After six years of backing up Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in their brutal and incompetently prosecuted military misadventure in Yemen, President Biden has finally decided to do the smart thing.
Get out of this war.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced on Thursday that Washington would terminate its offensive military support to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen. The choice to intervene in Yemen’s civil war occurred on President Barack Obama’s watch after very little interagency debate. A conflict that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman claimed would be over in a few weeks has instead dragged on for years. The Houthis will and, Iranian enabled, capability to resist the Saudi air campaign was consistently underestimated. With every passing month, more evidence of Saudi war crimes emerged, making U.S. assistance to Riyadh even tougher to justify.
The war worsened under the Trump administration as billions of dollars in additional U.S. offensive weapons, including air-to-ground munitions, were sold to the Saudis with very little regard to how Riyadh would use those weapons. Indeed, strategy seemed notably absent here. It was always unclear how pouring more arms into the conflict would serve official U.S. policy: encouraging a negotiated end to the war.
Yemen was never a particularly prosperous country to begin with. On the contrary, it is the poorest nation in the Middle East. The war, however, has all but wiped out whatever infrastructure Yemen had before the conflict began. Roughly half of its hospitals are unworkable, many destroyed by Saudi airstrikes. Over 20.1 million people would face starvation were it not for international food assistance. Eighty percent of Yemenis need some form of humanitarian assistance to survive on a daily basis. Washington’s involvement in the conflict has not only worked at cross-currents with U.S. interests, it has also seriously violated America’s own values.
Biden, of course, was vice president when the initial decision to intervene was made. To his credit, Biden no longer believes the status-quo is worth defending. The Biden administration has adopted a number of smart decisions on Yemen early on, including adopting a one-month waiver which nullifies Trump’s designation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. That waiver has less to do with sympathy for the Houthis and more to do with ensuring food aid can continue to be delivered to the bulk of Yemen’s population. The appointment of foreign service officer Tim Lenderking as U.S. special envoy to Yemen is also a sign that the Biden administration will at least try to act as a neutral party to the war.
Still, the top line is clear: The United States can’t get out of Yemen fast enough. A hat-tip to Biden and his national security advisers for following through on their rhetoric.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a fellow at Defense Priorities
