The group chat that broke Washington has sparked a weeklong war of words between President Donald Trump’s top staff and Jeffrey Goldberg, the liberal editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. He reported in a March 24 blockbuster story that he had been erroneously added to a Signal group chat of top national security officials.
Yet, neither side of the aisle has spent much time debating the actual substance of the Signal chat relative to the blame game over how Goldberg wound up part of a likely classified conversation in the first place. While national security adviser Michael Waltz likely made the major error of accidentally adding Goldberg to the chat, he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were dead right about one thing: Liberating the Red Sea from the control of Houthi terrorists was and still is unquestionably in America’s self-interests.
In the group chat’s most fascinating exchange, Vice President JD Vance pushed back on his boss’s since-executed plan to conduct naval and aerial strikes on dozens of Houthi military targets in Yemen. Claiming that only 3% of American trade runs through the Red Sea compared to 40% of European trade, Vance offered a litany of risks incurred by the scheme. The public might not understand why such a strike was necessary, Vance demurred, and Trump may have been unaware of “how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe.” Furthermore, Vance wondered whether the attacks would result in elevated oil prices.
Waltz pointed out that while we can’t say for certain how much of the 30% of global container trade that traverses through the Red Sea comes from or to America, only America, not Europe, could reopen the shipping lanes in the Red Sea. But it was Hegseth who laid out the clearest case for why the strike was desired by Trump in the first place: “1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”
Vance eventually gets to the actual rationale behind his opposition to the strikes — “I just hate bailing out Europe again” — but accedes to the plan.
And that plan, thus far, has shown promise. It is still far too soon to say whether the whole military campaign has been successful, as strikes are ongoing. And shipping conglomerates are unlikely to return routes to the Red Sea until U.S. liberation of the thoroughfare proves permanent and complete. But the benefit, if the strikes are successful, will be tangible to America.
While $1 trillion of annual global trade, or somewhere between 12% and 15%, used to travel through the Red Sea, shipments have plummeted 70% due to the Houthis’ selective attacks on cargo ships from America and its allies. As this column has explained before, the alternate route of sailing around the Cape of Good Hope instead of directly crossing the Red Sea adds an extra 3,500 nautical miles, 10 days, and $1 million in additional travel.
And while America may not directly transport a majority of its trade through the Red Sea, both global trade networks and the finite nature of shipping capability mean that we have paid for reduced shipping supply in the Red Sea with higher shipping costs everywhere else.
Consider this chart of Drewry’s World Container Indices. While Drewry maintains one mega-index of global shipping costs, this graph splices out the change in prices for four major routes, two of which have been frequently forced to detour around the Cape of Good Hope and away from the Red Sea, and two of which are not directly affected because they pass through the Pacific Ocean, not Eurasia. But if you look at the graph, all the shipping indices tend to move in tandem. The route most directly harmed by Houthi control of the Red Sea, Shanghai to Rotterdam, suffered the steepest price increases as a result of Houthi attacks.
Throughout 2024, the cost of shipping a container from Asia to northern Europe rose 270%, while shipping one from China to the American West Coast rose 217%. The White House estimates that this increased global consumer goods inflation between 0.6% and 0.7% last year.
But the most significant possible cost to Americans would be a failure to deter the Houthis from expanding their assaults and the rest of our adversaries from initiating new fights against us.
Recall that this country’s first major war outside the Western Hemisphere was indeed to assert our right to traverse the seas and trade freely. Securing our independence from the British meant that we lost the naval protection of the French, and African pirates began seizing American ships and enslaving our citizens. As secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson was charged with using diplomacy and then bribery to secure the safety of our sailors and the seas.
But he soon learned that appeasement in the form of paying tributes to pirates only went so far. The U.S. Department of the Navy was established in 1798 specifically to protect U.S. shipping from piracy, and by the time Jefferson became president in 1801, he was ready to play hardball. When the theocratic warlord of Ottoman Tripoli demanded that the incoming president pay up for peace, Jefferson refused. Tripoli declared war, and Jefferson sent in the Navy. At various points throughout the four-year war, American forces were joined by Greeks, Berbers, Swedes, and Sicilians, ultimately capturing the city of Derna and forcing Tripoli to agree to a peace treaty and bring the First Barbary War to a close.
Given the security scandal of why the conversation is a national news story in the first place, Waltz and Hegseth likely won’t be taking a victory lap here. But the sizable solecism of the Signal chat aside, the two were right on the merits, and Trump’s muscular approach to the Houthis should be seen as pro-American as Jefferson’s victory over the Barbary pirates over 200 years ago.
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