Asked this week whether the joint US-British airstrikes on Yemen’s de facto Houthi government were “working”, President Biden replied: “Well, when you say ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.” While his response has been satirised as the perfect summation of US Middle East policy, there is another way of reading the dynamics of the current crisis: that every military escalation so far, arriving each day with grim inevitability, is so carefully calibrated that the effects are strangely de-escalatory.

Certainly, the Houthis have shrugged off the effects of the airstrikes so far. Yesterday Centcom, the US strategic command for the greater Middle East, announced the third Houthi attack on commercial shipping in as many days, while the Houthis have declared, with customary bellicosity, that “a retaliation to the American and British attacks is inevitable, and that any new aggression will not go unpunished.” Yet the airstrikes themselves, focused on a minimalist target list and telegraphed well ahead of time (whether through conscious intention or, as the Americans allege, poor British information security) were so limited as to be hardly more than a rap across Houthi knuckles, a dramatic and costly equivalent of a tetchy diplomatic note.

A similar dynamic can be seen with Iran’s recent and dramatic ballistic missile strikes across the region. Though clearly a warning to Washington that Tehran can inflict pain on both American bases and US allies should the crisis escalate further, the chosen targets — a prominent Iraqi Kurdish businessman’s home, the defunct base of a Syrian jihadist group and a Baluchi separatist group’s base in Pakistan — were all expendable whipping boys for America itself. While the missile strikes were in themselves escalatory, the targets chosen simultaneously served to de-escalate, flexing muscles while pointedly giving no grounds for a direct US response.