Follow us on social

Biden's Yemen envoy in the hot seat

Biden's Yemen envoy in the hot seat

We cannot accept at face value that the US and Saudi Arabia are committed to peace when their actions demonstrate the opposite.

Analysis | Middle East

U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking will testify before both houses of Congress today, addressing the House Foreign Affairs Committee first, followed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of both panels have expressed consternation at the lack of progress in U.S. efforts to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and this frustration may come through in these hearings.

Pressure has grown from activists, celebrities, and members of Congress for the Biden administration to demand that Saudi Arabia lift the blockade on Yemen that is contributing to conditions of severe food insecurity faced by 16 million people and the specter of death for 400,000 children under age five. Yet the State Department recently contested the use of the word “blockade,” asserting that food is entering Yemen’s primary port at Houthi-controlled Hodeida. The State Department acknowledged that fuel import restrictions are alarming, but framed the Hadi government as responsible for imposing restrictions, rather than the Saudi navy, which has allowed only four fuel ships to dock since January 3.

Members of Congress should press Lenderking on these points, specifically why the State Department appears to be ignoring statements by the World Food Program, which cites the blockade as the single most important humanitarian concern for Yemen, as well as by the UN Human Rights Council’s Group of Eminent Experts, which concluded that the Saudi blockade amounts to a war crime

They should also ask for clarification about why the U.S. government blames the Hadi government for the restrictions and ignores Saudi Arabia’s responsibility. The Hadi government lacks the on-the-ground capability to enforce its own edicts, while the Saudi government selects which of Hadi’s preferences align with its own agenda. In this case, working to prevent the Houthis from acquiring fuel revenues that the Saudis know will help fund their war effort lines up with the Hadi government’s desire to maintain the facade of its own control over Yemen. In addition, Lenderking needs to explain why Washington is tacitly supporting the starvation of Yemen by not pressuring Saudi Arabia to lift the blockade.

Lenderking will probably try to shift the hearing’s focus to the looming humanitarian catastrophe in the city of Marib. A hundred miles east of the capital of Sanaa, the city has offered refuge for over a million internally displaced people (IDPs) who have fled violence in general and the Houthis in particular. The Houthis have tried to take the city for over a year, given its strategic importance to the Hadi government and the Saudi military campaign, as well as the oil and gas infrastructure located there. Both Lenderking and the Saudis have stressed the need to protect Marib from the Houthi advance, and the prospect of a Houthi takeover of the city is grim, as civilians would either come under attack or be forced to flee into the surrounding desert of the Rubʿ al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, some of the world’s least hospitable terrain.

If Saudi Arabia and Lenderking are concerned about Marib, they should propose a means of providing assistance to the population there, such as a UN-led international effort to help move IDPs away from the front lines to other parts of Yemen.

Instead, Lenderking and the Saudis argue that the blockade should only be lifted if the Houthis agree to a ceasefire in Marib. This argument is problematic because it operates under a logic that considers the ongoing starvation of Yemenis to be an acceptable bargaining chip. Moreover, Lenderking and the Saudis know that their various ceasefire proposals are likely to be rejected by the Houthis, who believe they are winning the war and thus have no incentive to negotiate a ceasefire. Saudi Arabia and Lenderking portray the Houthis as uninterested in coming to the negotiating table, which is accurate. The Houthis are virtually certain to reject any negotiation defined by the terms of UN Security Resolution 2216, which requires that they give up their weapons and territory. Thus, for Riyadh and Washington to continue to propose ceasefires under this framework, while knowing full well that it will be unacceptable, amounts to the intentional prolonging of the war.

The Saudis and the Hadi government have lost the war. Their insistence that the Houthis accept their terms before they lift the blockade reflects their unwillingness to accept this fact. The U.S. government’s unwillingness to acknowledge that the position of the Hadi government — and therefore the Saudi position — is untenable, appears to be motivated by Washington’s  animosity towards Iran. The government continues to frame Yemen through the lens of Iran, a position that reinforces Riyadh’s argument that it cannot accept a resolution to the conflict that permits the Houthis to remain in control of most of Yemen. Yet, despite six years of war and billions of dollars of resources to wage it, the Saudis must accept that they have lost. Unfortunately, decades of U.S.-Saudi partnership not only flooded the kingdom with tens of billions of dollars of sophisticated U.S. arms, training and other support, but also to have transferred to the Saudi military’s mindset something of the American military’s chronic inability to accept the reality of unwinnable wars.

If, as they claim, Riyadh and Washington are committed to ending the violence in Yemen, they will need to shift their approach. The Houthis are not interested in ending the violence, as it has offered them gains beyond what they thought possible. 

The members of Congress who will hear Lenderking’s testimony must not accept at face value his insistence that the United States and Saudi Arabia are committed to peace in Yemen, when their actions so clearly demonstrate the opposite. Congress must use these hearings as an opportunity to demonstrate that Biden’s declaration on February 4 that “this war has to end” has not yet been borne out by his administration’s policies and actions.


Department Spokesperson Ned Price introduces U.S. Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking at the Daily Press Briefing at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on February 16, 2021. [State Department Photo by Ron Przysucha/ Public Domain]|
Analysis | Middle East
US military border
U.S. Army Strykers from 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, assigned to Joint Task Force - Southern Border (JTF-SB) in May 2025. (Army Spc. Michael Graf)

Military seizing massive swaths of public lands at the border

North America

The Trump administration has transferred thousands of acres of federal land along the U.S.-Mexico border to be controlled by the Department of Defense (DoD). The transfer is part of an ongoing expansion of the military’s presence along the border which the administration claims is necessary to “control” illegal immigration.

Critics of the land transfer, including some who live near the affected areas, have raised concerns about the environmental impact of military operations on these large swathes of land. Additionally, much of the land now under the jurisdiction of the military encompasses national parks and other federal lands which the public is losing access to.

keep readingShow less
Warfare movie A24
Top photo credit: (official trailer for Warfare/A24)
'Warfare': Rare Iraq film that doesn't preach but packs truth

'Warfare': Rare Iraq War film that doesn't preach but packs punch

Media

Unlike Alex Garland’s Civil War, his Warfare, co-directed with war vet Ray Mendoza, is not just another attempt at a realistic portrayal of war, in all its blood and gore. Warfare, based on a true story, is really a parable about the overweening ambition and crushing failure of empire, a microcosm of America’s disastrous adventure in Iraq.

A Navy Seal mission reconnoiters a neighborhood in Ramadi. “I like this house,” says the team commander, reflecting the overconfidence of the empire at its unipolar moment. But it soon becomes clear that the mission has underestimated the enemy, that the whole neighborhood has, in fact, been tracking the Seals’ movements. Surprised and scared, the mission requests to be extricated. But extrication becomes a bloody, hellish experience despite the Seals’ technological edge in weapons, IT, and logistics, and it barely succeeds.

keep readingShow less
vietnam war memorial washington DC
Top photo credit: Washington, DC, May 24, 2024: A visitor reads the names of the fallen soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Mall ahead of Memorial Day. (A_Kiphayet/Shutterstock)

Veterans: What we would say to Trump on this Memorial Day

Military Industrial Complex

This Memorial Day comes a month after the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, which was largely used to recall the collapse of the entire American project in Vietnam. In short, the failure of the war is now viewed as both a rebuke of the American Exceptionalism myth and the rigid Cold War mentality that had Washington in a vice grip for much of the 20th Century.

“The leaders who mismanaged this debacle were never held accountable and remained leading players in the establishment for the rest of their lives,” noted author and professor Stephen Walt in a RS symposium on the war. “The country learned little from this bitter experience, and repeated these same errors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places.”

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.