Is It Too Late for Diplomacy in Yemen?

The world is very large and very old. Its many inhabitants, while not in the main very clever, have a surfeit of idiosyncrasy and cussedness, making them unruly on the best of days and baffling to the high-flying masters of the universe. Take a country of middling size—Yemen, which is back in the news this week. The Houthis, who have been menacing Red Sea shipping since the outbreak of the Israel–Gaza war, attacked Israel directly by drone last Friday; Israel retaliated with air strikes on a Yemeni port city. The Houthis vowed further direct strikes against Israel. This is an unwelcome escalatory spiral; not only does it possibly open a third(!) front for Israel, but the ongoing disruption of Red Sea traffic threatens the stability of Egypt, whose tatterdemalion economy is propped up by Suez fees. Yet it is difficult to see a way out.

It didn’t have to be this way; how we got here is almost unfathomably complicated, and better policies could have been adopted at many junctures. Yemen is the inexplicable fusion of two Cold War–era republics, one Soviet-aligned and one Arab League–aligned. (Confusingly, the former was also supported by Israel to stymie Nasser in Egypt.) The resulting state found a president-for-life ruling over a sandy shoebox full of religious and tribal factions in a byzantine ecosystem of interlocking mutual beeves. One of these factions was the Shi’ite Houthis. The Houthis had it in for the president, whom they accused of being a corrupt puppet for the Saudis and the Americans. Tacitly conceding the point, the president threw the Houthis’ leader into jail in 2003, where he died, which did not improve the group’s attitude. In 2011, amid the broader regional unrest of the Arab Spring, various Yemeni discontents, Houthis included, took the opportunity to air their grievances, can the president, and cook up a new political settlement. As happened in every Arab Spring arena, liberal rhetoric swiftly flew out the window to make way for naked power-grabs by force of arms.

The Houthis are an unpleasant gang of ugly ideologues who have little use for (among other things) liberal democracy, America, or the Jews. As the press will never let you forget, they draw support from Iran. (“Iran-backed” is one of the better vague but obligatory epithets like “hardline” and “far-right.”) They also control Yemen’s formal capital, Sana’a,  and most of the territory that constituted the former Yemen Arab Republic, one of the two precursor states for the modern unified Republic of Yemen. (In an echo of Afghanistan’s ironies, this makes the formerly communist portion of the country the Western-backed agonist.) 

This is not a particularly new development; they have been in the catbird seat for about a decade, despite the heroic efforts of our favorite Middle Eastern despots. The tender ministrations of the Saudis and the Jordanians have not dislodged the Houthis, but they have caused a years-long on-and-off famine and widespread misery by annihilating much of Yemen’s civilian infrastructure.

I am afraid that, when a gang of thugs with all the guns takes control of the capital and the surrounding third of the country and refuses to leave, we have a name for it: a government. You have two tools for getting foreign governments to do what you want, diplomacy and war. After ten years and change, it is fair to say that war has been found wanting. Novel half-measures like calling the Houthis terrorists haven’t done much to get everyone onside (but they have kept the State Department’s deputy undersecretary for immiserating foreign peoples busy, so it’s not completely a wash). 

That leaves diplomacy. In these ugly peripheral proxy wars, there are two courses of action when your horse fails to win the race. You can try to do down your opponent in anticipation of the presumed next round of conflict; this is the tack we have taken toward North Korea. Or you can work out a modus vivendi with the full spectrum of normal diplomatic relations; this is the tack we have taken toward communist Vietnam. One of these approaches has given us a hostile, fortified nuclear power that happily operates against American interests. The other has yielded a stable, non-aligned power that operates as a counterweight to overtly hostile interests in the neighborhood. Nobody thinks Vietnam is a special friend to America, but it is a normal nation among normal nations. That is better than another Hermit Kingdom. 

A settlement in Yemen seems unlikely while the war in Israel-Palestine is still going—another incentive to finish up that war. Americans and Western Europeans have a strong interest in keeping the sea lanes open, and it seems unlikely that yet more questionably legal American bombing is going to stop the Houthis’ Red Sea operations. Rather than dealing out more force, perhaps the masters of the universe should try cutting deals for a change.