A new report says the United States’ recent missile strikes on Yemen is only “one of the bad options” on President Joe Biden’s table, warning that the move will increase regional tensions.
The report, published by the Foreign Policy website on Friday, said the US military strikes on the Arab country showed that Washington has a limited batch of mostly bad options to deal with the Yemeni army’s attacks, amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
These attacks will escalate tensions and further involve Washington and other regional powers in a wider conflict, the American news publication noted.
The report came after US and British forces carried out air, naval, and submarine attacks on Yemeni targets. The attacks on Yemen followed Yemeni forces’ strikes on several Israeli-related ships in the Red Sea in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Biden said the attacks were a joint operation by the US and the UK, with help from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands.
The Yemeni army has vowed to carry out retaliatory operations, stressing that the US and UK attacks against the country would not go “unanswered and unpunished.”
A day before the strikes, Thomas Juneau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, said that Washington is “in a bad position,” adding that “There are no obviously good options for the US at this point, so the challenge is to find the least bad option moving forward.”
Experts have also warned that these attacks could help increase the popularity of the Yemeni military because by attacking ships linked to Israel, they have strengthened their domestic and regional popularity and established themselves as a major power player throughout the region.
Meanwhile, experts have admitted that the concentration of the military operations of the Yemeni army in one of the main centers of global trade has resulted in a heavy cost for the world economy.
A new study by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy also found that the volume of containers passing through the Red Sea in December reached about 70 percent less than usual.
The Yemeni army has intensified attacks on ships en route to the Israeli-occupied territories after the illegal entity refused to extend a Qatari-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and pressed ahead with its genocidal war on the besieged Palestinian territory.
Yemeni forces have also launched missile and drone attacks on targets in the Israeli-occupied territories after the regime’s aggression on Gaza.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
The Israeli aggression has so far killed more than 23,843 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Nearly 60,317 Palestinians have also been wounded.
