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All that is at stake for America is some small fraction of wealth that the blockade represents, and ultimately that wealth is of little importance for a country as glutted on it as America, and in any case it's probably mostly at stake for the well-off investor class rather than the broad populace.
It is in most people's best interests for state power and particularly the power of the world's elite to be constrained by various laws and conventions. Houthis are fighting against powerful and malign forces represented by Israel and the US. It is in most peoples' interests that they win over their adversaries, as this will weaken elite power and the power of the militaries they control.
I don't give a shit about America, at least, not more of an extent than America gives a shit about me, and I think what the Houthis are doing is terrible. Not on a wealth terms, but on a value destruction terms.
Wealth, at least in fiscal terms, is not my concern, and to Americans least of all given that they can just print their way out of it. But value, actual value, is fucked.
Real, genuine productivity not counted in dollars I believe is on a firm downtrend and inflating the money supply or bean counter supply doesn't have much to do with it. You can have as much money as you want but that won't turn one block of steel into two without a whole supply chain of people who are willing to mine, process and machine that block. By which count the Houthis are directly damaging value that exists in this chain and applying their own war tax on significant portions of the world economy.
If Egypt decided to use chemical weapons on the Houthis tomorrow, I wouldn't condone it. But I'd understand.
If various ecologically-inspired political parties decided to advocate for bombing Houthis, I'd understand as well. Fuel burned in global shipping is a significant contributor to climate change, and a lengthening of vessel trade routes and logistics chains stand to do more damage than several million lifetimes of plastic straws.
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To be replaced by what? Get rid of one elite or overarching entity, and what replaces that? Revolutionaries get lined up against the wall by apparatchiks who then set themselves as the new elite.
Investor classes and wealthy elites and all the other preferred terms of derogation are precisely that: descriptors meant to evoke disdain for a victim and thus give moral cover to the perpetuator. The israeli kids raped and murdered on telegram live by armed men were not people, they were colonizers. The businesses looted and burned during the minneapolis riots were not citizens, they were gentrifiers. The peasants who didn't drink away their money and who were executed under collectivization were not people, they were kulaks or antirevolutionaries.
Speaking of laws and conventions as if they are not constraining the hated west is itself a misrepresentation. There is nothing lawful about shooting missiles at civilian ships in international waters. Giving moral support to houthis impoverishes everyone except the internal enemies of 'the west' who wish to seize the reigns of power for their own specific set of hands. Most of these revolutionaries are just too stupid and lazy to take up the arms themselves and blindly trust the word of populists who shout false promises freely, confident that when the power actually resides in their own hands they will find their grips surprisongly unrestrained and unbeholden to those who ostensibly granted them such power in the first place.
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