I’ll give you the TL;DR version of Gregory Johnsen’s piece on Yemen at Brookings: Yemen is no more. He discusses a country in seven fragments but why not 17 or 70? Here’s his conclusion:
The nation-state system is the key building block of diplomacy, international relations, and national security. The United States, like most countries, is set up to deal with other nation-states. The military prefers to work “by, with, and through†local partners. But what happens when there is no partner on the other side, when the gulf between what Yemen’s internationally recognized government claims and what it actually controls becomes so great the fiction of a single state finally collapses?
The answer isn’t clear, but increasingly in countries like Yemen, Syria, and maybe even Libya, it is a question the U.S. is going to have to solve.
That supports a point I made some time ago. Without harsh authoritarian dictatorships there’s a stretch of, essentially, ungoverned territory that stretches from the Hindu Kush and covers most of the Middle East and North Africa. Those are areas well-suited for terrorist bases. The Ottoman pacified that area for about a millennium and we’re still feeling the vacuum left by the collapse of the empire.
The current situations in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen were created by the US and its allies. They didn’t just happen. Libya and Syria, in particular, had functioning governments, albeit dictatorships, and were at peace. Yemen had a civil war going back to its unification a few decades ago. Ukraine actually had a democratically elected government and president. No more. Now it is ruled by neo-nazi oligarchs.
The individuals in the Obama administration that developed and administered the policies that led to chaos, violence, starvation, and mass death are back in the saddle: Nuland, Rice, Blinken, etc. They are unrepentant warmongers and war criminals, and they are guaranteed to bring us more of the same, and to prevent any settlement of the ongoing wars.
Russia and China reject the legitimacy of our self-defined “rules-based order,” in preference to UN-mediated international law. Obama was sometimes able to rein in the warmongers, but Biden may be too feeble to do so. We may be in for a very rough ride.
Yemen was never much of a country to begin with. It’s just returning to its natural state. Not much sense in us pouring blood or treasure into that.
Neither was Afghanistan. Or Syria. Iraq was only a country while the Ottoman or Saddam Hussein was running the show. A few city-states and lots of generally ungoverned territory.
Libya was composed of multiple Ottoman provinces which weren’t particularly friendly to each other. The “civil war” was one province fighting against the other. We took the side of the province that didn’t rule the entirety for reasons I’ve never been able to decipher. My inference was that British and French interests thought they could get a better deal on oil from the rulers of what had been the sanjak of Benghazi than they could from the ruler of the eyalet of Tripoli.
Rounding out bob sykes’s list of countries, Ukraine had never been a country at all until IIRC 1956 when Khrushchev, of Ukrainian ancestry as you can tell from his name, named it a Soviet republic. There had been a powerful city-state of Kiev but never a country. As a gauge of its influence in the 11th century a princess of Kiev married the king of France, eventually becoming regent and ruling the country. “Ukraina” just means “on the border”, i.e. of Russia. That’s another one that puzzles me. We took the side of a bunch of outright fascists who had organized a putsch against the legitimately elected but admittedly corrupt government of Ukraine. I can only attribute it to a cadre of unreconstructed Cold Warriors in the State Department and too much responsibility for our policy in the region being handed over to Ukrainian nationalists.