The Red Sea is where threats to civilian shipping occasionally rear their ugly heads. It is also where positive Mideast changes can be made — especially, as in 1967, when such threats are adequately answered. A new threat, from Iranian-backed Yemeni terrorists, is now growing. If history is any guide, President Biden’s response is insufficient. Unlike 56 years ago, high seas are rougher around the world and positive developments are nowhere to be seen.  

This week the Tehran-backed Houthis launched missiles at three commercial ships in the Red Sea. Additionally, United States Ship Carney intercepted Houthi attack drones. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is part of an American naval force sent to the Mideast to deter the widening of war beyond Gaza. The Houthis, however, seem undeterred, determined to hit what they believe to be Israeli targets. Other Iranian proxies are eager for battle.  

An Israeli shipping tycoon once owned a stake in one of the struck vessels, a Bahamas-flagged, British-owned cargo ship, Unity Explorer. Other targeted ships had loose ties to Israeli businessmen. All have multinational owners and crews. No Israeli nationals were aboard. The threat is global, and America, long a guarantor of freedom of navigation, is not seriously responding to peril in the corridor for more than ten percent of world commerce. 

The attacks are “unacceptable and have to stop,” the National Security Adviser, Jacob Sullivan, said Monday. The Houthis, he says, “are the ones with their finger on the trigger. But that gun — the weapons here are being supplied by Iran. And Iran, we believe, is the ultimate party responsible for this.” All true, so . . .? Engage in “intensive consultations with partners and allies to determine the appropriate next steps,” twitters Mr. Sullivan. That’ll show ’em.

History teaches that gathering a multinational naval posse may fall short. On May 23, 1967, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, declared the Tiran straits closed to Israeli shipping. The straits, connecting the Gulf of Eilat to the Red Sea, is the Jewish State’s only ocean route to Asia and Africa. The Israeli premier, Levi Eshkol, considered Nasser’s threat a declaration of war, and President Johnson agreed.

America “considers the Gulf to be an international waterway and feels that a blockade of Israeli shipping is illegal and potentially disastrous to the cause of peace,” Johnson said, adding that freedom of navigation is “a vital interest of the entire international community.” A decade earlier President Eisenhower warned Nasser that Tiran’s closure would be “dealt with firmly by the society of nations.” Society? Community? Israel was left to go it alone. 

In the morning of June 6 Israel launched the Six-Day War, which would be studied in military academies for decades hence. Israel  acquired the Sinai peninsula in the south, the Golan Heights in the north, and its nation’s cradle of Judea and Samaria to the east. It united the Jewish capital, Jerusalem. Nasser was gone, and Egypt was only able to reacquire the Sinai a decade later through a peace treaty with Israel.

Now Israel is engaged in a war that Iranian proxies — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — launched. It has its hands full. The Houthis are eager to get in on the act, trying to hit Eilat with missiles and drones. Some 1,200 miles away, at the Houthi-captured Yemeni capital, Sana’a, a missile factory was demolished this week in what is widely believed to be an Israeli bombing. Yet Israeli ships must avoid the Red Sea at a financial loss. 

Israel’s response to the Red Sea crisis of 1967 instructs that this is no time for coalition-building or a notional international community wagging fingers. Failing to stop Houthi aggression will encourage Iran’s other proxies to escalate attacks against the global order. Acting against a ragtag Yemeni army would remind others, including Red China, that when war is declared on the high seas, America is there on the side of freedom of the seas.