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Guest post by Marta Furlan
In 2014, the Houthis, a Zaydi Shia armed group from the Sa’ada region of northern Yemen, aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been removed following the Arab Spring uprisings. Together, they defeated the government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, and established control over the Yemeni capital of Sana’a and the entirety of northern Yemen.
At that time, Iran began to progressively increase its support for the Houthis, seeing partnership with the group as an opportunity to advance its revisionist agenda in the region and establish its influence in the southern Red Sea, an area of immense strategic significance. Threatened by aggressive Iranian expansionism at its doorstep, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia entered the war alongside Hadi. As Iran sided with the Houthis and Saudi Arabia sided with Hadi, Yemen became the battlefield of both a domestic competition for power between different local factions and a regional competition for influence between Teheran and Riyadh.
The complexity that characterizes the Yemeni conflict is not unique. In the modern Middle East, countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya also experienced civil wars that developed into multi-layered conflicts involving local, regional, and international actors. In Syria, for instance, the confrontation initially involved the Assad regime, the secular opposition, a plethora of jihadist groups, and the Syrian Kurds. It grew, however, into a competition between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey over the regional status quo and a competition between the United States and Russia over influence in the Middle East. Despite the civil war scholarship suggesting that one-sided victories become harder with the passing of time, the Syrian conflict ended de facto with the one-sided victory of Bashar al-Assad, supported by Russia and Iran.
As far as Yemen is concerned, the conflict is still ongoing. A major development, however, occurred two weeks ago when Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic ties and reopen embassies within two months, seven years after they severed relations. Following the signing of the agreement, which was brokered by China, questions emerged as to whether the deal might have positive implications for the war in Yemen.
Prospects aren’t promising. The conflict in Yemen is at its heart a civil war between Yemeni factions, which is driven by social and political tensions that emerged in Yemen following the country’s unification in May 1990. On the background of those tensions, the inception of the current conflict can truly be traced back to the early 2000s, when six rounds of confrontation saw the government and the Houthi movement fight each other in Sa’ada. Rather than being a simple binary confrontation between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government, the war in Yemen is a complex mosaic of multiple armed factions fighting against and, at times, alongside each other. Within the anti-Houthi camp, there is a significant degree of military and political fragmentation, with different militias harboring different interests and visions. Some of those include the Southern Transitional Council (STC); al-Islah; the National Resistance Forces led by Tareq Saleh; and the National Shield Force formed by Saudi Arabia.
A reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia will not address the deep-rooted and long-harbored hostility between the Houthis and their opponents, nor will it address the tensions and differences that dominate the anti-Houthi camp. At the very best, the Saudi-Iranian détente will facilitate the bilateral talks that have been ongoing between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. Those talks were initiated last October, when a six-month-long ceasefire expired, yet no side (Houthis, Saudi Arabia, the government) was willing to return to the battlefront amidst war fatigue. However, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC, Yemen’s de facto government) has been excluded from the Houthi-Saudi negotiation table. Its exclusion inevitably makes any Houthi-Saudi deal that might be reached in the future with Iranian support hardly consequential for the country’s peace and stability.
Will Yemen see a one-sided victory, similar to what happened in Syria? That’s unlikely. The Houthis and the government-aligned forces reached a mutually damaging stalemate in Marib that left them all weaker. Under these circumstances, academic research suggests that the warring parties could either take steps toward a negotiated settlement or persist indefinitely in a costly, stalled conflict.
The regional dimension of the war might gradually be moving toward a negotiated settlement between the Houthis and Iran, on one hand, and Saudi Arabia, on the other. Pummelled by years of fighting, the Houthis and Saudi Arabia seem to view bilateral negotiations favorably. But the domestic dimensions of the war continue to evade any negotiated settlement between Houthis and the PLC and between different PLC-affiliated militias. As the civil war literature suggests, the trajectory of the conflict will depend on how those parties assess what they can gain or lose from fighting versus negotiating. As the Houthis appear once again determined to resort to force, prospects for peace do not look particularly encouraging.
Marta Furlan is a research and policy consultant at Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) in Germany.
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world.
In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and research area. That’s true, but I really should talk about the Iraq war as well.
As the build up to the war began, my classmates and I at my isolated lefty college were shocked. How could anyone want to start a second war after just invading Afghanistan? How could anyone think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11? How could anyone believe this was a good idea?
I soon realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Conservative friends and family members were swept up in post-9/11 patriotism/panic.
Some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned
And then, during spring break, the war began. I watched in shock as the United States unleashed its might on Iraq. I was torn. I wasn’t one of those lefties who defended Saddam Hussein (we had some at my college). I wanted him gone. But even at 20 I knew this wasn’t the way to do it.
I continued with my plan to work in the US intelligence community while also pursuing scholarly studies. I got an internship with a defense contractor, was assigned to an intelligence agency. A few years into my career, I got accepted to a PhD program, was offered a promotion at my firm, and was offered a permanent job with the government agency. I went the PhD route (whether or not that was the right choice is the topic for another post).
I said this post wasn’t going to me about me, and I meant it. I gave this background to explain how I became involved in the bigger debate about the Iraq war: whether it invalidated liberal internationalism. While I was working in DC I also became part of a foreign policy group, the Truman National Security Project, meant to revive muscular liberal internationalism within the Democratic Party. I left after a few years, but the debates we had there stuck with me.
Liberal internationalism is a specific orientation towards the world. Advocates believe there is an international order that can be mutually beneficial. States should resolve disputes peacefully and multilaterally, through the United Nations and other international organizations. Human rights should trump narrow security interests. And states’ foreign policy should focus on upholding this international order.
Historically it had been tied to the US Democratic Party. This changed with the Bush Administration. A group of thinkers within the Republican party–growing out of the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Soviet policies–sought to ensure US primacy while also defending democracy and human rights. They saw the response to 9/11 as a way to advance these goals, as signified in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Bush drew on similar language when justifying the Iraq War.
The Bush Administration’s use of liberal internationalist arguments to justify the Iraq War did trap some liberal internationalists. For example, the prominent liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War. This has given rise to the pejorative “liberal hawk” moniker-the claim that liberal internationalists are basically war-mongers. We’ve seen this deployed against Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
As a result, some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned. To these policy thinkers, liberal internationalism is an “increasingly unsustainable grand strategy.” Others have gone further to question the validity or even the existence of a liberal international order, which liberal internationalism is meant to sustain.
But liberal internationalism is not dead.
First, Americans do not support an isolationist or restrained foreign policy. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that US voters are “weary” of military interventions, but have not rejected American leadership in the world.
The irony is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks.
Second, there is more to liberal internationalism than military interventions. This is what restrainers tend to suggest-that, since liberal internationalists tend to just be hawks a liberal internationalist grand strategy will lead to another Iraq war. And, to be fair, the liberal side isn’t helped when prominent members like Anne-Marie Slaughter praised Trump’s poorly-thought out air strikes on Syria. But there is a lot more to liberal internationalism- multilateralism, respect for human rights, upholding international institutions.
More importantly, those who assume the Iraq war damned liberal internationalism seem to ignore its relevance outside the United States. Many countries around the world look to the UN to reflect their views and advance their interests. This is why Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was concerning: other states take this, and other UN bodies, very seriously. The rest of the world–especially the Global South–has an interest in a robust UN, which only a liberal internationalist grand strategy can ensure.
Additionally, many countries depend on the liberal international order for support. The UN, while far from perfect, performs services no state can legitimately do on its own, such as supporting economic development, protecting cultural sites, and keeping the peace between combatants. Persistent security threat–like that of ISIS and other militant groups in the Sahel–require the international community’s assistance.
The irony, then, is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks. They approach the relevance of liberal internationalism only in terms of whether America will invade another Middle Eastern country.
It gets a little tiresome when debate over US international action boils down to “but the Iraq war was bad.” Reducing the debate to pro/con military intervention makes it hard to effectively respond to crises, as arguably occurred in the Obama Administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the Syrian civil war. It also leads to poor analysis, such as when Middle East experts, viewing everything through the lens of another Iraq war, assumed that Saudi Arabia would pull America into a war with Iran.
But liberal internationalists are also at fault. They’re attached to US primacy, from Madeleine Albright’s invocation of America as the “indispensable nation” to Joe Biden’s foreign policy promise to “place America at the head of the table.” They seem obsessed with looking tough–which I suspect is behind the cheerleading of air strikes. They haven’t figured out a way to support human rights and a robust US international presence while also criticizing the Iraq War.
And that is the issue. Liberal internationalism is still viable, and much of the world depends on America’s continued support of this grand strategy. But US foreign policy debates revolve around that horrific and illegal invasion of March 20th, 2003, rather than the full set of policies we could adopt.
UPDATE: Edited to fix a typo
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