Review of Alexandra Stark, “The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024).
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– Yemen goes through a civil war that does not end, frequent cholera outbreaks, and acute malnutrition among children. These days, however, the southern Arabian country appears on the news mostly in connection to the rebel Houthi movement’s attacks against Israel and ships transiting the Red Sea. The Houthis, led by Abdulmalik Al-Houthi, have their origins in the border areas with Saudi Arabia but now control most of northwestern Yemen, where the majority of the population lives.
The rebel group has grown increasingly close to Iran during the decade that has passed since the beginning of the civil war in Yemen. The Houthis are now considered to belong to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, which also includes Syria, the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 1,139 people in Israel and took about 250 hostages. Israel responded by waging war on Gaza, and at least 42,603 people have been killed and 99,795 injured in Gaza (the total number of direct and indirect deaths is likely to be much higher, with a group of US doctors who served in Gaza estimating 120,000 Gazans have died).
Soon after October 7, the Houthis started to attack ships in the Red Sea, driving up global shipping costs and forcing a steep decline in the number of vessels transiting the area. At the same time, and despite the over 2,000km (1,300 miles) that separate Yemen’s capital Sana’a from Tel Aviv, the Houthis have carried out direct attacks against Israel.
Although the Israeli air defense system has normally intercepted the missiles and drones launched from Yemen, last July a drone slammed into an apartment building in Tel Aviv killing one person and leaving ten others wounded. The Houthis have announced they will stop their attacks if there is a ceasefire in Gaza. With no end to the war on Gaza in sight, there is no way of saying whether the Houthis are bluffing.
The Houthis’ increasingly assertive military activities have led to an unprecedented presence of the US Navy in the Red Sea, both protecting ships and targeting positions in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. Together with the UK, the US has conducted 200 airstrikes in Yemen since January 2024, with 74 civilian casualties reported as of September 2024.
Ironically enough, in the early 2010s, then-US President Barack Obama’s so-called “Yemen Model” was supposed to represent a new and lighter-footprint approach to the Middle East. Alexandra Stark, an associate policy researcher at RAND, greatly contributes to our understanding of the self-deceptive Yemen Model in her recently published book “The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East.”
Steven Simon, one of Obama’s Middle East advisors, spoke about the Yemen model as an “intelligence-driven, dynamic targeting” to disrupt terrorist activities by using drones. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) became a top national security priority for the Obama administration after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a terrorist connected to AQAP, failed to detonate a bomb aboard a commercial plane en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009.
AQAP had a strong presence in Yemen, but according to the Obama White House, it could be neutralized by partnering with the Yemeni government and launching remotely directed drone strikes. This approach had the advantage of avoiding the boots on the ground that had made the Afghanistan and Iraq wars so unpopular at home. Stark argues that, at the beginning, some limited successes were achieved, but the Yemen model soon faced two critical problems.
First, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was so interested in the US funds newly available to his regime (connected to Washington’s counter-terrorism efforts) that he had little incentive to do his part in combating AQAP. A US success against AQAP would have been a failure for Saleh. It would have led to a loss of the funds that oiled the wheels of his patronage system. Second, and equally important, was the mistake of approaching Yemen through the extremely narrow lenses of counterterrorism. Washington thought it could react to AQAP’s activities in Yemen as if taking place in a vacuum, “while largely ignoring or deprioritizing questions around governance, the allocation of political power, and economic development.”[1]
Because of this narrow-minded approach, the US did not see (or did not want to see) how the US-Saleh partnership de-legitimatized the Yemeni leader in front of his population. The same applies to Saleh’s diversion of US counter-terrorism funds to pay for his military campaign against the Houthis in northern Yemen, which had been going on since 2004.
Although Saleh would be forced to resign in early 2012 following the Arab Spring protests, the US kept a similar counterterrorism partnership with Saleh’s vice-president and successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. During Obama’s two terms as president, an estimate of between 1,094 to 1,394 people were killed by US drone strikes, with around 100 of them being civilians, according to New America.
Leaving aside the horrible assumption that a drone operator is entitled to decide who lives and who dies, the drone campaign was most likely also a failure in purely utilitarian terms. As Stark notes, there is no systematic evidence of how the drone campaign was perceived by Yemenis, but more general research on counterterrorism points out that the death of non-combatants tends to swell the ranks of terrorist organizations. The US continues to strike AQAP targets until today, and the terrorist group is estimated to have between 3,000 and 4,000 members.
The US military never developed a transparent system to account for all the civilian deaths in Yemen as a result of US drone strikes. Even so, when in March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemen civil war to roll back the Houthis’ territorial advances, the US did not only equip the Saudis with the necessary weapons for the military operation. It also provided the Saudi armed forces with advice that would supposedly reduce civilian casualties. The almost 9,000 civilian deaths as a result of targeting by the Saudi-led coalition, as estimated by the Yemen Data Project, speak for themselves.
Obama’s decision to greenlight the Saudi intervention in the Yemen civil war (with a more secondary role for the UAE) was strongly connected to the broader context in the region at that moment. Obama sought to reassure Washington’s main security partners in the Gulf at a time when the US was about to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, providing sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. Whereas US President Donald Trump would unilaterally abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, Saudi airstrikes on Yemen continued until April 2022.
Analyzing the seven years of Saudi airstrikes on Yemen, Stark identifies only two episodes in which the US appears to have used some of the leverage over Riyadh that came with Washington’s military and diplomatic support for the Saudi-led campaign. The first moment came in October 2016, when a Saudi airstrike on a funeral killed 140 civilians and wounded 600 more. In response to this, the Obama administration reduced the number of US personnel assisting the Saudis in their airstrikes and temporarily froze a $350 million weapons deal. The number of Saudi airstrikes temporarily decreased after the US decision.
The second limited use of US leverage over Saudi Arabia took place in December 2017, when the Trump administration called the Saudi coalition to stop the blockade of the key Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The Saudis did so and allowed the arrival of four new cranes to the port donated by USAID. These two moments of US pressure on Saudi Arabia were too half-hearted and inconsistent to yield sustainable results. Still, they give us a glimpse of what could have happened had US leaders cared enough about Yemen.
Not everyone in the US was willing to forget Yemen, however. Stark devotes a chapter of her book to the Yemen advocacy coalition, a diverse alliance ranging from humanitarian NGOs such as Oxfam to libertarian-minded groups such as Defense Priorities. They were united by the desire to stop US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and asked the US Congress to apply pressure to that effect on President Trump. The Yemen advocacy coalition organized a long-running campaign to inform the broader public of the US’s role in the Yemen war and lobby politicians on Capitol Hill.
In early 2019, the House of Representatives and the Senate approved legislation relating to the War Powers Resolution, which restricts the involvement of US forces abroad without congressional authorization. Trump used his veto power to stop the legislation in its tracks. However, Stark credits the campaign with having “an effect both on the Trump administration and the behavior of the Saudi-led coalition.”[2] Stark argues that one of its most significant successes was raising the reputational costs of being engaged in the war for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. She notes this played a role in the Emirates’ decision to withdraw most of its forces from Yemen in July 2019.
“The Yemen Model” concludes with some general lessons from Washington’s approach to Yemen during the last decade and a half. First, prioritizing short-term stability at the expense of addressing the root causes of conflict, as the Obama administration did when partnering with Saleh against AQAP, is ultimately counterproductive. Second, the US democratic system, as shown by the Yemen advocacy coalition, offers opportunities to demand accountability from political leaders even in the usually secluded realm of foreign policy. Third, the US cannot shape the world alone but the leverage it can exert over its security partners is very strong.
Stark’s book does not discuss the war on Gaza, but her concluding thoughts on the Yemen model are extremely relevant. A former official quoted in a 2017 article explained that the Obama administration became “very frustrated” with how the Saudi-led forces were carrying out the war in Yemen but believed US support was having a positive impact. If this sounds familiar, it is because we are now witnessing a similar dynamic, only on a probably even deadlier scale.
In January 2024, US President Joseph Biden was reportedly “running out” of patience with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In March 2024, we were told he was “extremely frustrated” with the Israeli leader. Examples of such reports could go on and on. If we did not know that the Biden administration has contributed $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, or that the US shields Israel diplomatically at every international venue, we could be forgiven to think that Biden is simply powerless. But the billions in military aid and the US key diplomatic support equal enormous leverage. A leverage the US actively decides not to use. Even if the cost is tens of thousands of lives in a war that can already be defined as regional and now risks expanding to Iran, gaining an even more dangerous dimension.
[1] Alexandra Stark, The Yemen Model: Why U.S. Policy Has Failed in the Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), p. 31.
[2] Ibid., p. 161.