“Why would the U.S. even care? These aren’t American cargo ships.”
About ten percent of world trade goes through the Red Sea. You might say, why do we care? It’s not our trade. Picture markets as one big world-sized bucket of stuff. Each country dips into the bucket for their needs. If the stuff in the bucket gets more expensive, then everyone who dips into the bucket pays more, including the US consumer. Further, some of the bucket-dippers are really poor and each percent of increased costs means a certain number of people starve to death. You might say, why do we care? Well, in today’s connected world they might get on a ship to South America and eventually come acrost America’s wide-open border to sponge off American welfare payments. Or they’ll migrate to our allies and cause them problems. Anain, why do we care? It’s not a direct effect, but enough of these civilization destroying events will eventually build up to the point where we can’t do anything. It is much better to fight small manageable fires rather than wait until the entire house is on fire. Our anger arises from the fact our government makes no attempt to explain why we should care. We aren’t consulted. Part of that is because we have a representative government. They don’t hold a plebiscite for each and every issue because we hired them to make those decisions. Still, we’d be better served if the government took a minute to explain why they do the things they do on our behalf.
Also, we are showing how weak we are if we don’t go after those pirates.
The rest of the world sees this, and who knows when a terrorist group decides to go after a cruise ship? Achille Lauro, anyone?
Those Houthi ships need to be taken out with extreme prejudice as soon as they
leave port. I don’t care which country does it.