The Tragic Absurdity of War with Yemen

One of Trump's best lines, when he was first running for President in 2016, was his attack on our "forever wars." His particular statements were often incoherent, but you could extract a sort of ideology from them: if we're going to fight wars, we should fight them to win, and then move on. Once in office he did confront the Pentagon about Afghanistan, eventually forcing them to agree to a withdrawal timetable. That timetable was so long that our final departure fell after the 2020 election, leaving Biden to bite the bullet, but that strikes me as normal politics and I give Trump credit for standing his ground.

Fast forward to 2025, though, and we find Trump dabbling in exactly the same kind of unwinnable quagmire war he always ran against, and then recoiling from it in what looks very much like surrender. My point is not just to mock Trump's Yemen policy, but to use it as a case study in how the US keeps getting drawn into these wars.

The current conflict started after October 7, when Israel began bombing Gaza. To support the Palestinians, Yemen's Houthi leadership announced a policy of attacking Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Actually they had no clue which ships had anything to do with Israel, so they were just attacking ships at random.

So here's my first question: when a nation is randomly attacking civilian shipping on a vital international sea lane, should the US do nothing? 

When you ponder why US presidents keep bombing people, you have to remember that every time anything violent happens in the world a dozen people call them up or visit them to say, "We have to do something." Across my whole lifetime, US presidents have found it very hard to resist this pressure. Obama was extremely proud of the one time he said "no," over the "red lines" thing in Syria. Biden, despite being the closest thing to a pacifist we have had as president since Carter, and despite his decades of political experience, gave in to the pressure and ordered airstrikes on the Houthi military, and then had US naval ships use very expensive missiles to help shoot down Iranian and Yemeni missiles flying toward Israel.

The Houthis backed off for a while, but they soon resumed both launching missiles at Israel and randomly attacking civilian ships.

Enter Trump and his team, fired up by their election victory and eager to smite somebody. The Houthis made a convenient enemy, since they were both attacking Israel, about which Trump seems to care a lot, and tweaking their noses at the world by attacking ships. So Trump ordered a new bombing campaign with much laxer rules of engagement than Biden's. The administration did not announce any timetable or goals. (To me the striking thing about the leaked Signal chat was that nobody in it said a word about what our airstrikes were supposed to accomplish.) But the NY Times has been doing a lot of reporting, of which I found this ungated summary:

The Trump administration initially refused to lay out the exact parameters for its campaign against the Houthis. But the Times, citing three U.S. officials, reports that the plan was for a long operation expected to last eight to ten months. The objectives were more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s failed air campaign against the Houthis, and included a plan to use tremendous firepower to take out the group’s air defenses and also assassinate Houthi leaders.

But, according to the Times, Trump asked for a progress report after a month and, feeling unsatisfied by the progress, decided to scrap the plan. Instead, the U.S. and the Houthis settled on a ceasefire agreement that the Houthis would stop firing on U.S. ships in exchange for the U.S. suspending its operations. Notably, that agreement did not restrict the Houthis from firing on Israel or shipments it considered helpful to Israel, which in turn has contributed to a growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The times said Trump's distaste for long Middle Eastern wars was a big factor. 

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials. But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.

So after spend about $7 billion on our six-week war we gave up again, and the Houthis remain in power, still randomly attacking ships. 

Meanwhile, though, the US has done one concrete thing in Yemen: cutting off all aid to Yemeni civilians. It seems in one sense bizarre that the US has been both bombing Yemen on a regular basis and supplying hundred of millions in aid to its citizens every year, but that is the world we live in. When Elon's Doge was feeding our aid programs "into the wood chipper", aid to Yemen was the first thing to go. Nicholas Kristof thinks this was a big mistake:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”

Despair over just this intersection of human misery and evil autocracy was one of the reasons Bush  II invaded Iraq. If the people are suffering, and we can't even help them because the regime will just steal the aid, what are supposed to do? With the threat of terrorism in the air, Bush opted to invade and rebuild Iraq "from the ground up," a phrase I feel like I heard six thousand times in those years.

Fortunately, nobody seems to have any appetite for a ground-up rebuilding of Yemen, so we're going to avoid that nightmare. But instead we are stuck with the ongoing bad dream of a famine-wracked country spending its resources to attack international shipping, an echo of the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, which is an echo of events that go far back in time, the legacy of which we seem unable to escape.