Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to broker a ceasefire agreement in Yemen’s war by leaning on a United Nations-backed roadmap to resolve a conflict that has spawned a proxy war between Iran and the U.S.-allied Saudi Arabia.
Kerry met late Monday night with the Iran-backed Houthis — a Shia Muslim minority group in Yemen that has been at war with the official government for years — and the Sultan of Oman to rally support for the U.N. roadmap. He apparently succeeded in convincing the Houthis to agree to a cease-fire that would begin on Nov. 17, but the internationally-recognized Yemeni government immediately rejected the proposal.
“We’ve made enormous progress,” State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters Tuesday. “We think that this provides an opening.”
Yemen’s formal government, which the Saudi Arabian coalition is attempting to prop up in the face of Houthi opposition, has repudiated the deal. “The government was not aware of nor is it interested in what Secretary Kerry announced, which represents a desire to scuttle peace efforts by trying to reach an agreement with the Houthis apart from the government,” Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi said.
That statement adds a wrinkle to an already complicated situation, one that is particularly thorny for President Obama’s administration. Saudi Arabia and other U.S.-allied Gulf states fear the prospect of Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, particularly in light of the Iran nuclear deal and Obama’s support of a revolution that ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was previously aligned with the Saudis and the United States.
“How far we can go with our dependence on America, how much can we rely on steadfastness from American leadership, what is it that makes for our joint benefits to come together,” former Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal told CNN in April. “These are things that we have to recalibrate.”
Against the backdrop of the Iran deal and Mubarak’s ouster, U.S. support for the Saudi Arabians’ defense of the Yemeni government takes on greater significance, as a matter of foreign policy substance and symbolism. The Obama administration has signed off on billions of dollars worth of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
But Saudi attacks on civilians in Yemen, which have taken place at the same time that Obama’s team is condemning Russia and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad for killing civilians in the Syrian civil war, has caused some U.S. leaders to try to cut that military aid.
“I would absolutely argue that we should be sending messages to the Saudis that our support for them is conditional,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in September. “I do think it’s time to question whether this alliance is as clear and as solid as many of us may have been told that it was.”
Kerry hasn’t talked to Iran about the U.N. roadmap for peace in Yemen, Trudeau said, but the Houthis nevertheless agreed to Kerry’s proposal. “With the Houthis agreement on this, this was a significant step,” Trudeau said.
