Yemen Is Being Starved to Death
The AP reports on the horrible and worsening conditions in Yemen:
They are among countless Yemenis who are struggling to feed themselves amid a grinding civil war that has pushed the Arab world’s poorest nation to the brink of famine. The family lives in a mud hut in northern Yemen, territory controlled by Shiite Houthi rebels, who are at war with government forces and a Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition.
The coalition has been waging a fierce air campaign against the rebels since March 2015, trying unsuccessfully to dislodge them from the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north. A coalition blockade aimed at preventing the Houthis from rearming has contributed to a 60-percent spike in food prices, according to an estimate used by international aid groups.
The coalition’s responsibility for creating these conditions is even greater than the article states. In addition to a punishing blockade that has been in place for almost two years, the coalition has bombed major ports, roads, and bridges that are all critical to bringing in food and other aid. The “legitimate” Yemeni government led by Hadi announced that the central bank was being moved to Aden last fall. That had the effect of rupturing one of the last national institutions left, and it made it much harder for importers to arrange financing to bring in necessities. Shortly before the end of the year, major trading companies halted wheat imports into Yemen as a result of Hadi’s central bank decision, which made the already dire situation in the country even worse. The Hadi government and its coalition and Western backers have inflicted all of this on the civilian population of Yemen for more than twenty-one months in the service of an atrocious war effort that has failed in all of its stated objectives.
Yemen is suffering one of the worst man-made disasters of this century. The humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen threatens millions of people with death from starvation and preventable disease, and yet the U.S. continues to support and enable the coalition war effort that bears a huge share of the blame for creating famine conditions in one of the world’s poorest countries. Unless something is done immediately to lift the blockade and bring in food to stave it off, Yemen’s famine will only grow more severe.
Trump vs. Foreign Policy Restraint
Barry Posen doesn’t see any evidence of foreign policy restraint in the incoming administration:
It does not look to me as if this is a ‘eureka’ moment for the “Restraint” strategy. Instead, this looks a bit like hegemony without liberalism. President-elect Trump has promised to increase U.S. military spending. This is not consistent with Restraint. His appointees seem to be people who wish to militarily confront those states and groups who challenge the U.S. in any way. China and Iran seem to be at the head of the list. Some of his appointees seem hostile to Russia as well. The President-elect seems to wish to do something more aggressive vis-a-vis Al Qaeda and ISIL than the outgoing administration. It is hard to see how this many military confrontations would be consistent with Restraint. With this many under-thought confrontations underway, it is likely that one or more will go awry.
That seems exactly right. I would just add that Trump has never given us a good reason to think that he would be in favor of restraint, and he has given us many reasons to assume he isn’t. Not only is he surrounding himself with hard-liners that want more aggressive policies across the board, but at no time has he explicitly called for reducing U.S. military deployments anywhere in the world. He clearly isn’t interested in reducing military spending, and that is one of the appealing features and benefits of a strategy of restraint. Last year, his nominee for Secretary of Defense dismissed Obama’s criticism of Gulf client states as “free-riders”: “For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as free riders is nuts.” If we are to believe what Flynn and Ledeen said in their book, Trump’s main adviser imagines that we are engaged in a prolonged global war that could last generations. One could scarcely have a worldview less sympathetic to restraint than that, and that is the view of one of the most influential people in the new administration. Finally, there are no ongoing wars that Trump has said the U.S. should stop fighting, and he has committed to escalating one of them.
Posen concludes:
The costs will mount, and future administrations will find they have even less public support for a forward grand strategy. This is how I imagine the U.S. could ultimately shift to a more restrained grand strategy.
Obama’s Misguided Indulgence of U.S. Client States
Uri Friedman comments on Obama’s management of relationships with allies and clients:
By contrast, Obama seems to believe that the United States and its allies should—in an ideal world, at least—share interests and values. When an ally acts in ways he disapproves of, Obama has been more willing than his recent predecessors to publicly criticize or marginalize it.
There is some truth to this, but we should remember how shabbily Obama’s immediate predecessor treated many treaty allies and how empty most of Obama’s rhetorical jabs at some client states have been. When France and Germany resisted the U.S. over the invasion of Iraq, they were publicly rebuked by Bush administration officials far more harshly than anything we have heard from this administration about any ally or client, and France was singled out to be “punished” for having warned us against committing what proved to be one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in modern U.S. history. The Bush administration also annoyed many of its European allies with its silly missile defense scheme and its ill-advised push for bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The latter failed because France and Germany had the good sense to oppose it. Relations with many major European allies were in a parlous state for most of the Bush era as a result of the Iraq war rift and later disagreements, and they only really recovered after Bush left office. Relations with Turkey took a nosedive after they refused to participate in invading Iraq and didn’t allow the U.S. to use their territory to launch part of the invasion. That was when U.S.-Turkish relations really started to deteriorate. When it came to managing ties with actual allies, Bush was responsible for alienating more of them than anyone else in recent memory.
Obama has been a great one for chiding client states while simultaneously showering them in weapons and aid. Like his supposed “disdain of military force,” Obama’s willingness to “marginalize” some U.S. clients is mostly imaginary. Until the recent abstention on UNSCR 2334, the Obama administration had done much less to pressure Israel on settlements or anything else than previous administrations did, and at the same time it kept increasing the flow of weapons and aid for eight years. The story with the Saudis and the other Gulf states is much the same: some very mild, generic criticism combined with unprecedented levels of arms sales and completely uncritical backing of a reckless, atrocious war in Yemen. When the clients complain about the mild criticism, the Obama administration responds by giving them even more support, so one has to assume that some of the complaining is feigned in order to extract more benefits. As for Egypt, Obama did very little to protest the military coup and subsequent dictatorship despite the fact that he was obliged by U.S. law to suspend military aid. Once again, the client government bridled at the minor effort at protest, and then Obama yielded to try to placate them. Far from telling these governments “hard truths” and forcing them to face up to them, the Obama administration has mostly coddled and catered to these client states’ wishes, and it has failed to impose costs on those clients when they ignored the criticism and persisted in the behavior that prompted it. There has been a wide gap between what the U.S. says about its clients’ behavior and what it is actually prepared to do about it, and that is consistent with the rhetoric-action gap in Obama’s handling of other foreign policy issues. A couple belated, insignificant gestures at the very end of his second term don’t alter any of that.
The nuclear deal with Iran would seem to be the one big exception to all this, but that is somewhat misleading. In that case, Obama wasn’t stopped from pursuing the deal on account of the whining clients, but he nonetheless thought that he had to “reassure” them with more weapons and promises of support anyway. Even though Obama didn’t yield to their pressure to change our government’s behavior in that instance, he has gone out of his way to try to placate and indulge them even when they behave appallingly. If they aren’t satisfied with that level of indulgence, that is only because they assume they can get even more from the U.S. if they throw a fit and talk about how poorly Obama has treated them. Based on what we have heard from Trump, they are right to assume that.
The Danger of Passionate Attachments and Inveterate Antipathies
Andrew Bacevich warns against passionate attachments to other countries. Here he wonders how long the U.S.-Israel relationship in its current form will last:
Will love alone sustain US support for Israel? Perhaps. But a lover who gives without getting may eventually tire of such an arrangement. When love dies, watch out.
I would hope that the U.S. would tire of all its one-sided relationships with clients and other dependents, but it has become so ingrained and habitual that it seems unlikely to happen on its own. In this case, support for a “special” relationship with Israel is also fueled by the other thing Washington warned against, namely “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations.” As long as many Americans make the mistake of believing that Israel’s enemies are our enemies, they will continue to make the mistake of imagining that Israel is a reliable “ally” that we ought to support. Even though the close relationship with them is one of the causes of hostility to America in the region, that same hostility is used as an excuse to bind the U.S. ever more closely to a client state it doesn’t need. Even if the passionate attachment to the client were to weaken at some point, the antipathies against many of its neighbors might keep it going for a long time. That is why Washington was very wise in warning against both kinds of intense sentiments, because both drive Americans to take sides in quarrels that have nothing to do with us and only make the U.S. less secure.
Obama’s ‘Disdain of Military Force’ and Our Militarized Foreign Policy
Robert Samuelson repeats a very tired assertion:
What’s curious is that American leaders have sometimes contributed to the decline of U.S. power. Barack Obama’s disdain of military force is so deeply felt and visible [bold mine-DL] that the use of the United States’ fighting capabilities was often discounted by allies and adversaries alike, as in Syria.
Obama leaves office later this month with the unhappy distinction of being the only president to spend his entire tenure presiding over foreign wars. His “disdain of military force” is so strong that the U.S. has bombed at least half a dozen countries on his watch, and his administration has assisted other governments in laying waste to one of the poorest countries on earth. To say that he has a “disdain of military force” might have seemed plausible eight years ago before he took office, but it is not credible to say this after eight years of Obama’s continuation, escalation, and initiation of multiple wars. The fact that he didn’t start even more or wage them as aggressively as some in Washington would like doesn’t change any of that.
One might have thought that fifteen years of desultory wars would have taught more people in Washington a bit more “disdain” for using force in response to each new crisis or conflict, but that hasn’t happened. Instead of treating Iraq and Afghanistan as sobering lessons in the limits of what the U.S. can achieve with military force, many in Washington have chosen to see Syria’s civil war as proof that even more U.S. meddling and intervention are required. The same people that learned nothing from the Iraq war chide the rest of us about “overlearning” the lessons of that war, as if it were possible to “overlearn” something as simple as “don’t fight pointless and unnecessary wars, and definitely don’t fight them in countries we don’t understand.” It’s not as if the U.S. has had a stellar record of success during this period, so it is all the more remarkable that our foreign policy is arguably more militarized now than it was even ten years ago. If Obama really did have “disdain for military force,” we would expect to have a much less militarized foreign policy than we did when he took office, but any impartial observer would have to conclude that this isn’t the case.
When a pundit says that Obama disdains the use of force, he is almost always complaining about Obama’s supposed aversion to inflicting death and destruction on other parts of the world. In a sane political culture, this would be cause for praise or at least grudging admiration, but in Washington it is considered a sign of failure. The weirdest part of Samuelson’s complaint is that there is no more certain way to hasten the decline of U.S. power than to fritter away our resources through even deeper involvement in a war in Syria. We don’t have to speculate about this. We know very well that waging prolonged, large-scale wars wastes American strength and bogs us down for years or even decades. If you wanted to hasten U.S. decline, the first thing you would have done was plunge our military into another fruitless war in Syria as soon as possible. Obama’s biggest contribution to American decline came from his decisions to continue our perpetual war footing while repeatedly claiming to be doing the opposite.
The Week’s Most Interesting Reads
Pulling back now won’t absolve American involvement in Yemen. Trevor Thrall criticizes the Obama administration for its very belated reduction in support for the war on Yemen.
Who will win the contest for Trump’s Iran policy? Daniel DePetris warns Trump against listening to Iran hawks.
Trump goes all in with the settlers. Paul Pillar objects to Trump’s response to UNSCR 2334.
Kerry’s speech greeted by collective shrug in Arab world. The New York Times reports on the lukewarm reception of Kerry’s speech on Israel and Palestine
U.S. Clients Are Not Our ‘Friends’
Like the U.S. abstention on UNSCR 2334, John Kerry’s speech on settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes too late to do any good, but it did contain at least one very important statement about U.S. foreign policy that can be applied to many other issues:
Regrettably, some seem to believe that the U.S. friendship means the U.S. must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles, even after urging again and again that the policy must change. Friends need to tell each other the hard truths, and friendships require mutual respect.
Kerry is entirely right on this point. Regrettably, the Obama administration has more often given in to what its clients want in the name of “reassurance” while putting “our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles” second. That is how they have handled the relationship with Israel: showering them with weapons and aid in exchange for no positive change in their behavior. Kerry’s own litany of how much support the administration has given Israel confirms this. We have seen the same thing in the way they have handled Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states. Obama may occasionally make a comment in public about them that they don’t like, but in almost every other practical way the U.S. lavishes its clients in the region with support, refrains from criticizing their worst behavior, and enables their most destructive policies. Only now at the end of Obama’s second term are they interested in telling their “friends” hard truths when those truths can be most easily be ignored.
If you judge the administration by what Obama and his officials say about how the U.S. should deal with its “friends,” you would assume that they are constantly holding them accountable for illegal and self-destructive behavior, but when we look at the record of what they have done we see that they routinely indulge and let them get away with just about anything. Forget about illegal settlements for a moment, and just look at the horrors that the administration has enabled in Yemen. Which American interests and principles are served by fueling an atrocious war and supporting the starvation of millions of people? Obviously there aren’t any, but you’re not going to hear that from Kerry or any other administration official.
Thinking of these relationships in terms of friendship usually does more harm than good. It blinds us to the reality that client states value a relationship with us for what they can get out of us Friendship does require mutual respect, but a patron-client relationship often isn’t like that. The client does what it has to in order to get as much as it can from the relationship, and the more it succeeds in extracting benefits from the patron the more likely it is that the client views its benefactor with something other than respect. These governments do not behave like friends should, but instead they frequently work at cross-purposes with us while expecting to receive uncritical support for whatever reckless and irresponsible thing they want to do in the region. It is long past time since the U.S. dealt with these states based on our own interests rather than going out of our way to cater to theirs.
‘Pro-Israel’ Hawks Are No Good for the U.S. or Israel
Bloomberg’s editorial condemning the U.S. abstention on UNSCR 2334 is comically overwrought:
President Barack Obama’s ill-advised decision to order the U.S. to abstain on a United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements breaks with past U.S. policy, undermines a vital ally and sets back the cause of Middle East peace.
There are many weak arguments against the recent Security Council resolution, but the claim that it “sets back the cause of Middle East peace” stands out for its sheer bad faith. There is a broad international consensus that settlement-building in the occupied territories is both illegal and a barrier to a negotiated resolution of the conflict. No one who is genuinely interested in securing a negotiated resolution of the conflict thinks that continued settlement construction makes a peace agreement more likely. One of the main reasons for continued construction is to establish de facto control over most of the territory that has been occupied while leaving less and less land for the Palestinians so that it becomes impossible for them to have their own state. If that continues, it sets Israel up to rule over a stateless, subject people in perpetuity, and that will be a disaster for all involved. If making an attempt to oppose that dreadful outcome constitutes “betrayal,” I shudder to think what loyalty is supposed to look like.
Calling out Israel for its ongoing illegal behavior becomes unavoidable when there is no progress in resolving the conflict, and the current Israeli government has made it very clear that there won’t be any progress. Criticizing Israel for behavior that has contributed to its increasing isolation in the world is not an unfriendly or treacherous act, and it ought to serve as a wake-up call to warn Israel away from a ruinous path. The fact that many so-called “pro-Israel” Americans are denouncing the decision not to veto the resolution as a “betrayal” reminds us just how bad conventional “pro-Israel” advocates are for both the U.S. and Israel.
It is worth noting here that Israel isn’t actually an ally, much less a “vital” one, and it certainly isn’t “critical” to our security. The U.S. isn’t obliged to cater to some of the worst policies of a client government that has increasingly become a liability. The real problem with the U.S. abstention on the resolution is that it came many years after it might have done some significant good, and it comes so late because Obama wasted his entire presidency trying to “reassure” a government that undermined and opposed him time and again.
The editors’ recommended course of action is as foolish as the rest of the editorial:
[Republicans and Democrats] should start by agreeing to President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — a step envisioned but never taken by presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. That would provide a powerful reaffirmation to Israel –- a nation born after the slaughter of six million Jews, and under siege since its birth — of the U.S.’s enduring commitment, and to the world of Israel’s right to exist. That reaffirmation, in turn, is essential in providing Israel with the confidence to move ahead with a two-state solution.
Moving the embassy would have real and immediate costs for the U.S. with many other states, including more than a few allies in Europe. (Notice how the preferences and wishes of our actual allies count for nothing in these matters.) It would do nothing good for Israel, and might very well provoke a new intifada. Even if it didn’t get that bad, it would all but guarantee a dramatic souring of relations with many states in the region that have been tacitly cooperating with Israel. Nothing could be more pointless and short-sighted while also harming Israeli security, so of course that is what the “pro-Israel” editors think the U.S. should do.
A Team of Hard-liners
Trump appoints yet another hard-liner and loyalist to a foreign policy-related position:
On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump named Jason D. Greenblatt his special representative for international negotiations, creating a new White House role for his right-hand man at Trump Tower.
Greenblatt’s name first emerged Dec. 23 as frontrunner for the new position. But it’s still unclear what exactly he will do. A statement released by Trump’s team said Greenblatt would assist “on international negotiations of all types, and trade deals around the world.”
Greenblatt is one of Trump’s main advisers on Israel, and he worked with David Friedman (Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel) in drafting the party platform plank that denied the existence of the occupation and omitted any reference to a two-state solution. In keeping with most of Trump’s other appointees, he appears to have no relevant experience for the position he will fill, but he is reliably hard-line on the issues that he advises Trump on.
This is just the latest hard-liner that Trump has selected for a role in his administration, and it is part of a pattern of choosing advocates of more aggressive policies in their respective areas of interest. We have already seen several top national security positions have gone to strident Iran hawks with Flynn’s appointment and the nominations of Mattis and Pompeo. Earlier this month, we saw the nomination of the extremely pro-settler Friedman as ambassador to Israel. Last week, Trump named noted China hawk Peter Navarro to head the newly-formed National Trade Council, which fits with Trump’s other recent efforts to antagonize China. This is the profile of an administration that is looking to pick a lot of fights.
UNSCR 2334 and Obama’s ‘Betrayal’ of Israel
John Bolton throws a fit over the U.S. abstention on the recent Security Council resolution:
Mr. Obama’s refusal to use Washington’s veto was more than a graceless parting gesture. Its consequences pose major challenges for American interests.
As usual, Bolton is wrong, but his objection to the resolution and the U.S. abstention tells us a lot about how he and other hard-liners misunderstand American interests. If the U.S. takes a position that serves our broader interests, but happens to be at odds with the preferences of the Israeli government, these so-called nationalist condemn it. If the U.S. had continued to shield its client from international consequences of its illegal actions at the expense of our interests, they would be pleased. Not surprisingly, Bolton can’t identify any American interests that are “challenged” or put in jeopardy by the passage of this resolution, because there aren’t any at risk.
The resolution that the U.S. chose not to veto does nothing except restate the obvious and affirm existing U.S. policy regarding illegal Israeli settlements, and it is consistent with previous resolutions that other administrations have abstained on or even voted to pass:
The U.S. abstention—the focus of a great deal of personal rage against Obama by Netanyahu and others—was not new either. In 1987, the Reagan administration abstained and allowed the passage of UNSCR 605, 14 to 0, which reaffirmed the application of the Geneva Convention (via previous resolutions) and included “Jerusalem” in the “Palestinian and Arab Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967.” Sixteen years later, the George W. Bush administration voted in favor of UNSCR 1515, which called—by endorsing the Roadmap for Peace—for a full settlement freeze, including natural growth. In fact, until this latest resolution, Obama had been the only president not to let a resolution critical of Israeli policy pass in the Security Council.
Unfortunately, the resolution is mostly useless because it comes so late in Obama’s presidency after eight years of endlessly indulging and arming Israel. The next administration will ignore it and has no intention of following up on it. Naturally, that doesn’t satisfy Bolton, who wants Trump to harm U.S. relations with numerous other states to punish them for having the temerity to respect international law:
First, there must be consequences for the adoption of Resolution 2334. The Trump administration should move to repeal the resolution, giving the 14 countries that supported it a chance to correct their error. Nations that affirm their votes should have their relations with Washington adjusted accordingly. In some cases this might involve vigorous diplomatic protests. But the main perpetrators in particular should face more tangible consequences.
You could scarcely ask for a more explicit demand to put the interests of a client state ahead of our own, but then that is what we have come to expect from hard-liners when it comes to U.S. policies in that part of the world.

