That question was a subplot in the Trump administration's instantly famous leaked Signal chat over an operation to hit Iran's Houthi sock puppets
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is
God is Great, Death to Americaâ„¢, Death to Israel, a curse on the JewsThey like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
targets in Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of...
Vice President JD Vance expressed skepticism, pointing out that more European than US trade passes through the Suez Canal.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz, on the other hand, were strongly in favor. Hegseth, correctly, called freedom of navigation ''a core national interest.''
Open sea lanes are necessary to US commercial shipping and trade (80% of all global trade is carried by ocean), as well as to lines of communication with our allies and US bases overseas.
As a strategy document from US Joint Forces Command put it a few years ago, ''The crucial enabler for America's ability to project its military power for the past six decades has been its almost complete control over the global commons.''
The fact is, President Trump's decision to hit the Houthis toward the goal of fully freeing the Red Sea to shipping again was fundamentally American.
We've long recognized the wisdom of the great 17th-century English adventurer Walter Raleigh when he said, ''For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.''
We've acted on that insight from the beginning of our existence as a nation.
We fought the Quasi War with La Belle France beginning in 1798 during the John Adams administration over French privateers seizing our shipping in the Caribbean.
A few years later, President Thomas Jefferson reacted similarly to the Barbary states harassing European and American shipping in the Mediterranean.
He ordered US ships to go after the corsairs hammer and tongs, urging our commander to ''chastise their insolence — by sinking, burning or destroying their ships & vessels wherever you shall find them.''
Jefferson's actions were in keeping with his belief that we should be a trading nation, and it'd only be possible with naval protection.
As he had put it earlier in a letter to James Monroe, ''this will require a protecting force on the sea. Otherwise the smallest powers in Europe, every one which possesses a single ship of the line may dictate to us, and enforce their demands by captures on our commerce.''
He concluded that ''naval force then is necessary if we mean to be commercial.''