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The bombshell publication of a group chat involving Trump administration officials discussing U.S. battle plans revealed in unusually stark fashion what the Trump administration hopes to achieve with airstrikes this month against the Houthi militia in Yemen.

The attacks, some of the chat’s participants said, were meant to deter the Houthis from attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea and reopen shipping lanes to the Suez Canal.

“Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes,” said a participant identified as Michael Waltz, President Trump’s national security adviser.

But the high-level hopes expressed in the Signal chat, which became public after The Atlantic’s editor in chief was inadvertently added to it, could collide with reality.

Middle East experts said the Iran-backed Houthis won’t be easily beaten. Few wars have been won with air power alone, and some military experts say it will be no different with the Houthis. The biggest shipping companies also have little appetite for returning to the Red Sea. They have found a workaround that, while inconvenient and costly, allows them to avoid those lanes and deliver goods on time.

James R. Holmes, the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, said that even during the U.S. war to remove Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, when air power was at its apex, a land invasion was necessary — and defeating the Houthis might require an occupation.

“You have to control turf to win,” Mr. Holmes said. “Aircraft cannot occupy territory, however valuable a supporting capability they are for armies and Marines.”

The Houthis may even use the U.S. military strikes, analysts say, to bolster their position in Yemen and farther afield as other Iranian proxies, like the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, have suffered heavy losses at the hands of Israel.

The latest U.S. strikes are a “direct answer to the Houthi prayers to have a war with the U.S.,” said Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni research fellow at Chatham House, a research institute based in London. He said the group “wants to drag the U.S. into a larger regional escalation.”

The Trump administration has called the Houthis a threat to the safety of Americans, U.S. allies and the stability of global maritime trade. In addition to the military strikes, the administration officially re-designated the Houthis as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Mr. Trump vowed this month that the group would be “completely annihilated” and warned Iran to “immediately” stop supplying it with military equipment and providing it general support.

The Trump administration says its strikes will be more effective than those carried out by the Biden administration. Another chat participant, identified as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said, “Biden cratered” U.S. deterrence.

With heavier bombing, targeted strikes against Houthi leaders and successful efforts to cut off financial flows to the militia, the United States may succeed. But history is not on its side.

From 2015 to 2022, the Houthis fought off a Saudi-led coalition, which launched a war to restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government and counter Iran’s influence in the region. And even if the United States successfully pressures Iran into limiting its support to the Houthis, the militants have shown they can act independently, analysts said.

“The group withstood seven years of Saudi-led airstrikes and a year of U.S. strikes under the Biden administration, which yielded little effect,” said Luca Nevola, a senior analyst for Yemen and the Gulf at Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a crisis monitoring group.

James Hewitt, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement on Wednesday, “While this is still an ongoing operation, we have had major positive indications from our efforts, including taking out key Houthi leadership, and carried out strikes on more than 100 Houthi targets, including air-defense systems, headquarters, command and control, and weapons manufacturing and storage facilities.”

The Houthis have been striking ships in the Red Sea since late 2023, targeting vessels that the group believes are linked to Israel, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. A period of relative calm followed after a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was struck in January. But then the Houthis issued a warning on March 12, saying they would restart attacks on Israeli vessels in retaliation for Israel’s closure of Gaza’s crossings and the blockade of humanitarian aid.

Since the U.S. strikes began this month, the Houthis have launched at least eight ballistic missiles at Israel in the past two weeks, most recently on Thursday, though most were intercepted. Israeli warplanes have retaliated by bombing ports and a power plant in Yemeni territory controlled by the Houthis.

Historically, great powers have aimed to protect shipping because an interruption in global trade flows can trigger shortages and high inflation, causing economic havoc. Much of the group chat among Trump administration officials focused on opening shipping lanes. “Restoring freedom of navigation” was “a core national interest,” Mr. Hegseth said.

But although the U.S. military has been conducting daily strikes against Houthi targets, the Pentagon has not provided details about the attacks since March 17, when it said more than 30 Houthi targets had been hit on the first day. Yemeni officials say the strikes also hit residential areas and buildings in Sana, the capital, causing an unknown number of civilian casualties.

And the Houthis have largely succeeded in frightening off Western vessels from the Red Sea. Since they started targeting ships in 2023, they have carried out about 130 attacks on commercial vessels, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the crisis monitoring group.

That has prompted freighters going from Asia to Europe to stop traveling through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and instead go around the southern tip of Africa — a voyage that is about 3,500 nautical miles and 10 days longer. The cost of shipping surged as companies scrambled to reorganize their routes and add more vessels. But within months, they adapted to the longer voyages, and this year shipping rates plunged.

Shipping executives say they won’t return to the Red Sea until there is a Middle East peace accord that includes the Houthis or a defeat of the militia.

“It’s either a full degradation of their capabilities or there is some type of deal,” Vincent Clerc, chief executive of Maersk, a shipping line based in Denmark, said in February. On Wednesday, a Maersk spokesman said in a statement, “Our priority remains to be the safety of our seafarers, vessels and customer’s cargo.”

In the group chat, there was dispute about whether reopening the Red Sea shipping lanes was of crucial national interest. A participant identified as Vice President JD Vance contended that the lanes were far more important to Europe than the United States.

The United States does not rely on the Suez Canal because its seaborne trade with Asia goes across the Pacific, and with Europe, it travels across the Atlantic. But shipping analysts said the Suez Canal is still a crucial waterway for the United States.

Its importance became clear in recent years, when other shipping routes — the Panama Canal coveted by Mr. Trump, for instance — were severely restricted or closed, said Rico Luman, senior economist for transport, logistics and automotive at ING Research.

“Maritime shipping is a global market and everything is interconnected,” he said.

Some in the chat criticized Europe for not doing enough militarily to reopen the Red Sea for shipping. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Mr. Vance said.

But the European Union had deployed a small naval force in the Red Sea since early last year to defend against attacks, and the mission was extended to next February.

Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a research institute that favors restraint in foreign policy, said Europe had, indeed, gotten a free ride on American military power. But she added that the Europeans had decided they could absorb the extra shipping costs and that a big military effort against the Houthis was probably not worth it.

“The United States shouldn’t be taking military action in the Red Sea — even if Europe continues to refrain from doing so,” she said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Liz Alderman from Paris.