Houthis Have Defeated American Goliath - UK Media

Yemen’s Houthi militia have effectively “defeated the US military,” humbling America into recognizing that it “cannot be an omnipotent force, fighting every battle around the globe,” one of the UK’s top circulation daily newspapers has suggested.

In a piece for The Telegraph on Wednesday, opinion contributor Daniel Depetris pointed out that America’s immense economic and military might “doesn’t necessarily equate to unlimited influence,” and that “the architects of US foreign policy all too often assume the US is all powerful, that it can will events out of whole cloth and coerce friends and adversaries alike to adopt their policies to Washington’s likings.”

This “almost universal” assumption “has been disproven time and time again,” most recently by the Houthis, who, in Depetris’ characterization, have “been treating the Red Sea as [their] own personal firing range since November.”

No amount of effort by the US and the UK to “change the Houthis’ strategic calculus” by bombing the militia has helped, the columnist admitted. Nor have US attempts to quietly bribe the Houthis to get them to halt their attacks.