Follow this authorDavid Ignatius's opinions

The United States and Britain finally took military action on Jan. 11, striking more than 60 Houthi targets with more than 100 precision bombs, and U.S. forces attacked again the next day. Even that didn’t stop the Houthis, who struck a U.S-owned cargo ship on Monday, drawing a retaliatory U.S. assault Tuesday against a Houthi missile-launching site.

The Houthis are masters of modern guerrilla war, exploiting the weak points of stronger powers. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates fought a war against them starting in 2014. The UAE gave up in 2020, and the Saudis agreed to a peace deal last year, which only seemed to embolden the Houthis. They are tough, patient fighters — supplied with weapons, training and intelligence by Iran — and they sit atop one of the world’s most strategic waterways.

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Houthi leaders seem to understand that the deeper they draw the United States into conflict, the greater impact they have on the global economy. That’s the lesson of this undeclared war: The United States has overwhelming economic power. But perhaps because it is dependent on global trade and financial flows, it is especially vulnerable to economic attack by such seeming lightweights as the Houthis.

We’ve seen other bottleneck vulnerabilities during the past few years. A giant Panamanian-flagged cargo ship called the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021, obstructing more than 350 ships. The delicate thread of global commerce was beginning to unravel when the ship was finally refloated.

The war in Ukraine has been, in part, a battle to control access points and skew commerce. Russian control of the Black Sea allowed it, for a time, to halt Ukrainian grain shipments and spike global food prices — adding to inflation and, worse, threatening famine. Russia’s enemies, identity still unknown, sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. Ukraine at least twice has attacked the Kerch Strait bridge that links Russia to occupied Crimea.

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Paradoxically, the more dominant the United States has become economically, the more vulnerable it is to supply-chain attack. An early demonstration of that dependence was the 1974 Arab oil embargo, whose destabilizing effects persisted for much of the next decade. Today’s most precious resource is information, and the United States keeps leaping forward with new digital tools. But as cyber technology advances, so do the weapons of cyberwar.

A disturbing example of a........

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