After the U.S.-British air and naval strikes on Yemen on Thursday night, the Middle East is even messier than it may seem.

President Joe Biden and his allies (a smaller coalition than he was hoping to rally) had good reason to launch the attack. Since November, Houthi militias, which control much of Yemen, have fired more than 100 drones and missiles at 27 commercial vessels—affecting the trade of 50 countries—in the Red Sea, passageway for 20 percent of the world’s container shipping.

The Houthis’ most recent strike, on Tuesday, had been a coordinated salvo of 21 drones and missiles at commercial and military ships. U.S. Navy crews were able to shoot down all the weapons, but some came close. In any case, protecting navigation of the seas is an age-old, legitimate military mission. Before Tuesday’s strike, the U.S. and 13 other countries had formally warned the Houthis they would face “consequences” if they continued attacking ships. The U.N. Security Council also condemned the Houthi attacks.

Yet at the same time, the Biden-led attack—which involved ships, submarines, and aircraft firing more than 100 highly accurate missiles at more than 60 Houthi targets across at least 16 locations in Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa—could escalate and widen the ongoing conflicts in the region. At the very least, it will further embroil the United States in the war and complicate the prospects of a peace.

The strikes—which officials say were aimed at radars, missile factories and depots, command-control facilities, and drone launch sites—were meant to “degrade” Houthi capabilities to attack more ships. The officials did not claim that the strikes would “destroy” all of their capabilities; they said it was likely that the Houthis would retaliate in some form, in which case the U.S. would respond accordingly. It is not yet known how effective the strike was—it takes hours, sometimes days, for military intelligence to conduct “bomb-damage assessment.” Houthi officials claimed the attack killed five militiamen and injured six. They said nothing about civilian casualties, which suggests there were probably few, if any.

The Houthis are a Shiite sect that overthrew the Yemeni government in 2014 and have been waging a civil war ever since, with steadily increasing support from Iran and against steadily diminishing resistance from Saudi Arabia. The support from Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—in weapons, training, and intelligence—has made Houthi fighters, which were once a ragtag militia........

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