Alexandra Stark is the author of numerous articles on Yemen as well as the new book, The Yemen Model: Why US Policy has Failed in the Middle East. In it, she argues that the United States has consistently gotten it wrong in Yemen by focusing almost exclusively on the security threat du jour instead of the country’s long-term stability. Initially, after September 11, this was the terrorist threat. Then it was Iran, the nuclear deal, and how the US could repair its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Today it is the Houthis.
Each time, Stark says, the US makes the mistake of focusing on the security symptoms instead of dealing with the root causes. As a result, the US is continually being sucked back into Yemen to deal with a series of evolving security threats that change in appearance but never disappear.
Stark did her PhD at Georgetown and is currently a policy researcher at RAND. We recently sat down over email to talk about her new book, Yemen, the Houthis, and how the US can finally get the Middle East right.
IFC: Can you tell us why you decided to write this book? What was your genesis moment?
Stark: As news stories started to pop up around 2016 about civilians killed by the Saudi-led coalition intervention in Yemen and the humanitarian devastation that the war was causing, I was appalled like so many were, but also puzzled: how did the United States get involved in a war that so clearly did not contribute to Americans’ security and was at the same time harmful to so many people.
Just a few years prior, President Obama had run for office on a campaign that criticized US military intervention in the Middle East and promised to end the war in Iraq. In the early years of the Arab Spring, including in Libya and Syria, the Obama administration had clearly struggled with how to prevent civilians from being killed by their own regimes without involving US military forces. And yet even after all that, the United States still wound up supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention—ironically in a bid to try not to become further involved in the Middle East’s conflicts.
So my interest in understanding how US policy has approached Yemen came out of both concern for how the US appeared to be backing military intervention that was killing civilians, and wanting to understand how this apparently senseless approach came about so that we can perhaps prevent these kinds of atrocities in the future.
IFC: There is often a debate in policy and academic circles as to whether the Middle East can ever be solved – which tends to mean different things to different people – or if it is only something that can be managed. In other words, the US can’t hope to eliminate terrorist groups in Yemen, but it can prevent terrorist attacks on the US that come from Yemen. The subtitle of your book – Why US Policy Has Failed in the Middle East – suggests that there is a way the US can solve or at least better handle security threats from Yemen. What does such a policy look like?
Stark: The sub-title certainly aims high, and I won’t pretend that I have the solution for every challenge the Middle East faces. But as I began to study this more, I was repeatedly struck by how Yemen surfaced in key foreign policy debates over and over again even though US officials never saw Yemen itself as a strategic priority, and that the United States tended to take the same (unsuccessful) approach to Yemen over and over again. The problem, it seems to me, is that the United States does not approach Yemen for Yemen’s sake, but rather as a means to other ends—competing with the Soviet Union, for example, or eradicating terrorism.
So I think a better approach would center the well-being of people in the countries we’re talking about for their own sake, not as a means to achieve other strategic objectives. This could mean setting aside military-driven regional cooperation for cooperative efforts centered around mitigating the effects of climate change, for example, which will be particularly awful in Yemen.
It could also mean focusing on an inclusive peace process that brings in women, civil society members, and young people, not just the warring parties, to achieve amore lasting peace. Ultimately, a more stable, economically prosperous Yemen will be good for the people of Yemen, and for US national security.
IFC: You wrote in early January, that the US should take a diplomatic approach to addressing Houthi attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. That obviously didn’t happen. The US has carried out several strikes on Houthi targets and the Houthis have increased their attacks on shipping in recent weeks. Given the very real security threat, which is taking a toll on shipping, what realistic options does the United States have at this point?
Stark: Unfortunately I do think that the United States and its partners don’t have good options for addressing Houthi attacks in the Red Sea right now—it is hard to see how military escalation would change the dynamics at all, and what has happened so far clearly hasn’t worked either. But the point I wanted to make back in January is that I think the United States and the Houthis are talking past each other in the Red Sea, or at least trying to achieve different things. At least at the start of the US response in the Red Sea, officials seemed to want to deter the Houthis by responding to their attacks, but I didn’t think that was likely because the Houthis are engaging in an information campaign as well as a kinetic one.
Their aggression in the Red Sea has, from their perspective, allowed them to bolster their legitimacy with domestic and regional audiences and demonstrated their importance to Iran’s “axis of resistance.” Whether the United States and its partners strike back is really of secondary importance to them, because they are still able to use low-cost, simple technology such as radio-controlled unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and because they will likely be resupplied with UAVs and missiles by Iran.
They have even weaponized the message of the US attacks themselves by using them to claim that they are the defenders of the Palestinian people and are fighting against “western imperialism.” I think if US officials can better understand what the Houthis are trying to achieve, they can find more effective ways to counter the Houthi attacks, including counter-messaging campaigns and regional diplomacy.
IFC: At the moment, the Houthis control much of the northern highlands in Yemen, and the South is administered by the so-called Presidential Leadership Council, which is an odd amalgam of several different groups some of which hold diametrically opposing views for the future of Yemen. In your opinion what will a future Yemen or Yemen(s) look like and what will this mean for US policy?
Stark: It’s hard to make solid predictions, and ideally Yemenis themselves will be able to determine the shape of a future Yemeni state (or states) and society. What has become clear over the course of the most recent civil war in Yemen is that the unified state of Yemen (which really only existed in practice for a couple of decades), is in all likelihood fractured beyond repair. The Presidential Leadership Council itself represents the various anti-Houthi factions, but there is little agreement even among these factions about what a future Yemeni state ought to look like (indeed, the most powerful faction, the Southern Transition Council, advocates for southern Yemen to secede, with others oppose southern secession, to take one key example).
So even if the UN-led negotiation process does manage to lead to a more sustainable peace and a political plan for the future of Yemen (and I very much hope that it does!), perhaps a loosely federated Yemeni state or multiple Yemeni states, there will still be a long way to go in order to reach a post-conflict Yemen with a government(s) capable of supporting its people. This means that the United States and the international community more broadly will have to continue to stay diplomatically engaged in this process and to assist in implementation of an agreement as much as possible.