In the narrow waters where global commerce breathes, a militia born of civil war has seized what strategists call the cork of the Red Sea — a chokepoint whose control reshapes the balance of power between nations far beyond Yemen's borders. The Houthis, long dismissed as a regional spoiler, have moved into territory American military planners once considered their own domain of overwhelming advantage, inverting the logic of deterrence in ways that leave Gulf states and Washington without comfortable answers. This is the old story of asymmetric persistence meeting the limits of conventional pow