Last month the United Nations estimated that up to 13 million people could starve in Yemen if the Saudi-led coalition prolongs the country’s civil war. Without a ceasefire, the UN warned that Yemen could experience “the worst famine in the world in 100 years.” Earlier this week, after analysing UN data, the international charity Save the Children estimated that during the last three years, severe malnutrition and starvation have killed nearly 85,000 children – roughly 2,000 a month. At the moment, 400,000 Yemeni children face severe malnutrition, 15,000 more than last year.
After the first phase of the hope generated by the Arab Spring had passed, a regional power struggle turned Yemen’s civil war into a proxy conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Unconscionable profiteering by Western companies and governments has exacerbated that war for several years and impeded a political solution. Nevertheless, in a week filled with dire news of the conflict there were hints that a ceasefire might take hold, allowing conventional diplomacy another chance. During a policy speech in Riyadh, despite the usual sabre-rattling against “aggression of Iranian-backed militias” King Salman spoke of the war in Yemen as a “priority” for Saudi Arabia and he voiced support for the UN’s efforts to broker a political solution.
One reason that diplomacy has faltered in Yemen is that Saudi support for the war has been spearheaded by crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. The prince’s charm offensive in recent years has largely succeeded in defanging Western criticism of the conflict, but his apparent involvement in the Khashoggi killings has now proved a costly international embarrassment for the kingdom. This has undermined Western confidence in Prince Mohammed’s brinkmanship – in Qatar and Lebanon as well as Yemen – and allowed diplomacy another chance.
As Pankaj Mishra has noted in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, the prince is one of a long line of “quasi-Westernized men and women from the exotic Orient [who] flatter white self-images. These silver-tongued inheritors of wealth and power appear reassuringly familiar — suavely cosmopolitan folks who are au fait with the codes of bourgeois liberalism, unlike coarse nativists like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” However, once their flattery has neutralised Western criticism, such leaders as the Shah of Iran, Hosni Mubarak, Bashar al-Assad, Benazir Bhutto and Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi quickly reveal themselves to be no different from the illiberal and autocratic leaders they supposedly replaced.
Importantly, this analysis puts the Trump administration’s unwillingness to distance itself from Prince Mohammed into a proper historical context. For decades, Western governments have sustained equally unsavoury alliances, knowing all the while that they were fuelling conflicts in one of the world’s most volatile regions. As Mishra notes: “successive American presidents have waged lawless wars in the East; poring over “kill lists,” [and] they have ordered extrajudicial executions by drones.” Were it not for Prince Mohammed’s constant overreaching in geopolitical matters, the carnage in Yemen could easily, and may still, continue for several more years.
The end of the Cold War created a comforting illusion in many Western nations that proxy conflicts would be smaller and less enduring in a supposedly unipolar world. On the contrary they have become larger and more sanguinary than ever. The Iran-Iraq war, the multiple conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Congo war, and ongoing instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen all show that many-sided conflicts which are essentially insoluble without diplomacy are just as likely to occur today as they were before 1989. What has changed since then is our knowledge of the human cost of these conflicts and, to a lesser but no less crucial extent, our ability to press for diplomatic solutions.
