Global pressure builds in Red Sea

Even without the warship the Albanese government declined to provide, the joint demarche by the US and 12 allies, including Australia, over the terrorist threat to Red Sea shipping carries immense weight the Houthi rebels and their Iranian masters would be foolish to ignore. Unambiguous in the unprecedented “final warning” issued by the White House on behalf of the US, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK is the threat of collective military action “to hold malign actors accountable for unlawful seizures and attacks”.

That is as it should be. The threat to vital global trade posed by the Houthi rebels from their base in Yemen is dire. It can no longer be tolerated. Australia is right to be part of the effort to end what the statement refers to as “a direct threat that has no lawful justification to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways”.

Australia’s contribution to the joint effort, as indicated by Anthony Albanese when he controversially rejected the US request for a warship, may be no more than an additional six Australian soldiers deployed to the Middle East and unspecified “diplomatic support”. But even that is important given the extent of a rapidly escalating crisis that has the potential to affect 15 per cent of global seaborne trade.

The Houthis may be the putative perpetrators of the deadly ship missile attacks and high seas piracy, but it is Iran that underpins them. Iran’s own tortured instability is writ large in Wednesday’s twin bomb blasts that ripped through a crowd gathered at the Martyrs Cemetery in the city of Kerman to commemorate the 2020 assassination in a US drone strike of the notorious Revolutionary Guards general Qasem Soleimani, killing almost 100 people.

The Tehran regime, which knows something of terrorism, says it was a “terrorist attack”. According to the White House, it may have been the work of Sunni ISIS elements opposed to the Shia regime. Whatever the truth, it is another sign of just how unstable the Tehran regime is.

It is vital that the coalition formed to confront the dire threat to Red Sea shipping shows that it means business. The unambiguous gravity of the global shipping crisis demands that Australia should be prepared to join its allies in doing more than just offering six additional soldiers and “diplomatic support”.