless of the nationality of the pirates involved.
All of which brings us around to Ansar Allah, commonly called the Houthis (I’m going to say ‘the Houthis’ here because that’s the most common usage), and their actions in the Red Sea. I want to dispense with issue really quickly, which is the notion that what the Houthis are doing is actually a ‘blockade,’ ostensibly of Israel. The thing is, blockades are also governed by international law. A blockade is generally an act of war (though war is not always declared) directed at a specific country;2 international law requires the blockading power to stop ships for inspection and turn around ships that contain contraband goods. It does not allow a country to just shoot randomly at ships passing by under any flag headed to any destination; it certainly does not allow them to do so in international waters or in the territorial waters of non-belligerents. The notion then, which I have seen advanced, that Houthi action could be understood as some legal act of war or blockade direct at Israel is nonsense. If the Houthis are non-state actors, they’re engaged in piracy and hostes humani generis. If they’re state actors, they’re committing acts of war against quite a few different countries and no one ought to be terribly shocked at the result that produces. In particular, Houthi attacks have not been even remotely limited to ships with connections (of any sort!) to Israel; they’re attacking ships indiscriminately. I have also seen quite a lot of skepticism in the security policy space that an end to the conflict in Gaza would lead to an end to the attacks in the Red Sea; in any case, only one country can end the conflict in Gaza3 and it is a country that is not particularly impacted by the Red Sea crisis.
And now here is where I was going to note that given the history of the last few centuries, the consequence of continued disruption of trade in the Red Sea was almost certain: an escalating military response against the Houthis. But those strikes are now occurring.
Which is not surprising. For much of the last couple of centuries, it was broadly understood that the leading great powers, at least during peace time, kept the world’s seas open for business and that the rest of the world’s powers largely let them do so because it was in their interest as well to have access to the seas. For much of the 1800s, that job was accomplished by the British Royal Navy; after World War II, much of the responsibility shifted to the United States Navy (though note how involved the Royal Navy has been in this current crisis). And this fundamentally hasn’t changed.
At the same time, as I’ve noted before, airstrikes alone are often a weak lever when it comes to achieving strategic objectives. But 12% of all global trade moves through the Red Sea, which makes this crisis a major strategic interest for not just the United States but many other countries as well. As a result, while the Biden administration has made pretty clear that it does not want to escalate in the region, the United States and its partners are almost certain to keep escalating until trade flows return, while the broad global interest in freedom of navigation means that while many countries won’t rush to get involved in the expensive work of making the Houthis stop, there is unlikely to be any international coalition to mitigate the amount of force the United States and its partners use.
So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas.
Onward to Recommendations:
For those looking at a more focused take on the recent strikes in Yemen and the Red Sea crisis generally, I thought this explanatory essay by Mick Ryan is informative and gives a good sense of where things might go from here. Unfortunately, I think the answer is – as Ryan does – ‘nowhere good.’ The Houthis aren’t backing down but the United States is unlikely to tolerate a closed Red Sea either; incompatible demands of this sort generally lead to escalation.
Meanwhile, for those who missed it, I had a Twitter thread go somewhat viral discussing Latin and Roman values and in particular the claim that the Romans treated virilitas (‘manliness’ in the sense of “high testosterone”) as a core value. For those who’d rather not visit Twitter, you can read the thread on Threadreader. The whole episode makes me think that actually tackling how the Romans did self-perceive themselves and what their core values (virtus, disciplina, honos, sapientia, religio, pietas, constantia, fides and so on) were might be a good blog project for later this year. Roman values do not map neatly onto modern values (or traditional Christian ones, much less “traditional” Christian ones), so it might make for an interesting discussion.
I thought this video by (alleged) YouTuber Rosencreutz (who is also on Twitter), ruminating on the nature of player agency in strategy games – particularly in reference to Victoria II and Victoria III – was quite interesting. As he notes, Victoria II was willing, particularly in the internal political model, to actively dis-empower the player, to limit ‘player autocracy’ as part of its mechanics. And players really disliked that, but as Rosencreutz notes, it also gave some of the game’s systems very strong feedback in a way that Victoria III cannot, because it is much less willing to dis-empower the player. My own view, and Rosencreutz touches on this too, is that this hits at the conflict between game design and historical simulation design. In real history, there are things that are very difficult for rulers to control, but when we play games, we want a lot of agency. Striking the balance between those aims is, understandably, hard.
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m excited to finally get to recommend F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera. The book is the long-awaited translation of the Spanish original, F. Quesada Sanz Armas de la antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010). For once, I think the English translation of a title may actually be an improvement because while the book extensively covers arms and armor, it also discusses warfare in pre-Roman more generally. On these topics, Quesada Sanz is the world’s foremost authority, so having a general for-the-lay-audience treatment of the topic by him now available in English is a huge boon.
The book at hand is a quite direct translation (even keeping the original pagination of the Spanish volume), so none of Quesada Sanz’ arguments or information is lost. I’m not qualified to really assess how well Quesada Sanz’ prose flows in Spanish; the English translation follows the original very closely, but reads well – there is a bit of clunkiness in the English, but I certainly prefer the decision to hold tight to the original Spanish rather than twist it to make the prose flow. In any event, it is by no means bad; the volume is eminently readable. The book presents for a lay-audience both the evidence we have for warfare in pre-Roman Iberia beginning around 1000 BC and running to the end of the Roman context in the reign of Augustus. The approach is not fully descriptive: Quesada Sanz has arguments to make here (which he has made in scholarly venues in more depth); for instance he is at pains to show that these armies could and did engage in regular pitched battles in contrast to the sense in older scholarship that fighting in Iberia against the Romans was mostly irregular or ‘guerilla.’ Quesada Sanz is, I think, clearly right on this point and the evidence supports him. And so it goes: the vision of warfare in Iberia that Quesada Sanz presents is the culmination of his decades of work on the topic; this is a primer from the master.
The book is also illustrated and oh my goodness is it illustrated. The original combined astoundingly lavish and well-produced reconstruction artwork with archaeological line-drawings and photographs of surviving artifacts as well as some very clear and handy charts and figures. These the new volume has reproduced entirely (one oddity; the chronological development charts are translated, except for the dates, which are given as a.C., antes de Cristo, the Spanish equivalent of BC). Here I will register my one complaint with this English version: the original’s pages were 29.5cm x 21cm, whereas the English volume, published by Pen & Sword4 is smaller, 24.4cm by 16.5cm. Consequently, some of the fantastic illustrations are slightly smaller. Still, if this is the compromise to bring the book – in hardcover! – below $50 it was a good compromise to make. I admit, I am rather shocked (pleasantly) but how affordable this book is for how well produced it is, especially coming from Pen & Sword, where quality is not always the watchword.
Finally, in the original Spanish volume, Quesada Sanz made a point of including a lengthy bibliography as well as ‘further reading’ blocks at the end of each chapter (which point to full entries in the bibliography), specifically to give the lay-reader somewhere to go to read further. And, very happily, that choice is retained in the current volume. Consequently, this is one of the easiest book recommendations to make: if you have any interest in the warfare of Iberia before or during the Roman conquest, this book is a must-have.
- The Mycenaean takeover of Crete strikes me as the earliest clear example of “this was obviously a naval operation.” Curious if even older examples exist.
- For this reason, in fact, the United States went to some lengths to legally justify the blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis as something other than a blockade (it was officially termed a ‘quarantine’), precisely because a blockade would be an act of war.
- A reminder that Israel is a nuclear weapons state and consequently no country is going to intervene militarily to stop them. The United States could pull aid funding for Israel (I have come to think it should, though this should not be construed as any kind of support for Hamas, which I think should be destroyed), but it is not at all clear that even this would cause Israel to reassess its approach to Gaza. There is no magic ‘make the Gaza war stop’ wand, unless you are Benjamin Netanyahu.
- So, yes, this is now yet another huge exception to the general rule not to trust Pen and Sword
Why “alleged YouTuber”? If you’ve made dozens of YouTube videos, the most recent of which was posted yesterday, aren’t you by definition a YouTuber?
Alleged is really the wrong word here. It should probably be “fledgling youtuber”, “youtube novice”. He is not allegedly a youtuber, since as you said he has videos on youtube.
Because on Twitter his handle, at present is, “Rosencreutz (alleged youtuber)”
It was intended as a bit of a joke.
I saw you on the podcast talking about Victoria 3 and how unralistic it is that the only way to get communism in Pardox games is for the state to willingly drive the transition. Are there any games that do revolution well? Because it cerainly wasn’t Republic: The Revolution. 🙂
I think it’s wrong to see things you do in Victoria (or paradox games) as “actions of state” as in actions of goverment. You act as a “spirit of the state” that is independent of the government and in that context it makes sense to do things like moving to communism.
(Also in latest patches taking side of the revolution is the easiest way to get communism)
Would that be “Statgeist” in German?
Maybe Staatgeist?
You could instead argue for “Staatsgeist” (with the genitive -s) from a grammatical angle, but that sounds a bit more like the state equivalent to Mannschaftsgeist (“team spirit”).
“Staatgeist” would also make for a good parallel to Hegel’s “Weltgeist”, a pantheistic take on God that fits well with the player’s role in Victoria III if you imagine it limited to a state.
No. Not a word. You can create “Staatsgeist” (note the “s”), analogous to “Zeitgeist”, and while people will have an idea where you are going with it, explanations will be needed.
If we talk about the Russian revolution, you could make a good case that the “spirit of the state” was the secret police. So many members of the Imperial Okhrana later became members of the Cheka, that the collective organisation of the state police, from the Third Department of Nicholas I to Putin’s FSB, could be said to be the one continuing factor of Russian state.
Except the Cheka was led by Dzherzhinsky, who whatever you think of him was a true believing Communist and had the scars from the Tsarists to prove it.
that’s kind of the central conceit behind Tim Powers’ historical fantasy *Declare*. (Powers writes novels set in real historical context but exploring occult or supernatural forces that are influencing events behind the scenes, including in this one).
the book is really much more anti-Russian than anti-communist per se (the alliance with supernatural powers is carried right over, as you say, from the Okhrana to the Cheka) so it’s less over the top in its politics than one might think. a bigger problem is that Powers doesn’t seem to really know what *jinn* are supposed to be.
It’s a Secret History. Why do you think you know what jinn are supposed to be like?
“Why do you think you know what jinn are supposed to be like?”
They’re an Islamic concept (or rather a pre-Islamic Arabin concept adopted into Islam). Islamic thought is completely clear that they’re *not* angels, they’re a completely different class of being from angels. Tim Powers- though he’s a really cool, creative and compelling writer- persistently confuses jinn with (fallen) angels.
That’s what YOU think.
Objecting to a secret history that posits you are wrong only raises the question of why you read a genre with a premise you dislike.
Tim Powers is writing fiction, not an anthropology textbook. His jinn are what he wanted for the story, and if that meant ignoring the original sources, that’s his choice as a writer.
There are no angels in “Declare” at all, fallen or otherwise, and there’s nothing in the book’s description of jinn that contradicts the traditional Arabian myths about jinn. There is a strong suggestion in the book that Catholic Christianity is true – baptism has various actual effects – but it’s not the case that the jinn of “Declare” are supposed to be fallen angels. It isn’t entirely clear what they are. “Not everything that was kept out of the Ark had the decency to perish”, one character says about them.
“but it’s not the case that the jinn of “Declare” are supposed to be fallen angels”
The protagonist definitely thinks of them and describes them as fallen angels, as do one or two of the other characters he interacts with, but you’re right that we can’t necessarily conflate the protagonist’s and the author’s viewpoint- the hero is a Catholic so he conceives of these things through Catholic/CHristian categories.
There’s basically no games that provide a simulationist experience of historical revolution, no. And certainly not communism. History is incredibly random, so any real simulation would have trouble producing so called “historical” outcomes. You can have highly railroaded games like Victoria 2 but it feels flat to some degree.
I’d argue that this is the correct way to represent communist revolution. They don’t just happen on their own – OG Marxism is clearly wrong about this, while the Leninist strand of “Make the revolution happen right now” has at least had success at taking control of countries (if not always a lot of success with anything after that).
I don’t think that is really the case: Certainly not for Lenin, he intervened in an already existing revolution and steered it towards his own ends, but he didn’t start the revolution, it was already full underway.
There’s plenty of ground-up revolutions, but very few communist ones. Most people don’t actually like communism very much.
I’d argue that most authentic ground-up revolutions are pretty a-ideological at the start. Ideology gets applied after depending on which faction best takes advantage and ends up on top.
Are there? How many “ground up revolutions” can you name? How are they distinguishable from non-ground up revolutions?
In the reasonably fair 1917 elections radical socialist parties (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries) took around 70% of the vote. So there was clearly an appetite for drastic change – and the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were firmly communist.
I’ll add that the Communist Party still gets around 30% of the vote in Russia (okay – nostalgia for the days of good education, cheap fares and rents and pensions paid on time; not so much for the gulag)
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Russia 1905 and Iran 1979 were pretty spontaneous, as were some of the post-1989 anti-communist East European ones.
“I’ll add that the Communist Party still gets around 30% of the vote in Russi”
well, they did, back when elections were at least somewhat competitive- they’re not any more.
there were a couple of governorships a few years ago, I think Irkutsk or somewhere, where the communists almost certainly won the actual vote (all pre-election polls had them ahead) but were cheated out of winning.
that being said, if you leave partisan politics out of it and just ask people “what’s your preferred economic system”, then the answer “state planning and distribution” continues to be more popular than “capitalism”, not just in Russia but also in some other former communist countries (including, maybe surprisingly, Ukraine).
“In the reasonably fair 1917 elections radical socialist parties (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries) took around 70% of the vote”
yes, some kind of left-wing revolution was absolutely baked into the cake in the territories of the former Russian Empire by 1917.
the only question was whether it was going to be a Marxist one or an agrarian-socialist one.
The Bolsheviks also won a majority among their natural constituency, industrial workers (as well as of course among soldiers, which in the short run might have mattered more). Of course in a mostly agrarian country there were many fewer workers than peasants.
Depends how you count. Lenin carried out a successful coup against an existing government, even if it was a weak and unstable one.
Vicky 1 had mass popular uprisings to impose communism as a real possibility.
“Ollie has seen your turkey sandwich. He would very much like your turkey sandwich.”
Poor Ollie only wanted those delicious smelling slices of meat. He would then have generously allowed you to eat the rest of your sandwich. >:-)
Ollie is going to get himself a primate sandwich if conditions don’t improve.
Hey Bret. In light of the strikes against the Houthis. Do you have any opinions or insights of historical precedents on how effective attacks on proxies or junior partners actually are? Shouldn’t the focus be on their backer, diplomatically or otherwise (if lines get crossed).
I suspect that ignoring the backer of a proxy is one way to limit your escalation of a conflict. If you always fight the backer of a proxy too, you can wind up with uncontrolled escalation, like when Gen MacArthur wanted to bomb China (perhaps with nuclear weapons) during the Korean War.
Dear Bret
Recently this blog was focusing much on the ancient Rome. My vision of this period is shaped in great extent by Asterix & Obelix comics. Would you like to spend an article or two about it – how good is it in presenting ancient times? (Of course, laying aside obvious magic or anachronisms).
You may also focus on the first two movies, as they appear to be much more popular than comics.
Those comics were my introduction to the late Republic, even before Shakespeare. I wouldn’t be surprised if, especially for French speakers, they were a lot of people’s first exposure to Roman history.
A read and react article would be fun.
I’m a New Zealander who doesn’t speak French and they were my introduction to the Late Republic.
Also love this idea!
Their was a Radio France emission about this.
Basically, Goscinny used the latest documentation available to him to build his fictional work.
So yes, the goofiness is based on actual historical and archeological work.
Most of this work it completely outdated, though – the diet of wild boars comes from a misinterpretation of the remains found in archeological sites, now understood as of domesticated pigs (but of a rustic race).
More importantly, Goscinny’s not really following “L’école des Annales” (and I’d argue that he probably was right in neglecting it) so the social mores shown in the comic are entirely anachronistic.
So, as much as I’d like to read the Pedant on this, I’m not sure that he would actually have much to say.
Of course, I’d be happy if he could prove me wrong.
Final point : the only good movie beside Goscinny’s ones is Alexandre Astier’s.
Adam, what a great idea! I have a soft spot for the books. I read many of them while learning French at school. The UK French language editions came with a booklet which explained the puns. Although most of the books are having a go at the modern world, the Roman background/uniforms/society is clearly worth a look. Unless it’s totally ridiculous in historical terms, which would at least be worthy of comment.
Much of my knowledge of the Roman Empire is from I Claudius and Claudius the God, by Graves. I know he dashed them of as easy pot-boilers. The 70s BBC series is very close to the books, though stagey by modern drama standards. I would welcome Bret’s comments on how faithful to the facts they are.
Closer to the subject matter of the blog might be Graves’ “Count Belisarius” – which I prefer to the Claudius books. Graves has the idea of narrating the book through Belisarius’ devoted secretary, which gives him a ready-made excuse for inaccuracy and bias – a lot of the politics comes from Procopius, but the descriptions of warfare are interesting.
I’m surprised that Egypt seems to be playing no role in the crisis, given how dependent they are on Suez Canal transit fees.
I doubt Egypt wants to associate too closely with any US-driven military action that relates to Israels campaign in Gaza in any way
Yes, *the welfare of the people of Egypt* is heavily dependent on Canal transit fees, which provide 2% of GDP and 15% of foreign exchange inflow. But it’s important to remember that the welfare of *President Sisi specifically* is very much more dependent on not annoying the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition organisation in Egypt, the parent organisation of Hamas, and the group which murdered the last Egyptian leader who was seen as going a bit soft on Israel. Better the live ruler of a poor Egypt than the dead ruler of a rich one.
To quote wikipedia:
“On 24 March 2014, an Egyptian court sentenced 529 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death… On 2 February 2015, an Egyptian court sentenced another 183 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death.”
It would seem that President Sisi is prepared to run the risk of displeasing the Muslim Brotherhood occasionally. Perhaps a more important question is whether the Egyptian military has the reach to strike decisively at Houthi Yemen.
And why would they, anyway, as long as the US and the UK are willing to take the lead?
I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the Muslim Brotherhood cares more about what happens in Israel than what happens to its own members. Plenty more where they came from, after all.
“Perhaps a more important question is whether the Egyptian military has the reach to strike decisively at Houthi Yemen.”
Historically, it’s not clear that the Egyptian military has ever had the capability to do anything decisively anywhere.
Also, the last time the Egyptians went to Yemen to fight they got Molly-whopped. Unflattering comparisons were made at the time to America’s debacle in Vietnam. They probably haven’t seriously invested in power projection training, weapons, or doctrine since then. If they don’t have to wade into another fight down there they aren’t going to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Yemen_Civil_War
The (Egyptian-backed) republic won against the monarchists in Yemen in the end, though, didn’t they? Why is it considered “Egypt’s Vietnam” then?
Beyond what everyone else said here, I think they are probably free riding on the fact that the US will act to deal with the Houthis (more capably than Egypt could) without Egyptian support, and therefore there is no reason for the Egyptian government to pay any serious costs to support the effort, even though it is extremely important to them for the Houthis to be dealt with.
Egypt intervened in Yemen in 1962-67. The results were not favorable to Egypt. See “Arabs at War” by Kenneth M. Pollack, pg 47-58. I suspect that the Egyptian government does not want to repeat the experience.
They fought a nasty war in Yemen in the 60s – pointless and costly. I doubt they want to repeat.
Thanks for offering the thread reader alternative to twitter. In addition to not being a cesspool it’s just a vastly better reading experience.
I came here to say the same thing! I figure the more vocal support there is for something like this, the better.
Thirded.
I usually go to nitter.net for the twitter links nowadays, which is more of a direct twitter clone. But yeah all alternatives are appreciated
On the subject of early naval operations, Pharaoh Thutmose III’s Syrian campaigns included a naval operations which were roughly contemporary with the Mycenaean invasion of Crete which you mentioned. Going further back, some of the earlier Egyptian expeditions to Punt or Canaan could maybe be counted as ‘naval’ operations depending on your definition. Certainly if you’re counting riverine warfare the Egyptians had been doing that probably since before Pharaonic Egypt was a thing.
On the other side of the world, the Austronesian migrations from Taiwan into the greater South China Sea region are estimated (at least according to Wikipedia) to have begun sometime before 2000 BCE, but that is firmly in the realm of pre-history at that point so whether you’re willing to point to that as evidence of naval warfare is a matter of interpretation.
I think part of this is going to depend on what you consider a naval engagement. To use a fictional example (but one with real-world counterparts), take Aragorn’s attack on the Corsairs in LOTR. The Corsairs were using the navy to attack southern Gondor, but the actual fighting was in the city. Similarly, Aragorn uses the ships he captured to transport his army to Minas Tirith, but the actual fighting was on land. (I get the sense, though it’s not stated in the books, that the boats were more significant in Southern Gondor; their history included navies attacking each other’s ports repeatedly.)
And how big does the engagement have to be to count? A lot of South Pacific islands had very small populations, after all–the engagement may not be huge in terms of people, but as a percent of the population it would be on par with England’s experiences in WWI.
Concerning footnote 1, I don’t know if it quite rises to the level of “clear”, but you do have the Bell Beaker stuff. At the very least it coincided with a massive genetic replacement which is consistent with invasion. However, it could also be some kind of migration and say, a plague spreading among the indigenous population and wiping most of them out. But you do definitely need ships to get to Britain, and it’s the earliest example I can think of. But I will admit this is more ‘reasonably likely naval invasion’ rather than clear naval invasion.
Still, as I understand it, the evidence for Mycenaean takeover of Crete is archeological replacement of artifacts and changes in the material culture, which is the same sort of thing we have with the bell beakers in Britain. And this is like a millennia older than the stuff happening around Knossus.
At the very least it coincided with a massive genetic replacement which is consistent with invasion. However, it could also be some kind of migration and say, a plague spreading among the indigenous population and wiping most of them out.
Unless this plague wiped out 100% of the population — and since even the post-Columbian New World epidemics didn’t reach this level of mortality, it seems pretty unlikey — the new settlers would still have had to invade and conquer the previous inhabitants.
There is more than one country that can stop the war in Gaza – Hamasi Gaza is very much a state, and they can certainly unconditionally surrender at any time. I bet they could have their leadership live in exile.
And after the October 7th attack, a large majority of the Israeli public is not willing to live near an independent Palestinian state, and therefore they will do whatever they can to prevent one. Netanyahu, being only the prime minister of a democratic country, is limited to executing the will of the citizens, or it’s application by a Knesset that can Chamberlain him in a day.
“And after the October 7th attack, a large majority of the Israeli public is not willing to live near an independent Palestinian state, and therefore they will do whatever they can to prevent one.”
This is a big problem, isn’t it? Because unless you, like, give all the Palestinians refugee visas and move them to America* or something, I don’t see what other alternative there is *except* an independent Palestinian state next door to an independent Jewish state. The status quo obviously isn’t working, and integrating both Israelis and Palestinians into a single “binational” state would just be a bad joke.
“Netanyahu, being only the prime minister of a democratic country, is limited to executing the will of the citizens, or it’s application by a Knesset that can Chamberlain him in a day.”
Leaders shape public opinion as much as they respond to it, even in a democracy.
I’m also kind of curious what the Israeli military feels about a two state solution, and what their approach to the problem might be if they *didn’t* have to take into account the most hardline elements in Israeli public opinion (settlers, ultra-Orthodox, etc.). Maybe they would be even more hardline, but maybe not.
> This is a big problem, isn’t it? Because unless you, like, give all the Palestinians refugee visas and move them to America* or something, I don’t see what other alternative there is *except* an independent Palestinian state next door to an independent Jewish state. The status quo obviously isn’t working, and integrating both Israelis and Palestinians into a single “binational” state would just be a bad joke.
The occupation of the West Bank is working fairly well. I mean, everyone hates it, but everyone is able to live with it. Which is the sign of a successful compromise. I mean, as much as security checkpoints make life suck, they suck much less than 1-ton bombs. For basically everybody involved.
> Leaders shape public opinion as much as they respond to it, even in a democracy.
I don’t think Israeli politicians are really “leaders” in this sense. In particular, many of the people that don’t want a Palestinian state hate Netanyahu and want him to just go away.
> I’m also kind of curious what the Israeli military feels about a two state solution
They are quiet of this issue, but as far as I can tell the generals believed that paying off Hamasic Gaza by letting Gazans work in Israel would mean that Hamas would never attack Israel, so I’m not so sure about their strategic sense.
> what their approach to the problem might be if they *didn’t* have to take into account the most hardline elements in Israeli public opinion (settlers, ultra-Orthodox, etc.)
If there were less settlers, then there would be less settlements. There would still be an occupation, since Israelis don’t want to live near an independent Palestinian state.
The world might be less annoyed at Israel, but I’m not sure the amount the world is annoyed at Israel is proportional to the number of settlements.
“The occupation of the West Bank is working fairly well.”
Ask the thousands of Palestinians whose homes and properties have been stolen by the Israeli ‘settlements’, the Palestinians stopped, beaten and humiliated for no reason as a regular activity the by Israeli West Bank police, arrested and imprisoned, shot, shot and killed. Which all activities have been increasing for over a decade now — not just since Oct. 7th.
No, occupation is horrible condition and it never remains static — it either relaxes or it gets worse. We know how it has been this entire time for the West Bank.
I’m reasonably certain the majority of Israelis would be happy with a two-state solution if the Palestinians truly accepted a two-state status quo. I don’t see that happening as long as the schools that Palestinian children attend have maps on the wall showing the entirety of Israel labeled “Occupied Palestine”.
Israel has nuclear weapons and is the strongest military power in the vicinity.
Jordan had annexed the West Bank from 1949–1967, this was even recognized by the United Kingdom, and Egypt then held Gaza. And both countries have given up trying to reconquer these territories after realizing that is futile.
Besides Israel could also offer a demilitarized state to the Palestinians. However, this had once happened, but when Arafat finally accepted the reply was ‘that this offer was no longer under consideration’*.
Instead Israel decided to deliberately allow Hamas to take over Gaza as part of a play to weaken the Palestinians by dividing the West Bank from Gaza, based on the idea that this would allow them to achieve security without having to give the Palestinians a good deal. We can now see how that ended.**
*Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taba_Summit#Arafat_accepts_Taba_peace_plan
**https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/israels-tet-moment
Another example I had thought of:
Syria also still claims Hatay, which has been a Turkish province since 1939. However, as Turkey is clearly militarily more powerful Syria had never attempted to regain this territory by force.
Something else I just thought of:
And not to mention North Korea which still claims South Korea. Yet despite the DPRK being so mad that even the Communist Regimes in Warsaw Pact thought them crazy and they are sanctioned by even the PRC, North Korea still has not tried to conquer South Korea. Presumably because starting such a war would be an idiotic idea.
Then there is also the PRC-Taiwan situation. In which the totalitarian Leninist regime on the mainland still officially claims the island, states that ‘Taiwan must and will be reunited with China’ and refuses to renounce the use of force. Yet despite this, the actions and behaviour of Beijing suggest they have no intent to attack*; possibly because they have more pressing goals and/or it would be a bad idea.
So, I do not quite see where this idea that a fully independent Palestine under a ‘moderate’ (unlike Hamas) government would necessarily be a security threat to Israel comes from. Israel’s relative military position is absurdly more secure than those two examples.
* https://warontherocks.com/2022/12/is-china-planning-to-attack-taiwan-a-careful-consideration-of-available-evidence-says-no/
First produce the moderate government.
Yes, I believe that Israel should have put in more effort in doing that.
They had decades to time in the West Bank, but instead preferred to continue with their illegal occupation and kick Palestinians off their own land to construct more illegal settlements. So, I can only conclude that reaching a genuine positive peace was not high on the Israeli right wing’s list of priorities.
If the Palestinians can’t form their own government, they are unfit for self-government.
Ah, what a typical ‘Mary Catelli’ comment…
What an absurdly inane response.
I was not the one who had used a textbook colonialist argument.
Yes, you were. I merely pointed out that you had.
To put that again: the problem with a Palestinian state is that it seems to necessarily lead to a pile of Israeli skulls and a bigger pile of Palestinian skulls.
What they have in Gaza and the West Bank isn’t a “state”, so we can’t possibly know that it leads to that, certainly not “necessarily”. A state controls its borders and foreign trade.
TBH, I think the best way to think of Palestine is as two states that are allies in a very slow-burn war against Israel. The only meaningful part of the war much of the time is the blockade, but there’s occasional bursts of activity above that.
They are states (plural, let’s dispense with the myth that Palestine is united), but states that are on the losing side of a war don’t always control their own borders or trade at all.
But I don’t think there’s a very convincing argument that giving the Palestinians a free hand will end up with anything except a lot of dead Israelis. Their hate is entrenched far too deeply, and their leaders all need the war to keep their position. (Some of the same dynamics are at play on the Israeli side, but they’ve got far more incentives towards restraint than Palestine does, so they don’t tend to express themselves in ways that are nearly as toxic as October 7th was. Sometimes bloodier, but nothing like the same reckless hate.)
Palestine isn’t two states. It’s zero states. They didn’t control their borders even before the war, and they don’t have enough control of their territory to kick out the settlers.
“They are states (plural, let’s dispense with the myth that Palestine is united), but states that are on the losing side of a war don’t always control their own borders or trade at all.”
OK, that’s fair. I can agree that West Bank & Gaza are autonomous states, not independent ones.
I still think the logic is faulty though, you can’t conclude that “semi-independent / autonomous X state works very badly, so a fully independent state X would work as badly or even worse.”
“but they’ve got far more incentives towards restraint than Palestine does,”
I think the theory here is that a materially and economically more prosperous Palestine would also have (material) incentives towards restraint that it doesn’t now. For some of the same reasons that this blog has pointed out in the past regarding why international wars, especially involving rich or middle income countries, are rarer today than they used to be.
The West Bank is not really a state, since Israel feels free to arrest everybody there they want to, and also basically runs a lot of the infrastructure.
Gaza is, or at least was before the war, a state. They controlled their territory and their borders, and they were even able to import a lot of things even while Israel was blockading them.
I definitely would like to live in a world where giving the Palestinians wealth and freedom would make them not wage war on Israel. Unfortunately, the history of the last 30 or so years seems to have the Palestinians use every bit of wealth or freedom to conduct terror attacks. Which is why Israel is not eager of giving them that.
“I definitely would like to live in a world where giving the Palestinians wealth and freedom would make them not wage war on Israel.”
To be clear, I’m not saying here that sovereignty and economic thriving (I like that phrasing more than ‘wealth and freedom’) would make Palestinians love the State of Israel or be happy about its existence or any of that stuff, and I’m also not saying I personally sympathize with their religious or national worldview. I’m sure that, in a peaceful, independent, prosperous Palestine there would still be tons of people who took a dim view of Israel and Jews and thought that in a perfect world Israel shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that I think that in a peaceful, independent, prosperous Palestine people would recognize that whatever they personally felt about Israel, they would have a lot more to lose by armed conflict, terrorism, etc. than they do today, and a lot more to gain from peaceful coexistence.
That sounds like the status quo. Do you consider the status quo to be a Palestinian state? I’d say that Israel has too much power over Palestine for Palestine to count as a state.
You do know that Hamas is not the only Palestinian organization in existence?
I do not see why it would be impossible for Israel to have had peaceful coexistence by now, if they had in previous negotiations been willing to offer something else than some form of Bantustan or second class citizenship…
“I don’t see what alternative there is.”–There is no requirement that democratic polities arrive at comprehensive solutions, in fact they may be worse at that than autocracies. (Of course, autocracies often arrive at very bad comprehensive solutions.) The US system is not generating comprehensive solutions to the migration crisis, or the looming insolvency of major entitlement programs, or many other problems. My guess is that the democratic process will result in Israel’s settling on a continuation of the pre-October situation but with much more intrusive security in Gaza and the West Bank, much less autonomy for the Arab population, and no pretense that those areas will ever attain anything approaching sovereignty.
Thank you. I was just going to say this myself.
“There is more than one country that can stop the war in Gaza – Hamasi Gaza is very much a state, and they can certainly unconditionally surrender at any time.”
While this is true, the Houthi actions also do not place pressure on the rulers of Gaza to surrender, so their actions still fail as an attempts to end the war.
In defence of books from Pen & Sword, you do really do have to judge each one on its merits. P&S publish a lot of books, and undoubtedly some are stinkers, but don’t judge any book by its cover, still less by its imprint.
Thanks for the post, as always.
Any chance you could post the reading list for your US Naval History course? I’m quite intrigued.
It just says “Mahan” enough times to fill a page 😉
(Seriously though, I’m also mildly curious.)
In land military history, each time there’s a reference to Clausewitz, you take a drink.
In naval history, each time there’s a reference to Mahan, you take a bite of chocolate.
I think Brett’s more a Corbett guy
I vote in favor of the deep dive into Roman self-conception and how it doesn’t map onto modern (in the post-1500 sense) value systems.
Sure, but *after* a deep dive into shield design and use. You know, to go with the swords and the spears.
Bret’s portrayal of the situation in the Red Sea looks like it was lifted straight from US State Dept PR. Typical of him, but it’s always fascinating to see how an American nationalist copes with the fact that his government is backing genocide with all its hard and soft power. And now it’s even attacking other nations who oppose it.
I don’t really like the term “American nationalist”, since America isn’t a “nation” in the traditional sense of the term. Maybe “American hegemonist” or something would work better?
Sure, if you like. I’d rather not get too hung up on exact labeling when the meaning is clear.
“Genocide”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
That’s being litigated in court as we speak. But either way, the US naval action in the Red Sea isn’t in support of Israel, it’s in support of international trade.
“You keep using that word.”
What this tells me is that you don’t bother to do any fact-checking, or perhaps you just type without thinking about what your words actually mean. I have used this word exactly one time in this blog, and it was just now.
“I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Fortunately for you, there are online resources available to help you think a little better. The term “genocide” has an agreed-upon meaning among international body, and you can read all about it in detail, with numerous documented examples to reinforce your understanding, in an application submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month.
The case number is 192. The filename is
192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf
I suggest you read it carefully.
It does have a meaning, yes. I’ll quote it in full:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Note that “with intent to destroy” at the top – that’s quite important here. We can all agree that each side is killing the other at times, so they meet points (a) and (b) in their attacks, but the question is whether they’re trying to *destroy* the group on the other side, or if they’re doing something else.
I skimmed the South African submission (it’s 84 pages), and the only mentions of “intent to destroy” are in paragraphs 103, 117, and 124.
> 103 is referring to a list of statements in 101-102, which allegedly prove that the goal is to destroy the Palestinian people “as such”.
> 117 is just a statement of the fact that a bunch of people are dying, which isn’t really the question at hand in this case.
> 124 is a legal argument about the court’s jurisdiction.
So only 103 is an actual claim here. And in fairness, some of the statements are pretty bad. But others fall well within Israel’s stated objective of destroying a terrorist organization(which would obviously not be genocidal, if that is their actual objective). And a few of them come from people extremely distant from the centres of power – a 95 year old reservist with no position except private soldier is not exactly a driver of state policy.
For all the great length of this submission, I find it to actually be somewhat weak. They dedicate less than a tenth of the document to the crux of the issue (namely, intent), and most of that is just block-quotes without analysis. Some of them are also snipped in ways that make me wonder if they’re trying to omit context, but in fairness I don’t have time to actually chase down the references and prove it. I’ve read a lot of legal paperwork over the years, and this feels like one written more for journalists than for judges.
“I skimmed the South African submission (it’s 84 pages), and the only mentions of “intent to destroy” are in paragraphs 103, 117, and 124.
> 103 is referring to a list of statements in 101-102, which allegedly prove that the goal is to destroy the Palestinian people “as such”.”
How odd. You seem to be avoiding any mention of the fact that the section labeled “D. Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others” which you are obliquely referring to above includes statements expressing genocidal intent by the
Prime Minister of Israel
President of Israel
Israeli Minister of Defense
Israeli Minister for National Security
Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure
Israeli Minister of Finance
Israeli Minister of Heritage
Israeli Minister of Agriculture
Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee
Israeli Army Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories
Israeli Army Reservist Major General, former Head of the Israeli National Security
Council, and adviser to the Defence Minister
Head of the Israeli army’s Air Operations Group
Commander in the 2908th Battalion of the Israeli army
But yes, please keep complaining about “people extremely distant from the centres of power”.
“For all the great length of this submission, I find it to actually be somewhat weak.”
Anyone reading your attempt at an assessment can see the document directly and decide how competent you are at making such judgments.
By the way, those “block-quotes” you deride are called “evidence”. They don’t include entire speeches, so please go ahead, read up the whole speech, and tell us how they are “misinterpreted”.
I posted that in twenty minutes while I was on break at work, so I didn’t have time for a proper deep-dive of everything. (And I don’t right now, either. Sorry.)
Suffice it to say, most of the people on your list who have any connection to security policy were saying “destroy Hamas”, or sometimes “stop giving free aid to a country who just decided to kill a huge number of us”, not “destroy the population of Gaza”. If the head honcho says something okay and the Minister of Unrelated Affairs says something awful, then the latter should not be used to taint the former (at least, not all that much). Especially when they’re probably in very different parties, given how the Israeli system works.
Anyway, you can have a different impression of it than I do. But I’ll state my thoughts anyway. I don’t think Israel is the greatest thing ever, and some parts of their populace probably would do genocidal things if they had the power to, but that’s not the same as saying that the country itself is doing so.
I should note that “intent” in criminal law (including this case) is a bit broader: If you take an action that you can reasonable foresee to have a particular consequence that action is intentional, even if it is not your primary objective. if you rob a bank and shoot the cashier that’s still murder, even if you protest that what you “really” wanted to do was just get the cash.
Okay, but I don’t see any reasonably foreseeable way for this to eliminate the population of Gaza, or any particular subset thereof.
Here, let me help you:
Weird that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would say something like this when nowhere in his heart does he dare dream of the destruction in whole or in part the Palestinian Arab population living in Gaza.
Keep in mind that actual genocide prosecutions can and have been brought on war crimes with significantly lower total death tolls, such as Srebrenica (8,372 dead) and far less blatant statements of intent than this.
Someone apparently does not understand movie references.
What this tells me is that you don’t bother to do any fact-checking, or perhaps you just type without thinking about what your words actually mean. I have used this word exactly one time in this blog, and it was just now.
You don’t get the reference? Inconceivable!
Err, if you are using a courtcase to justify your claim, should you not at least wait till the courtcase is decided?
Also, if you ask me there is a clear precedent for this case:
The USSR, which I severely dislike, had during its intervention in Afghanistan committed even more and larger war crimes and crimes against humanity than Israel is doing now in Gaza. However, as far as I am aware this was never ruled as a genocide by any international court or large human rights organization; there only were a few individual scholars and historians accusing it of such.
So, I can only conclude that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. And I say that as somebody who would prefer it if the EU would ‘sanction Israel like apartheid-South Africa’ until they get rid of their illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Someone war crimes trials have never been conducted against a nation with nuclear weapons. A fact which some say led to South Africa developing them at one point.
What makes you think the Houthis are actually trying to do anything about Israel? Their attacks have no visible connection to Israeli ownership, routing, or anything else – sure, there’s probably some control system in the maritime diesel (or whatever) that was made by an Israeli firm, but whatever targeting they’re using, it’s clearly quite indiscriminate.
From all we can see, the Israel link is just PR, not an actual military reality. They’re trying to turn some random drone attacks into volunteers and donations from the anti-Israel world, figuring that they’ll gain more support from the violence than the counterstrike is likely to cost them. But it’s not like they have a plan that’ll actually do anything substantive to Israel. The main victim of this attack is Egypt, because of the lost canal tolls.
By your reasoning,
Israel’s attacks on Gaza have nothing whatsoever to do with Hamas. Its attacks have no visible connection to Hamas membership, ownership, or anything else – sure, all those men, women, and children Israel kills probably had bus cards or medical IDs or whatever issued by some Gaza government ministry formally under the political bureau of Hamas, but whatever targeting the Israel military is using, it’s clearly quite indiscriminate.
(In fact, we know it is. Because we know Israel is using a militarized verison of ChatGPT to generate bombing targets. IDF insiders praise it for producing “large volume” which previous human methods couldn’t.)
From all we can see, the Hamas link is just PR, not an actual military reality. Israel is just trying to turn random drone attacks into volunteers and donations for the Zionist cause, figuring that they’ll gain more support from the violence than the pushback is likely to cost them. But it’s not like they have a plan that’ll actually do anything substantive to Hamas. The main victim of this attack are the people of Gaza, who are being slaughtered en masse.
I can see how you might arrive at such thinking. And there are examples, such as the one I gave, where it is very likely to be the truth. Especially given that Israel and its military has a 75-year track record of trying to erase the Palestinian people and openly lying, including manufacturing false evidence, and being caught doing so repeatedly.
But there are big differences with the situation with the Red Sea. For one thing, Yemen doesn’t have the long record of blatant lying and propaganda that Israel does.
More importantly, Yemen has publicly laid down concrete conditions under which they will stop targeting shipping linked to Israel. And these are in fact conditions which the US government itself professes to want: a stop to the mass killing, and sufficient volumes of humanitarian aid going into Gaza.
If the White House really thought Yemen was just attacking ships randomly and lying about the reason, then it could simply call Yemen’s “bluff”, choke off Israel’s killings, and then demand that Yemen honor its declared commitments. It would be politically difficult for Yemen to renege on them.
I don’t think that comparison means what you think it means.
Because Israel absolutely is using Hamas as an excuse to do genocidal stuff it wanted to do anyway. Is the Houthi situation similar? Is fighting Israel little more than an excuse for terroristic violence that they wanted to commit anyway?
Kinda looks like it, actually.
“I don’t think that comparison means what you think it means.”
The point I was making that is that there are some cases where more skepticism is warranted, and other cases where an actor’s declared intent is more believable. I think Yemen falls into the second category.
“Because Israel absolutely is using Hamas as an excuse to do genocidal stuff it wanted to do anyway.”
I agree.
“Is the Houthi situation similar? Is fighting Israel little more than an excuse for terroristic violence that they wanted to commit anyway?
Kinda looks like it, actually.”
I don’t agree.
First, I don’t buy the talking point that the Yemenis (or insert your favorite US enemy here) just like to randomly attack things for no coherent reason. People in power who do crazy things for random fun are extremely rare, and I don’t assume the Yemenis are this without good evidence.
And I follow this standard even to states such as Israel. The former PM Naftali Bennett revealed secret negotiations early on in Ukraine. I’m no fan of Bennett or Israel, but I see no reason to disbelieve him on this claim, because I see no reason he would just make up a lie like that randomly.
The Yemenis haven’t inflicted nearly as much damage as they could have if damage was their main goal. Nor have they stolen as much cargo as they could have if riches were what they are after. Ships tied to China have passed through the Red Sea unharassed, so it clearly the targeting is not indiscriminate, although I’m sure mistargeting happens. Who truly controls a cargo ship is a complicated issue, which makes it easy for people with agendas like Bret Devereaux to try to portray the Yemenis as being indiscriminate. But I am pretty sure the Yemenis do their homework better than Bret does.
In fact, the Yemenis have demonstrated a level of restraint that puts both the US and Israel to shame. Literally no one has been killed to date in a Yemeni hijacking. The US cannot even make such a boast about traffic stops involving US citizens. And this is not because the Yemeni could not do more damage. They can.
And as I have said, the Yemenis have stated a clear condition under which they will cease their attacks: stop the genocide. This condition is, supposedly, one which the US claims to want, and one that the US can easily implement if it wanted to. By publicly stating their goals, Yemen forces itself to back down if the US really does stop the genocide. Not exactly the most natural move to make if you were just looking to keep attacking ships for fun.
I don’t claim that the Houthis lack a reason. I don’t know of anyone claiming that. Their reason is advertising – it’s a very common behavior among terrorist groups, and it makes a lot of game-theoretical sense. (It only works if you have no moral compass, but again, terrorists.)
What makes you think that a rebel group of very limited resources, facing down a lot of actual-navy ships, can just do more damage easily? What capacities do you think they’re holding back?
As for their targeting, Haaretz seems to have the only complete-looking list I can find of who’s been hit (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-31/ty-article-magazine/23-attacks-in-2-months-all-red-sea-ships-targeted-by-the-houthis/0000018c-5df7-d6f9-afbc-5dff7a430000), and on there I can see two owned by Israelis plus one owned by someone born in Israel who doesn’t live there any more.
But I can also see a lot of “the owner claims it was bound for Italy, but the Houthis claimed it was bound for Israel”, which looks a lot to me like the Houthis just attacking whatever was nearby and then making up a story afterwards. (The modern cargo-shipping industry is not exactly a big believer in evasive routing, and you can’t just divert a quarter-billion dollars of goods without anyone noticing.)
Ships attacked by Yemenis with no connection to Israel that I can see include the Maersk Hangzhou, Maersk Gibraltar, Ardmore Encounter, Strinda, Sai Baba, Palatium III, Blaamanen, MSC Clara, Swan Atlantic, Al Jasrah, and CMA CGM TAGE (which seems to actually be its name, not an acronym). Eleven unrelated ships, versus three related ones. Even if I missed a couple links, they’re still doing worse than a coin flip. That does not inspire confidence in their targeting.
As for their great humanity and restraint, they’re firing missiles at a large number of mostly-random civilian ships. If they haven’t killed people yet, it’s because they lack capacity, not because they are showing restraint.
I’m sorry, are you actually trying to claim that those anti-ship missiles were meant to be nonlethal?
They’re anti-ship missiles.
Of course not. The point is that they are not using anywhere near the amount of force they could be.
Is fighting Israel little more than an excuse for terroristic violence that they wanted to commit anyway?
Ansar Allah (the Houthis) have been fighting a civil war for years including fighting Saudi Arabia, ably assisted by the USA, and the United Arab Emirates. They, suddenly, said to themselves, “Hey let’s go out and try a bit of terrorism? We’ve got a free weekend”
It is quite possible that they see political gain in this naval interdiction but I suspect sympathy with fellow Arabs and an intense dislike of the USA are fuelling their actions. Israeli genocide probably does not go down well with them. And let us not forget the almost certain intention of Israel to raze the Al Asqua Mosque.
If they managed to control shipping in the Red Sea that would be pretty profitable in it’s own right.
If that claim bore much resemblance to reality, your rewrite would be much funnier. To pick one part of it up quickly, I deal with giant data sets at work, and we automate the heck out of it. We spot-check the automation, to make sure it’s giving us good results, but we can’t manually deal with the several million items that we need to deal with over the next couple months using our team of twelve people. So while AI involvement is cause for some concern, it doesn’t actually prove anything – if the targets it generates are good targets, then they’re good targets. I get that you don’t trust Israeli processes here (and I have some doubts myself), but this isn’t the slam-dunk you think it is.
Regarding Yemen, your argument is basically “If they really thought it was a bluff, they should just give in to the terrorist group’s demands, destroy relations with a friendly nation, and then hope that a rebel group fighting an ongoing civil war cares enough about what their sworn enemies think of them to keep their word”. You realize how bad a plan that is, right? You’re just openly declaring what target someone can go after, in order to get anything they want. All they need to do is lob a few missiles and drones at the global supply chain, and they’ve unlocked a cheat code for geopolitics. You don’t think that’ll be abused?
But I’ll take this seriously for a moment. Please tell me what consequences there would be if it does turn out that the Houthis were bluffing. What would you have the US do to them, in that case, in order to dissuade abuse?
>So while AI involvement is cause for some concern, it doesn’t actually prove anything – if the targets it generates are good targets, then they’re good targets.
“Good” is just relative to the metric used for training. It doesn’t mean the targets are morally acceptable or indeed that they correspond to whatever the Israeli military says the metric is.
Agreed. The “if” there was not just for show, it’s an important condition here.
Not buying into Houthi motivations, which are opaque, but two observations:
Maritime ownership is (deliberately, for reasons of insurance and liability) extremely convoluted. Flags of convenience, numbered accounts in Panama or the Cayman Islands, multiple layers isolating ownership a narrowly as possible and more. The practice (not law) of blockade gets around this by directing all ships for blockaded destinations to ports where the cargo can be examined, and sinking any that refuse to comply or attempt to evade.
A second observation is that the word ‘terrorist’ applied to an established collective by now just means ‘someone we do not like’ – the ‘we’ usually being the US and allies. The Houthis are the de facto government of a large part of Yemen.
1) Yes, but maybe that’s a sign that this is a really poor tactic to use, if your goal is to specifically target Israelis.
2) I believe that typical laws against terrorism define it as an act that’s illegal, politically motivated and a threat to innocent human life. That’s taken from American law, but other countries use very similar definitions. And by that definition, I’d say these attacks certainly qualify. It’s as illegal as anything a government might do can be, it’s openly motivated by political aims, and it involves lobbing explosives at random civilians.
“I’d say these attacks certainly qualify. It’s as illegal as anything a government might do can be, it’s openly motivated by political aims, and it involves lobbing explosives at random civilians.”
in that case, does the Reagan government mining Nicaraguan harbors in the 1980s count as terrorism too? The Nicaraguans certainly thought so.
“does the Reagan government mining Nicaraguan harbors in the 1980s count as terrorism too”
As you describe it, that sounds like an act of war against Nicaragua. If you like, you can describe the Houthi attacks against shipping as acts of war, too. Against every country with shipping that transits the Red Sea. It is usually considered the right of anyone who suffers an act of war to conduct their own acts of war back.
Because they (the Houthis) said so. In early December the “Armed Forces of Yemen” AKA the Houthis made an official announcement, video with English subtitles, that they were imposing a blockade on Israel. They were going to attack Israel owned ships, or ships delivering cargo to Israeli ports, everyone else would be free to continue as normal.
(I saw the video via YouTube channel “what is going on with shipping” by Sal Mercogliano, which I highly recommend for the short updates every couple of days.)
And for the first few days, the Houthis did only attack ships that had some kind of Israeli connection.
What happened after that? Possibly the Houthis discovered, like everyone else, that merchant shipping is incredibly confusing. There’s the company that owns the ship, the company that operates the ship, the company that owns the cargo, … so there are very few obviously Israeli ships. (This confusion is almost certainly related to reducing taxes.) And very few ships in the Red Sea are there to deliver cargo to or from an Israeli port, the vast majority are going through the Suez Canal.
Or possibly the Houthis were pressured by their external suppliers to cause more trouble for Western nations.
Either way, the new Houthi plan seems to be attacking almost everyone. (Russian and Chinese ships seem exempt for now.)
“And for the first few days, the Houthis did only attack ships that had some kind of Israeli connection. What happened after that? Possibly the Houthis discovered, like everyone else, that merchant shipping is incredibly confusing.”
Per Lloyd’s List https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1147633/Houthis-target-tenth-ship-in-Red-Sea-as-attacks-turn-increasingly-indiscriminate the Houthis fired on three ships and hijacked one *before* their declaration of blockade. All four of those attacks are unjustified even if you accept the legitimacy of the subsequent blockade.
After blockade was declared they attacked the MT Strinda (destination Italy), the Ardmore Encounter (destination Netherlands), the Maersk Gibraltar (destination Jeddah), the Alanyah (Jeddah), the Palatium III (Jeddah) and the Al Jasrah (Singapore).
You will note that, since announcing a blockade, the Houthis have not attacked a single vessel that was actually heading to or from Israel!
The original question I was responding to was:
> What makes you think the Houthis are actually trying to do anything about Israel?
And I was pointing out that the official Houthi media release says it is in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Please note I was careful to write “some kind of Israeli connection”, not just an Israeli destination. The YouTuber I used as source, Sal Mercogliano of WIGOWS did some digging using publically available websites and found that among the first few ships there was one which had scheduled a stop in Haifa on the return voyage from their current destination. The other ships had the usual tangled web of owning and operating companies, and some of those companies had Israel investors.
(If you repeat these steps today you might get different answers! Again according to WIGOWS, shipping companies and ports have been closing down public websites. And a lot of ships are now advertising Chinese ownership and/or some Chinese crew on board, more than anyone had previously thought.)
If anyone wants to argue that the Houthi actions are not actually a blockade as recognised by international law, or that they’ve escalated well beyond a blockade to piracy, sure. But when the Houthis say they started this because of Israel, I believe them.
At this point, I recall the fellow who pointed out that left-wingers supporting the Houthis are supporting attempts to kill working class sailors. Mostly people of color, in fact. And from countries in the Global South.
Except that the Yemenis haven’t actually killed anyone. Not one single sailor on a ship they captured, nor on any other ship they have attacked (unless they really did sink a US warship). I guess those Houthis must be very incompetent, attempting to kill “working class sailors” they are holding at gunpoint and somehow failing to do so.
But yeah, let’s go ask the Global South what they think about trying to stop mass killings. Oh wait, we have multiple UN resolutions over the last three months telling us who voted for what.
The fact that they’re incompetent is not a great defense of their morality here.
One of the problems with the “tot up the casualty figures, support whichever side kills the fewest” approach to warfare is that it inevitably ends up conflating lack of ability to kill people with lack of desire to.
I respect Bret’s posts on history quite a lot but I would not characterize him as an American nationalist. People like him support the American Empire but this empire is not bound by history, blood or geography. It’s ideological. Sort of like how Roman Empire continued to exist in the east for centuries after losing any control over Italy or the city of Rome. Or being run by Christian Hellenized Anatolians rather than pagan Romans.
The few actual American nationalists who still have exist have been completely sidelined since at least 1945 and are completely opposed to the actions of our so called greatest ally.
American nationalists oppose British actions? Can’t think of any specifics there, which makes me very curious what you’re referring to.
he’s talking about Israel (and about the America First, Pat Buchanan-esque, semi-isolationist type of “nationalist”).
I think “nationalist” is a tricky term to use in the context of large, multiethnic countries like the US or India anyway, where there are many competing “national” narratives.
I am no fan of the eternal Anglo but I was talking about Israel.
A country that doesn’t even have a formal alliance with the US is America’s “greatest ally”? Who on earth is calling them that?
If you want to call America the greatest ally of Israel, sure. I don’t think they have any formal alliances at all, so an informal one can be at the top of the list. But from the American perspective, the only possible candidates are the UK, Canada, and *maybe* Australia or Poland, depending exactly what you’re emphasizing.
“A country that doesn’t even have a formal alliance with the US is America’s “greatest ally”? Who on earth is calling them that?”
i’m pretty sure I’ve heard politicians say it in stump speeches and the like, but I’ll have to check that.
Fair enough. Allow me to pre-emptively register my mockery of anyone who said that, even if I might like them on other issues.
Even the Israeli ambassador to the US limits himself to calling Israel “America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East”. And Obama remarked that “The United States has no better friend in the world than Israel” – but that’s rather different to “greatest ally”!
(“I am no fan of the eternal Anglo”, sheesh, OK coloniser)
I can read Spanish, but I’ll probably get the English version of Quesada Sanz’s book since it’s so much cheaper.
Typos:
why is has been → why it has been
warfare in pre-Roman more generally → warfare in pre-Roman times more generally
Dr. Devereaux I would like to know your thoughts on Scutum.
I would argue that it was by far the most important piece of Roman equipment and Roman soldiers did more fighting with the Scutum than their Pila or Sword. They most likely used their Scutum like a riot police shield, punched and pushed the enemy until he got of balanced and then used the gladius to deliver a stab once an opportunity presented itself.
Scutum is often called the “oval shield” but in my opinion the curved nature of it was far important than the ovalness of it. Curved nature of scutum resulted in a few important things. It wrapped nicely around the soldier’s body and provided good coverage from all angles. It also resulted in the center of mass of the shield to fall behind the grip which made the shield to tend to want to stay in a canted position with top of the shield closer to the body than the bottom of the shield. This made the shield easier to carry as well as it provided a more effective protection since most blows came from above.
Moreover, Scutum is a fine and sophisticated piece of equipment. Archeology shows that the thickness of Scutum was not uniform. The stripes at the edge were thinner which lowered the overall weight of the shield.
All and all, scutum was sturdy, provided excellent protection which most likely contributed to higher confidence and aggressiveness of a typical Roman soldier and it was an expensive and time consuming piece of equipment to produce.
So where did it come from? I am not aware of any other ancient peoples who deployed such curved shield made of laminated wooden stripes. Did Romans uncharacteristically invent this piece of equipment?!
Also, the advantage of Scutum must have been obvious to anyone who fought the Romans. Why nobody else adopted it?! Greeks adopted “Thureos” at a much later date but that shield does not seem to have been curved. It seems it was a flat oval shield, much easier to make and much less effective.
Prof. Devereaux I hope you will at some time write about Greek, Roman and Carthaginian fleets in the same way that you wrote about bread. Where did the Carthaginians get their timber for ships? What about the Athenians of the 5thC, where did their timber come from? If Themistocles was able to persuade Athenian voters to build a fleet after Marathon which was ready for Artemisia and Salamis, that wouldn’t have left much time for transport of logs from, Thrace?, much less letting those logs dry. They would have been using green timber, no?
Top tier Ollie picture.
The Houthis, if pirates, are exercising a strange sort of piracy — have they actually been able to steal anything?
The Galaxy Leader. Captured 20 Nov, currently being held in a Yemen port.
Notable for being the first ship captured by pirates with a *helicopter*
If they control entry to the Red Sea that could be very profitable for them.
And Iran and Russia considering the Houthis are a proxy for those nations, in fact Russia claimed that if the UK sent any more storm shadows, that it would get the Houthis to destroy a British ship.
Obviously the Houthis are as independent from their benefactors as the so called seperatists of the Donbas or Luhansk.
Obviously the Houthis are as independent from their benefactors as the so called seperatists of the Donbas or Luhansk.
Look, I myself have a low opinion of Houthi anti-shipping attacks*; however, that claim is absurd. The Houthis are, unlike the Donbas or Luhansk, not some kind of Manchukuo-style puppet state.
I don’t know under how much Iranian influence the Houthis are. However, I know that they are as much a Russian puppet state as Ukraine is an US puppet state, i.e. not at all.
*I have even heard that the Houthis had succeeded to get both Pakistan AND India to send military ships there out of security concerns.
Fun Fact! Israel is not a “nuclear weapon state”. That is a legal term defined in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. To qualify, a state must have built and detonated a nuclear device before January 1, 1967. There are five nuclear weapon states: US, Russia, UK, France, and China. Four other states have nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan, and Israel never joined the NPT, while North Korea withdrew from the treaty. Though they have nuclear weapons, they are not considered “nuclear weapon states”.
Not nuclear weapon states, merely states which have nuclear weapons?
I think one can make a distinction between the LEGAL term “nuclear weapon state” and the DESCRIPTIVE term “nuclear weapon state”. Israel – as well as India, Pakistan, and North Korea – don’t fall under the former, but certainly do the latter.
Question to OGH; has a student ever sought out your classes specifically because of your work on this blog?
Re: footnote 1 – Manishtishu, 3rd ruler of the Akkadian Empire circa 2270BCE, led fleets down the Persian gulf to maybe Qatar, Bahrain, or Oman, where he fought both on land and sea and briefly added that distant land to the Akkadian empire. As far as I know it is the oldest naval battle and amphibious invasion in history, but from what little we know, it seems sufficently organized that the Akkadians must at least have had practice in fleet actions on the Tigris and Euphrates.
I’d really like an explanation why Pen & Sword is such a disreputable publisher of history books? (Maybe this point has already been raised above, but good lord, there’s hours of scrolling involved to check all these posts!)
Our genial host set out his position e.g. here: https://acoup.blog/2021/04/16/fireside-friday-april-16-2021/
The key comment would seem to be “The problem, put simply is an explosion of subpar books aimed at the general public by amateur authors and through presses which do not seem as concerned about quality control.”
As he also noted, “[T]he deluge of such books poses a tricky problem to readers, particularly because the presses in question often also publish good ancient military history. Pen&Sword (and its imprints, Frontline and Seaforth) is particularly notable here, but it also publishes very good books, like P. Johstono’s The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (recommended on this very blog) and D. Hoyos’ Carthage’s Other Wars, making it impossible to just issue a blanket warning of ‘stay away’ as one might do with a purely pulp press.”
Disclaimer: I have books published by Pen & Sword! So make of my opinion what you will.
As Bret says, the combination of ‘amateur authors’ (meaning presumably non-academic authors) and lack of quality control (meaning light touch editorial control – no independent readers or peer review or specialist editorial input) can lead to some pretty poor quality books getting published. My views on this are somewhat mixed – I’ve read some really poor ancient military history written by academics and published by academic or well-regarded publishers, so these things are no guarantee of quality. From my point of view, the fact the P&S will publish books from non-academics (like me) is a good thing. I’m happy to accept that not every book published, from any author or publisher, will be good, and will use reviews, word of mouth, and sometimes just buying the thing and reading it, to sort wheat from chaff, in the usual way. I suppose Bret’s fear is that a large number of poor quality books will poison the well and I agree, up to a point, but I would still hope that nobody would ignore or pre-emptively dismiss a book just because it didn’t come from an academic author or publisher (rather than because it wasn’t very good).
Getting to this late, but re: footnote 2, do you think the U.S. justification of its Cuba blockade would pass any remotely impartial sniff test? Getting approval from the Organization of American States seems somewhere between dubious and outright absurd, given that (a) the OAS is a U.S.-dominated institution headquartered in Washington whose roots date back to an era when the US military had been actively invading and occupying many of the other future members, so seeking an OAS seal of approval for US military action seems about as meaningful as the Soviet Union seeking a similar seal of approval from the Warsaw Pact; and more generally, (b) international waters are international, and as far as I’m aware there’s no framework in international law for anything like “hemispheric waters” where Guatemala or Paraguay would have legal standing for security control that Laos or Namibia would lack.
It’d be one thing to defend U.S. conduct during the crisis on the basis that U.S. policymakers correctly assumed the Soviets would act like the grownups in the room and not risk the destruction of human civilization despite an unambiguous and unprovoked U.S. act of war, but it seems a bit undignified to sidestep around the flimsiness of the U.S. justification and decline to state outright whether or not you think it was an unambiguous and unprovoked U.S. act of war in the first place. (Presumably you wouldn’t hesitate to be directly scathing about the present-day Russian state’s justifications for its ongoing acts of war against Ukraine, despite the obvious historical parallels between Russian fears about a U.S. military presence in Ukraine and U.S. fears about a Soviet military presence in Cuba.)
+1000 to this.
The US position here seems especially egregious considering that 1) the US had sponsored a failed invasion of Cuba *the previous year*, not the other way around, meaning that Cuba had an extremely legitimate case that the missiles were intended for self defence, 2) that Cuba had already made overtures towards peace with the US which were denied, and 3) the US already had nuclear missiles in Turkey.
The relevance of the Russia/Ukraine comparison really becomes inescapable when you consider the extent to which the U.S. position during the crisis was predetermined by its monomaniacal interpretation of the Cuban Revolution as entirely inorganic and illegitimate, a pure foreign-backed coup d’état to replace the legitimate government of Batista with an illegitimate Soviet puppet regime whose sole purpose was to carry out the geopolitical agenda of the USSR — an interpretation that if anything seems far easier to sustain on the flip side regarding the 2014 Maidan events in Ukraine, where the U.S. had been publicly announcing for years prior its plans to incorporate the country into its military alliance structure, and where high U.S. officials of state were openly present on the ground to oversee the transfer of power.
Well not quite, but despite the howling of traditionalists who considered submarine warfare a barbarity, intercepting, inspection and occasionally seizing neutral ships gave way to shoot-on-sight during wartime. The USA swiftly adopted unrestricted submarine warfare against the Japanese in World War Two.
“Our unfortunate and regrettable collateral damage, their random and indiscriminate attacks”
I wonder what words Bret might have regarding the United States’ vicious and unprovoked act of war against China?