The West thinks every problem in the Middle East is a nail

It was reported on Friday that the United Kingdom and the United States had commenced a series of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.

The Houthis are an internationally unrecognized militia group who occupies the southwest of the country and has battled a coalition in a 10-year civil war.

Now, as a byproduct of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the Houthis have targeted international shipping in a retaliatory bid to try and strangle Israel's international trade, provoking this military response.

First, there is no guarantee the US and UK can succeed in crushing the Houthis. With an extensive history of Middle East-based interventions and bombing campaigns, London and Washington underestimate the resolve of this group that has successfully resisted a 10-year war against them, while other examples such as the Afghanistan war illustrate the long-term failure of this approach.

Once again, both countries are risking the anticipation of a Middle East "quagmire," whereby one intervention sows the seeds of more conflicts. The only way to end all of this is to push for peace, especially in Gaza.

The US and UK are famous for treating every problem in the Middle East as a nail to be hit with a hammer, that is, using military force as a quick-fix solution to try and quash instability or conflict in the region, only for it to produce more in the process and often lead to more harm than good.

Examples of this across the past 30 years include how the invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to a proliferation of terrorism and instability, a strengthening of Al-Qaeda and the rise of ISIL, leading to an outpouring of violence in regions across the world, or how backed civil wars or regime changes in Libya and Syria also had an explosion of negative consequences that impacted both at home in the form of terrorism as well as abroad.

The risks are straightforward: Western military intervention in the Middle East creates political instability and ideological upheaval, which empower radical ideologies and thus sow the seeds of more conflict.

While of course the shipping situation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is deemed a critical issue for British and American national interests, it is ignored that this dilemma itself is a product of Western backing for Israel in the conflict against Gaza.

This is not happening in a vacuum but is a chain of events caused by irresponsible foreign policies by the Biden administration, and each step to solve it only makes the problem worse.

Another problem in this regard is that the two countries are not seeking peace or inclusivity in the Middle East but actively see the region as a zero-sum ideological struggle and competition against others, which makes it impossible to compromise.

It has after all been the policy of Britain for long over a century to try and recreate the Middle East in its image, aiming to maintain political, economic, diplomatic and military dominance over it. This includes the strategic waterway of the Gulf of Aden, which is why they have for so long backed a civil war in Yemen with an attempt to destroy the Houthis.

But if both the US and the UK are serious about protecting shipping in the Red Sea and, for that matter, restoring peace and stability to the Middle East, the solution is quite simple: start pushing for peace in the Gaza Strip and negotiate an immediate ceasefire, which will end the ripple conflicts elsewhere.

The only way forward for the Middle East is to end the tradition of approaching every single problem with a military response, end bloc politics and zero-sum power games, and push for peace, diplomacy and mediation. Israel and Palestine can co-exist with the right support, and it is also possible to broker an end to the conflict in Yemen, but neither the US nor the UK seems to have desire to do so.

As history shows, this will once again only cause more problems than it aims to fix, and the cycle will roll on.

(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)