Every major political or ideological movement has a component that it treats, or regards, as its Achilles' heel. Its more serious allies are uneasy with, if not outright embarrassed by, this component and about their alliance with it. The component may apply the doctrine ineptly, graft heresies of its own onto it, embark on ill-considered ventures that entangle the other allies, or become something of a caricature of itself through its actions. Communists most devoted to their communism, for instance, would feel precisely this unease when discussing the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha or Korea's Kim dynasty, and they would meet talk of the "Marxism" of Ethiopia's Mengistu and Somalia's Siad Barre with a strained smile.
The same applies to the way capitalists most devoted to their capitalism regarded figures such as Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Augusto Pinochet. Muammar Gaddafi occupied this same position at a time when Arab nationalism, in its Nasserist incarnation, was still alive and well, inviting ridicule as readily as he invited disavowal. In every case, none of that ever precluded the rest of the alliance from providing the ally behind the unease with support or receiving its support, but their association with it always remained tainted, requiring that it be apologized for.
Yemen's Houthis play precisely this role within the so-called "Axis of Resistance." From the very first television appearance of their military spokesman, Yahya Saree, it has been evident that some of the Houthis’ defects are bound to make its "Axis" allies uneasy. The impression left by Saree's bluster was compounded, soon after this address, by febrile rallies meant to persuade us that, by their primitive weaponry shown in the pictures, the Houthis could threaten international commerce and maritime routes. We are well acquainted with the zeal that regimes akin to the Houthi regime exhibit as they herd masses of people who yell out slogans that others have placed in their throats into the streets.
One of the Houthis' most distinctive traits, however, is that their capacity to affect the world derives from their estrangement from it- that is, from their utter imperviousness to it, and from their preference for an isolation and obscurantism burnished with military technologies bestowed by Iran and perhaps by China. This is an alarming fact, as it demonstrates how meek the twenty-first century is in the face of remnants from earlier centuries.
On the one hand, they resemble the private armies that proliferated during the Thirty Years' War in seventeenth-century Europe: mercenaries whose interests were at odds with those of the populations whose land they exploited to wage war, and who invoked brute force as the sole foundation of whatever standing and recognition they attained. On the other hand, they bring to mind Ibn Khaldun's notion asabiyya as a foundation of dominion regardless of the moral value of its gains. Ansar Allah, unlike other movements that have combined isolation with influence, confronts the world bereft of any cause whatsoever. Their capacity to inflict harm, and to extort others by means of that capacity, weighs most heavily; it alone is the ladder of ascent from the margins of influence to seats of real power. Whereas Ibn Khaldun's asabiyya lays the foundations for states and dynasties, this asabiyya leads to nothing but perpetual statelessness and endless, unbridled chaos.
Houthism is the absolute militia. Whereas Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias snatch the last word on decisions, the Houthis tolerate no partner, however subordinate, and recognize no need for a "cover of legitimacy.” With them we confront the militia that has become the substitute state for the state. We thereby see the Houthis spreading chaos as a way of life and as a mode of relating to the outside world, which is intimately linked to its utter failure to deliver any domestic accomplishment and with its entrenchment of power upon that very void. With the Houthis, the crisis of state-building is exported, metastasizing into a regional crisis and a crisis of the global economy- not as the expression of fierce economic rivalry with the powers they harm, nor as the propagation of an idea its adherents deem sound and worthy of universal adoption.
The absolute militia's chaos is absolute, and its mounting depredations transcend every boundary: it visits them upon its own people, its foremost victims being Yemenis, naturally, but also upon its neighbors. Saudi Arabia is not merely bombarded; it is called "the Saudi enemy," an epithet one had presumed to be Israel's exclusive preserve- vacuous and shallow as it is regardless of its object. As for Egypt, shipping in the Red Sea has been targeted since late 2023, with all that this entails for the Suez Canal, whose revenues have plummeted and whose capacity to draw hard currency into the Egyptian economy has been sapped.
There is a salvationist impulse in all this, but it is a Samsonian salvationism that promises not victory in life so much as it seeks to intimate victory over life. It is thus the sum of manifold privations: a symptom of the decay of movements and causes masquerading as their triumph, a portent of endings masquerading as victorious beginnings.
Yet for all that, it does not leave its ostensibly more serious Axis allies uneasy. It is often the object of their envy, and they extol it as their foremost source of strength- a microcosm of the world they covet. After all, it "fights;" doesn't it?
