Biden Co-Chair Coons: I ‘Hope’ We ‘Find a Way to Deter Iran,’ We’ll Need to Do More on Houthis

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” Biden Campaign Co-Chair Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) responded to a question on what is the Biden administration’s end game for strikes on the Houthis by stating that “my hope is that we will find a way to deter Iran, but for the intermediate term, it’s going to require more action to prevent the Houthis from striking shipping.”

Co-host Phil Mattingly asked, “I do want to ask, on other foreign policy issues, because there is a lot going on right now, the fourth U.S. strikes in Yemen targeting Houthi rebels. The biggest question that I have given, one, the reticence of the administration to take this action until just a couple of weeks ago or a week ago is, what is the end game here?”

Coons responded, “Well, President Biden and his national security team are correctly working tirelessly since the October 7 Hamas attacks on innocent civilians in Israel to deter Iran. I’ll remind you, Iran is the regional source of all this violence and all these challenges because they are the folks who train and support and help fund the Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, the militias that have been striking American targets in Iraq and in Syria. It is Iran that most needs to be deterred. President Biden and his team took a disciplined, thoughtful approach to these Houthi attacks of drones and missiles on ships. They went to the U.N. Security Council and got a resolution. They got 11 other countries to sign up to share the burden of the naval interception. They warned the Houthis. They took modest initial actions, then they took more aggressive strikes. In the last two strikes, we’ve been hitting — our forces have been hitting Houthi launchers as they are about to strike ships. So, my hope is that we will find a way to deter Iran, but for the intermediate term, it’s going to require more action to prevent the Houthis from striking shipping. A huge percentage of global commerce goes through the Red Sea, and we’re going to begin to see impacts if every ship that’s going from Asia to Europe has to go around the very south of Africa.”

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