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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Enabling Reckless Clients and the War on Yemen

If the U.S. is stuck with the clients it has, it has to be able to pick and choose the degree and kind of support it provides.
yemenairstrike

Noah Millman makes some smart comments on the war on Yemen and U.S. hegemony:

It’s easy to say we should stay out, or that we should try to mediate between the two sides instead of siding with Saudi Arabia – that these would be neutral postures and who could fault us for that? But they would not be perceived as neutral – they would be perceived, at least in the Gulf, as more evidence that we were tilting toward Tehran.

It’s very likely that withholding support for the Saudi-led war would be perceived by the Saudis and many others in the GCC this way. My first reaction to this is to ask, “So what?” Our clients are always claiming to be anxious that our government is abandoning them or not giving them enough support. They do this in the hopes that the U.S. will rush to reassure them and throw more resources or attention their way, and administrations from both parties and most members of Congress seem only too happy to oblige in most cases. Giving in to their complaints doesn’t make them any less likely to complain about supposed neglect a few years later. Indulging them by supporting their genuinely dangerous and destructive actions, such as the current war on Yemen, just makes this habit worse. It tells the clients that the U.S. is happy to be suckered into supporting them in whatever reckless operations they want to undertake, and it also tells them that U.S. support for them doesn’t depend on how responsibly they behave. The clients expect our support to be unconditional, and our government encourages them in that belief. To put it mildly, this isn’t a smart way to manage relations with these states. Not only does it fail to secure U.S. interests, but often enough our interests are damaged so that a client’s foolish preference can be indulged.

Clients should be afraid of losing their patron’s support, but we have things set up so that the U.S. is desperate to placate grumpy clients while the clients are free to spurn and ignore U.S. preferences without having to fear any serious consequences. This is a peculiar sort of hegemony in which the putative hegemon is lured into supporting and participating in senseless conflicts in which it has nothing at stake by the states that are supposed to be helping to advance its interests. This is all the more absurd when the hegemon justifies its preeminent role by claiming to be acting to uphold an “international order” that it and its clients violate with impunity.

There is also reason to believe that stern U.S. opposition to a client’s reckless war could discourage the client from action, or it might at least discourage other governments from cooperating with that client. Other governments have refused to join the Saudis’ coalition, and no one thinks they’re “switching teams.” Though it is a part of the GCC, Oman isn’t participating in the campaign and has been offering to mediate the conflict. Pakistan’s parliament unanimously rejected getting involved in the war on Yemen while affirming its general support for the Saudis. These are states that arguably have more to lose by refusing to participate in the Saudis’ war, but they have been willing to do it anyway. How much easier would it be for the U.S. not to have any part in a reckless and unnecessary war?

Besides, it’s not as if helping the Saudis to commit a disastrous error is good for them, either. Our leaders are often quite good at pretending that the U.S. is being forced by necessity to do something that it could easily avoid doing. Based on reports on what U.S. officials think about the war on Yemen, they are doing it again here. Because “we weren’t going to be able to stop it,” we are told, the U.S. “had” to join in the attack. But our government didn’t have to do this, and a desire not to appear too “pro-Iranian” simply isn’t a good enough reason to become involved.

If the U.S. is stuck with the clients it has for the time being, surely it must have the ability as a hegemonic power to pick and choose the degree and kind of support it is willing to provide. This is especially true when we’re talking about backing a client’s offensive war of choice. It’s not as if the U.S. would be refusing to come to the defense of a client when it is under attack. All that the U.S. would be doing is refusing to participate in the client’s unprovoked attack on its neighbor. I don’t really expect the U.S. to have a “principled” foreign policy at this point, but it could at least try to have one that isn’t quite so stupid and cruel.

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