Follow us on social

Lawmakers take action on Biden's failed Yemen policy

Lawmakers take action on Biden's failed Yemen policy

Two House members announced this week they’d be introducing a War Powers Resolution to put an end to America’s role in the Saudi-led conflict.

Analysis | Middle East

On Monday, Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Peter DeFazio announced that they will be introducing a new Yemen War Powers Resolution. This is a direly needed step to put an end to America’s ongoing complicity in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world once and for all. 

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of President Biden’s inaugural foreign policy speech, in which he announced that his administration would follow through on his campaign promise and end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition’s “offensive” operations in Yemen.

Among advocates like myself who have long urged the United States to end its involvement in the war, high expectations for a serious shift in the U.S. policy towards Yemen and Saudi Arabia quickly turned into disappointment. Now, with continued U.S. support, the Saudi-led coalition is carrying out a major escalation in its brutal air campaign, making January one of the bloodiest months in the history of the war. Recent airstrikes targeting a detention center and vital communications infrastructure killed at least 90 civilians and triggered nationwide internet blackout.

The United States has for years enabled these vicious attacks against civilians, and it’s past time for Congress to end U.S. complicity in these atrocities by passing a War Powers Resolution.

Following Biden’s announced policy change last year, we expected to see robust limitations on weapons sales and military support to Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, the president’s announcement amounted to nothing but a public relations stunt that gave the appearance of change while obscuring the fact that U.S. policy hasn’t meaningfully altered.

The administration never defined the distinctions between “offensive” and “defensive” support and proceeded to approve over a billion dollars in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, including new attack helicopters, air-to-air missiles, and defense contracts. The Pentagon also acknowledged that the United States is still providing spare parts, maintenance, and logistical support for Saudi warplanes conducting operations in Yemeni territory.

Unsurprisingly, Biden’s strategy failed to induce changes in Saudi behavior. Saudi Arabia’s latest onslaught of airstrikes is just the most recent escalation in a brutal conflict that has ground on for almost seven years and sparked one of the most severe humanitarian crises on Earth. In 2021, Saudi Arabia launched roughly as many airstrikes as it did in 2020. Rather than de-escalate the conflict and engage in good-faith diplomacy, Saudi Arabia has doubled down on its collective punishment of Yemenis through airstrikes and strengthening its suffocating blockade, which the World Food Program warned last year was restricting access to vital commodities and setting the stage for the worst famine in modern history.

In recent years, Congress has repeatedly made its opposition to U.S. involvement in the Yemen war clear. In 2019 Congress made history by passing a War Powers Resolution to end U.S. military involvement in the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen. But after Trump’s veto, Yemen suffered a breakdown in diplomacy, an uptick in violence and a continuation of hostilities.

More recently, in response to the worsening humanitarian conditions in Yemen, a bipartisan group of over 100 members of Congress issued several forceful statements, calling on the Biden administration to take urgent action to end Saudi Arabia’s blockade, including by leveraging U.S. military aid. In September, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to prohibit U.S. involvement in the war. But for the third time in three years, the provision was stripped out of the final bill during closed-door conference negotiations and military support continued.

While the United States can’t unilaterally bring about a ceasefire, it must use its leverage to try to persuade Saudi Arabia to lift its blockade and end airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.

After a year of President Biden’s failed Yemen policy and repeated rebuffs of congressional attempts to course correct, lawmakers are left with two options: turn a blind eye to craven U.S. complicity, or pass a Yemen War Powers Resolution that finally ends U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition. With the midterms and an escalating humanitarian crisis looming, time is of the essence. By forcing more votes to prohibit unauthorized military support, Congress can do its part to pressure the warring parties to sit at the bargaining table and help bring this devastating war to an end.


Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. (Patrick Semansky/Pool via REUTERS) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (Oregon State University/Creative Commons)|Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) holds up a copy of the U.S. Constitution as she votes yes to the second article of impeachment during a House Judiciary Committee markup of the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, December 13, 2019, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. Patrick Semansky/Pool via REUTERS
Analysis | Middle East
Yemen Ahmed al-Rahawi
Top image credit: Funeral in Sana a for senior Houthi officials killed in Israeli strikes Honor guard hold up a portraits of Houthi government s the Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and other officials killed in Israeli airstrikes on Thursday, during a funeral ceremony at the Shaab Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, 01 September 2025. IMAGO/ via REUTERS

Israel playing with fire in Yemen

Middle East

“The war has entered a new phase,” declared Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior official in Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, after Israeli jets streaked across the Arabian Peninsula to kill the group’s prime minister and a swathe of his cabinet in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.

The senior official from Ansar Allah, the movement commonly known as the Houthis, was not wrong. The strike, which Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz promised was “just the beginning,” signaled a fundamental shift in the cartography of a two-year war of attrition between the region’s most technologically advanced military and its most resilient guerrilla force.

The retaliation was swift, if militarily ineffective: missiles launched towards Israel disintegrated over Saudi Arabia. Internally, a paranoid crackdown ensued on perceived spies. Houthi security forces stormed the offices of the World Food Programme and UNICEF, detaining at least 11 U.N. personnel in a sweep immediately condemned by the U.N. Secretary General.

The catalyst for this confrontation was the war in Gaza, unleashed by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, which provided the Houthis with the ideological fuel and political opportunity to transform themselves. Seizing the mantle of Palestinian solidarity — a cause their leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, frames as a “sacrifice in the cause of God Almighty ” — they graduated from a menacing regional actor into a global disruptor, launching missiles toward Israel just weeks after Hamas’s attacks and holding one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes hostage.

The chessboard was dangerously rearranged in May, when the Trump administration, eager for an off-ramp from a costly and ineffective air campaign, brokered a surprise truce with the Houthis. Mediated by Oman, the deal was simple: the U.S. would stop bombing Houthi targets, and the Houthis would stop attacking American ships. President Trump, in his characteristic style, claimed the Houthis had “capitulated” while also praising their “bravery.”

keep readingShow less
TRump  and Mikheil Kavelashvili
Top photo credit: President Trump (shutterstock/Maxim Elramsisy) and Georgian president Mikheil Kavelashvili ( President of Azerbaijan)

Georgia Dream hopes Trump is ticket out of geopolitical purgatory

Europe

For economic reasons but also for self-preservation, Georgia does not want to be dragged into picking sides in its relations with larger powers. Its president’s open letter to Donald Trump may be an effort to balance growing Chinese influence.

President Mikheil Kavelashvili’s letter to Trump urges a restoration of strategic ties with Washington. It struck the tone of a forsaken friend, talking about the lack of U.S. focus, raising “doubts and questions among the Georgian people about how free and sincere your administration’s actions are in terms of strengthening peace in the region.” He even bemoans Trump’s reinstatement of relations with President Putin.

keep readingShow less
US Navy
Top image credit: 250717-N-CT713-2083 SOUTH CHINA SEA (July 17, 2025) Sailors conduct flight operations on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). Vinson, the flagship of Carrier Strike Group ONE, is underway conducting routine operations in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Amber Rivette)

'First Among Equals': The case for a new realist internationalism

Global Crises

The unipolar moment is over, and the U.S. must adapt its foreign policy to an increasingly multipolar world. The old overly ambitious strategy of liberal hegemony is ill-suited to the new realities of the 21st century. Moreover, the U.S. is badly overstretched with too many commitments around the world, and it needs to chart a different course if it is to prosper in the decades to come.

To meet that need, Emma Ashford — a senior fellow at the Stimson Center — lays out the case for a new pragmatic grand strategy of realist internationalism in her valuable new book, “First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World.

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.