The Pentagon said on Thursday that more than 20 countries have signed up for Operation Prosperity Guardian, the U.S.-led international coalition to protect Red Sea shipping from the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen.
However, the Pentagon was only willing to name 12 of the participants and said some nations would provide only “staff or other types of support” rather than much-needed warships to protect civilian vessels against Houthi drones, missiles, and hijackers. Among the countries named is Spain, which clarified later in the day that it had not yet made any decision on joining.
Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the two newly named participants to join this “coalition of the willing” were Greece and Australia.
Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias announced Thursday that the country would send a frigate to join the Red Sea patrol to protect “merchant ships, the lives of seafarers, [and] the global economy.”
Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his country would send 11 military personnel to work at the Operation Prosperity Guardian headquarters in Bahrain, joining five Australians already stationed there.
“We won’t be sending a ship or a plane. That said, we will be almost tripling our contribution to the combined maritime force,” Marles said.
“We need to be really clear around our strategic focus, and our strategic focus is our region: the northeast Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Pacific,” he added, dumping a great deal of responsibility on sixteen people who do not even have a boat.
The Australian opposition strongly criticized the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for refusing to commit naval assets to the Red Sea crisis.
“It’s in our national interest to contribute. If we want others to help us in a time of need, we need to step up and reciprocate now,” said opposition spokesman Andrew Hastie.
As for the rest of the new members of the “coalition of the willing,” Ryder said they were not willing to be named, and he declined to criticize the paltry contributions offered by countries like Australia.
“We’ll allow other countries, defer to them to talk about their participation,” he said.
Observers of the Red Sea debacle have theorized that some countries are very interested in keeping the shipping lanes open but find it politically impossible to openly oppose the Houthis because their piracy is ostensibly an effort to aid the Palestinians in Gaza by forcing Israel to back down from its campaign against Hamas.
Prime examples of such countries would be Egypt, the owner of the Suez Canal, and Saudi Arabia, which has several busy Red Sea ports.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Tuesday invited China to play a “constructive role” in preventing the Houthis from attacking Red Sea shipping, but Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin flatly refused the invitation at his press conference on Thursday.
“We believe relevant parties, especially major countries with influence, need to play a constructive and responsible role in keeping the shipping lanes safe in the Red Sea,” Wang sniffed, implicitly excluding China from the list of relevant parties.
China’s friends in Iran have deployed at least one ship to the Red Sea, but it is working for the terrorists.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Friday quoted “Western and regional security officials” who said a “surveillance vessel controlled by Iran’s paramilitary forces” is cruising the Red Sea and passing tracking information on cargo ships to the Houthis.
The Houthis insisted they did not have to rely on Iran for help with targeting their pirate attacks, but naval experts doubted the Houthis could hit civilian vessels running with the radios off unless a maritime surveillance asset tracked them.
“The Houthis don’t have the radar technology to target the ships. They need Iranian assistance. Without it, the missiles would just drop in the water,” said one of the Western security officials.