Foreign policy
Finally, Biden ends America’s complicity in the long-running Saudi-Yemen tragedy.
For six years, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has played a brutal, bloody role in propping up the besieged government of neighboring Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital in 2015 and have waged war ever since.
Soon, it will no longer do so with the helping hand of the United States, which under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump provided precision-guided missiles, other arms, money and even troops in the form of secret deployments of Green Berets operating on the Saudi side to destroy missiles and launch sites.
President Joe Biden announced last week that the United States would end its support for Saudi Arabia’s intercession in the Yemen’s civil war, a move that includes suspending “relevant arms sales.” It also is moving to rescind the Trump administration’s Jan. 19 designation of the Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization — a move welcomed by the United Nations as a step toward alleviating the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
We support both decisions, and the signals Biden has sent on foreign policy since being sworn in Jan. 20.
We also recognize that some critics have raised legitimate concerns that, by cutting support for Saudi Arabia, the United States risks sending a message to the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors that they’ve been given a free pass to continue brutality of their own in a deadly civil war that they instigated.
But what’s clear is that policies of the Obama and Trump administrations have dragged America into a conflict it should have quit years ago, and into partnership with a nation whose own record of human rights abuses deserves censure, not continued cooperation.
Despite American aid, the civil war has persisted with terrible consequences for the civilian population in Yemen and, to a growing degree, Saudi Arabia, too.
About 100,000 Yemenis — many of them children — have died and 8 million or more are said to now be uprooted. Disease, hunger and homelessness are daily factors as the war rages on.
Two years ago, in a rare break with Trump, the Republican-led U.S. Senate called for America to end its support of Saudi Arabia’s role in the conflict, voting 63-47.
As we noted approvingly at the time of the Senate’s vote, “The United States originally got involved in this war to support regional allies. We agreed with Saudi Arabia’s conclusion that a coup next door in Yemen could threaten its government. But things have changed, not just in terms of the conduct of the war, which has turned ugly, but also in our relations with the Saudis.”
The White House ignored the resolution. (And when they tried again in 2019, when for the first time in history the House and Senate both approved a resolution under the War Powers Act, he vetoed it.)
The United States has instead expanded its partnership with Saudi Arabia, including selling tens of billions of dollars in arms to the kingdom. That persisted even as it became clear in 2018 that the ruling family in Riyadh was behind the outrageous murder of the Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump promptly caved on the red line he had drawn just weeks before, pledging “severe punishment” for the Saudis if they were found to be responsible for murder.
But he kept another promise: his “America first” foreign policy, announced in his 2017 inaugural address, that America’s diplomatic priorities would no longer be encumbered by human rights concerns.
Biden is quickly rooting out the most obvious pitfalls of “America first” in our foreign policy. He has expanded the number of refugees America will accept from 15,000 this year to 125,000 next and, more broadly, restored human rights as at least a factor in how we conduct ourselves on the world stage.
He has many challenges on that front, not the least of which is how he’ll pressure China on its murderous treatment of the Uighur minority in the Xinjiang region. But in the long run the return to a values-centered foreign policy will boost America’s influence in the world, and that in turn will make our nation safer.
That doesn’t mean our challenges around the globe will get suddenly easier.
The Houthi rebels mean Saudi Arabia no good, and given their strong support from Iran, they are no friends of America, either.
But rather than powering Saudi Arabia’s offensive, Biden has named a special envoy to Yemen, and pledged to support efforts to find a cease-fire, which the UN and others call the first step toward allowing humanitarian aid.
The United States must also rally our allies, including the UK which has yet to suspend arm sales to the Saudis, to a united front capable of putting diplomatic pressure on both sides of the civil war with the aim of a negotiated peace.
“This war has to end,” Biden said last week. Now he must put the pieces in place to make that happen.