On Friday night, the Biden administration announced that it would lift the designation of the Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization, reversing one of the Trump administration’s final acts.
The decision was welcomed by aid groups, which had condemned the designation as likely to precipitate the world’s worst famine in 40 years. Martin Griffiths, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, worried that designating the Houthis as terrorists would also hamstring his efforts to negotiate an end to the long-running conflict.
The Houthis, known formally as Ansar Allah, have committed atrocities during the horrific war in Yemen, as have all the other parties involved. Yet their designation as a foreign terrorist organization was rushed and apparently ill-considered, as the Houthis do not meet the official criteria for designation. The Trump administration had made a habit out of imposing or lifting such designations for political purposes, such as removing the designation on Sudan following its normalization with Israel and returning Cuba to the terrorism sponsor list nine days before Biden’s inauguration.
Friday’s announcement was condemned on Twitter with suspiciously repetitive tweets and hashtags, suggesting the mobilization of bots, possibly at the behest of Saudi Arabia. One of the hashtags #StopHouthiTerrorismInYemen included English text, as well as a meaningless series of five characters, possibly intended to evade Twitter algorithms intended to prevent bot armies from flooding the platform with identical tweets.
[Following publication of this article, Twitter users reached out to confirm their use of the random characters in tweets in order to draw attention to what they view as the white-washing of Houthi atrocities in English language media.]
Yemenis displaced by the Houthis, as well as many in the south, fear that the move will further empower the group’s position in eventual negotiations. The Houthis have engaged in horrific acts of violence and torture, laid countless landmines, and forced thousands to flee their homes. The Houthis are essentially using the Yemeni population under their control — approximately 20 million people — as hostages. Biden’s efforts are intended to save the population from the violence inflicted from the air by Saudi Arabia, whose six-year-old bombing campaign has destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, as well as on the ground where millions face severe malnutrition bordering on starvation and disease — problems exacerbated by Houthi indifference, yet even worse by their designation as terrorists. Lifting the terrorism designation may help to prevent a famine, but it will not help to end Yemen’s civil war.
In addition to the looming threat of famine, another major concern is the FSO Safer, an oil tanker rotting off the coast of Yemen, with 48 million tons of oil about to spill into the Red Sea. An oil spill of this magnitude threatens not only further devastate Yemen’s coastal communities, but also destroy coral reefs and fish habitats off the coasts of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Djibouti.
The United States has little leverage over the Houthis, and some fear that, by lifting the FTO designation, Biden has given the group an easy win without acquiring anything in return. This interpretation is flawed. At present, tens of thousands of Yemenis are dying of starvation and preventable disease. The most urgent priority is to provide aid. Lifting the FTO designation allows aid organizations to re-engage with the Houthis without fear of legal repercussions for engaging with terrorists. Although humanitarian exceptions were granted when the Trump administration added the Houthis to the terrorism list on January 19, such exemptions have proved inadequate in other contexts, such as Iran.
Having reversed the worst of Trump’s policies, Biden must now tackle those of the Obama administration, namely providing various forms of logistical and intelligence support to Saudi-led coalition that intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015 when the Houthis, who are based in the north, took over the country’s capital, Sana’a Stopping the flow of foreign funding from the UAE to the Southern Transitional Council (STC) and from Saudi Arabia to the Hadi government is critical to shifting the incentives of these warring factions and convincing them that a negotiated settlement is in their interest. The more difficult task is establishing a working relationship with Iran in order to pressure it to withdraw its own support for the Houthis.
The most difficult aspect is likely to be convincing the Houthis to accept a political settlement. The Houthis feel they have the upper hand in the war and have few reasons to stop fighting now. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project identified the city of Marib as a crucial location to watch for additional conflict. Marib is east of Sana’a and the current refuge for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who fled the capital region to escape Houthi violence and control. The frontlines are only a few miles from the city, and, if Marib is captured, the Houthis will hold almost all major urban centers in the former North Yemen, further consolidating their power.
Ideally, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, and the international community will agree to end support for their respective warring parties and commit to funding the reconstruction of Yemen, while internal Yemeni actors negotiate an inclusive political settlement. Biden’s moves to ameliorate the situation in Yemen are commendable, but must be only the beginning.
![Following a largely preordained election, Vladimir Putin was sworn in last week for another six-year term as president of Russia. Putin’s victory has, of course, been met with accusations of fraud and political interference, factors that help explain his 87.3% vote share. If this continuation of Putin’s 24-year-long hold on power makes one thing clear, it’s that he and his regime will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. But, as his war in Ukraine continues with no clear end in sight, what is less clear is how Washington plans to deal with this reality. Experts say Washington needs to start projecting a long-term strategy toward Russia and its war in Ukraine, wielding its political leverage to apply pressure on Putin and push for more diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict. Only by looking beyond short-term solutions can Washington realistically move the needle in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. has focused on getting aid to Ukraine to help it win back all of its pre-2014 territory, a goal complicated by Kyiv’s systemic shortages of munitions and manpower. But that response neglects a more strategic approach to the war, according to Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who spoke in a recent panel hosted by Carnegie. “There is a vortex of emergency planning that people have been, unfortunately, sucked into for the better part of two years since the intelligence first arrived in the fall of 2021,” Weiss said. “And so the urgent crowds out the strategic.” Historian Stephen Kotkin, for his part, says preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty is critical. However, the apparent focus on regaining territory, pushed by the U.S., is misguided. “Wars are never about regaining territory. It's about the capacity to fight and the will to fight. And if Russia has the capacity to fight and Ukraine takes back territory, Russia won't stop fighting,” Kotkin said in a podcast on the Wall Street Journal. And it appears Russia does have the capacity. The number of troops and weapons at Russia’s disposal far exceeds Ukraine’s, and Russian leaders spend twice as much on defense as their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukraine will need a continuous supply of aid from the West to continue to match up to Russia. And while aid to Ukraine is important, Kotkin says, so is a clear plan for determining the preferred outcome of the war. The U.S. may be better served by using the significant political leverage it has over Russia to shape a long-term outcome in its favor. George Beebe of the Quincy Institute, which publishes Responsible Statecraft, says that Russia’s primary concerns and interests do not end with Ukraine. Moscow is fundamentally concerned about the NATO alliance and the threat it may pose to Russian internal stability. Negotiations and dialogue about the bounds and limits of NATO and Russia’s powers, therefore, are critical to the broader conflict. This is a process that is not possible without the U.S. and Europe. “That means by definition, we have some leverage,” Beebe says. To this point, Kotkin says the strength of the U.S. and its allies lies in their political influence — where they are much more powerful than Russia — rather than on the battlefield. Leveraging this influence will be a necessary tool in reaching an agreement that is favorable to the West’s interests, “one that protects the United States, protects its allies in Europe, that preserves an independent Ukraine, but also respects Russia's core security interests there.” In Kotkin’s view, this would mean pushing for an armistice that ends the fighting on the ground and preserves Ukrainian sovereignty, meaning not legally acknowledging Russia’s possession of the territory they have taken during the war. Then, negotiations can proceed. Beebe adds that a treaty on how conventional forces can be used in Europe will be important, one that establishes limits on where and how militaries can be deployed. “[Russia] need[s] some understanding with the West about what we're all going to agree to rule out in terms of interference in the other's domestic affairs,” Beebe said. Critical to these objectives is dialogue with Putin, which Beebe says Washington has not done enough to facilitate. U.S. officials have stated publicly that they do not plan to meet with Putin. The U.S. rejected Putin’s most statements of his willingness to negotiate, which he expressed in an interview with Tucker Carlson in February, citing skepticism that Putin has any genuine intentions of ending the war. “Despite Mr. Putin’s words, we have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war. If he was, he would pull back his forces and stop his ceaseless attacks on Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council said in response. But neither side has been open to serious communication. Biden and Putin haven’t met to engage in meaningful talks about the war since it began, their last meeting taking place before the war began in the summer of 2021 in Geneva. Weiss says the U.S. should make it clear that those lines of communication are open. “Any strategy that involves diplomatic outreach also has to be sort of undergirded by serious resolve and a sense that we're not we're not going anywhere,” Weiss said. An end to the war will be critical to long-term global stability. Russia will remain a significant player on the world stage, Beebe explains, considering it is the world’s largest nuclear power and a leading energy producer. It is therefore ultimately in the U.S. and Europe’s interests to reach a relationship “that combines competitive and cooperative elements, and where we find a way to manage our differences and make sure that they don't spiral into very dangerous military confrontation,” he says. As two major global superpowers, the U.S. and Russia need to find a way to share the world. Only genuine, long-term planning can ensure that Washington will be able to shape that future in its best interests.](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/media-library/following-a-largely-preordained-election-vladimir-putin-was-sworn-in-last-week-for-another-six-year-term-as-president-of-russia.jpg?id=34283894&width=1245&height=700&quality=90&coordinates=0%2C77%2C0%2C77)
