The Saudi Intervention in Yemen: Struggling for Status.

• Author: Darwich, May
• Position: ARTICLE - Essay

Introduction

On March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes on Yemen with the aim of restoring the rule of President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi and eliminating the Houthi movement. Located on the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern entrance of the Red Sea, Yemen has always constituted a cornerstone of Saudi foreign policy. Since the Kingdom's foundation in 1932, the Saud family (al-Saud) has striven to expand its control over its southern neighbor and prevent it from threatening its interests. In 1934, the first modern war broke out between the two Arabian states. The 1934 Treaty of Ta'if put an end to this military confrontation, ceded the three provinces of Asir, Najran and Jizan to the army of Ibn Saud, and established a peaceful coexistence between the two countries. (1) Since then, the Saudis have avoided open, large-scale confrontation, and have instead maintained a precarious stability in Yemen through meddling in its internal politics, backing certain local groups against others, using Yemeni guest workers as leverage, buying off tribal leaders, and conducting limited, occasional military operations, especially over border disputes.

Operation Decisive Storm, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen that began in March 2015, constituted a break with this decades-long peaceful coexistence. Although Saudi Arabia had spent substantial resources on military procurement and training over the last two decades--especially after the 1991 Gulf War (2)--never before had the Saudi Kingdom, or any of the Gulf States, so proactively and aggressively deployed their military forces or engaged in a large, offensive mission such as the operation in Yemen. The intervention in Yemen has unveiled a new era in Saudi foreign policy and appears likely to overshadow Gulf politics for years to come. This paper attempts to explain the abrupt aggressiveness in Saudi policies toward Yemen while situating it in a more comprehensive understanding of the Kingdom's foreign policy in the region as an emerging regional power fighting for status.

Saudi Arabia's motivation in the Yemen offensive arguably reflects a Kingdom that is starting to rely on its own resources in fighting for and asserting its status as a leading power in the region. Scholars, commentaries in the Arab media, and government officials have often characterized the war in Yemen as part of a larger struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran over influence in the Middle East. From this perspective, the war is a reaction to the influence of Iran's expansion in the Arabian Peninsula through its alleged proxy, the rebel Houthi movement. (3) A proxy war with Iran, along the Sunni-Shia divide, became a central trope in Saudi state-owned media. Meanwhile, other scholars and commentaries focused on personalities at the expense of more structural factors. In particular, the ascendancy of King Salman al-Saud to power in January 2015, and the parallel rise of his ambitious son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the position of Minister of Defense, are often considered to be the origin of this intervention. (4) Many scholars have explored the evolution in the decision-making process in the Saudi Kingdom that followed the passing of King Abdullah, and attributed the Yemen war to the centralization of decision-making power in the office of the crown prince. (5) Despite the importance of individual decision makers, however, preparations for the operation in Yemen began in response to the Houthi takeover of Sanaa in September 2014, an event which preceded Salman's reign by several months. (6)

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the Saudi intervention in Yemen and argues that this aggression is driven by a non-material need: the Kingdom's will for status. In the post-2011 order, the Saudi Kingdom has fought for its status as a regional power at both the regional and international levels. In this context, the Saudi leadership responded to the regime change in Yemen with a violent intervention in order to assert and confirm its status as a leading power in the region. The paper starts with an overview of the Yemen crisis while outlining the current developments in the war. The second section explores the drivers of the Saudi intervention in Yemen; it argues that this aggressive strategy can be considered as status-seeking behavior, and it contextualizes this explanation within the International Relations literature. The last section presents an assessment of the overall performance of Saudi forces in the war and, further, draws out the implications of the intervention on the Yemen crisis and its ramifications for the evolving role of the Saudi Kingdom in the Middle East.

The Road to Yemen

Yemeni politics are complex and often plagued with shifting alliances at both the domestic and regional level. Saudi Arabia has historically seen Yemen as a source of threat, and its stability is inextricably connected to the security of the Arabian Peninsula. Whether this threat is real or imagined, the Saudi Kingdom has employed several measures to control politics in Yemen. Mainly, until recent times, it relied on Ali Abdallah Saleh, president of North Yemen from 1978 and later of a unified Yemen from 1990 until 2012, to maintain stability. Fears of Yemen's instability peaked with the appearance of Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), a movement headed by the Houthi family, in the mid-2000s. The movement emerged as a result of economic and social grievances in northern Yemen, especially in the governorate of Sa'dah. (7) The movement challenged the authority of the central government in Yemen, and started an active rebellion in northern Yemen against the government of Ali Abdallah Saleh. (8) In 2009, Saudi Arabia openly entered the fight against the Houthi movement and launched a military operation on its southern border--the first Saudi unilateral operation in decades. (9) This operation was far from successful. The Saudi armed forces failed to defeat or even weaken the Houthi rebels, raising doubts about the military effectiveness of the Saudi armed forces despite their vast technological superiority. (10)

The current crisis began during the 2011 Arab uprisings. The story of the uprisings in Yemen was not different from that in Tunisia or Egypt. The diffusion of protests against authoritarian regimes across the Arab world reinvigorated Yemen's marginalized social movements and united different geographical and political factions in Yemen, such as the northern Houthi movement and the southern secessionist movement Hiraak. (11) In 2011, mass-based revolutionary movements demonstrated against the regime of then President Ali Abdullah Saleh and demanded both political and economic reforms. The Houthis and their main party militia found in the uprisings a new outlet for their discontent against the central government. (12) They dropped their weapons and joined the peaceful protests. (13)

The Yemeni uprisings, like most other uprisings in the Arab region, did not succeed in consolidating a genuine democratic transition due to the lack of reforms and the interference of regional actors. (14) The Saudi Kingdom, along with other Gulf monarchies, swiftly designed a transitional plan for the country to ensure that Saleh would be replaced with a friendly government. The Saudis negotiated the ousting of Ali Abdullah Saleh and supported then Vice-President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi in a one-man election. Following this flawed political transition, Yemen descended into a conflict between different groups, which pushed the country to the edge of a civil war. (15) Four years after the uprisings, in September 2014, the Houthis took military control of the capital Sanaa and the state collapsed into various power centers. Yemeni security forces became divided between two camps. The first is loyal to Hadi, who still has support in the south. The second is loyal to Saleh, who allied with the Houthis in the north. The picture is further complicated by the presence of other groups who have benefited from this divide to expand their influence in Yemen, namely al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as well as a Yemeni affiliate of the ISIS. (16)

In January 2015, President Hadi resigned. The collapse of the government led to the outbreak of violence between the two opposing camps. At the end of February, Hadi fled Sanaa to Aden and announced it as his new capital. On March 22, 2015, the Houthis marched to Aden, seized the international airport, and bombed Hadi's headquarters. When the Houthis started their assault on Aden, Hadi fled the country and called for external intervention. Within days, the Houthis expanded to the south, took Taiz--the country's third-largest city--and seized al-Anad, where the U.S. military base was located. On March 25, 2015, Saudi Arabia unilaterally launched an attack on Yemen under the name "Operation Decisive Storm," with the announced aim of restoring the legitimate government of Hadi and preventing the Houthis and their allies from taking control of the country. Hours later, eight Arab states--Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Sudan, and Morocco--announced their support for the Saudi intervention, in what can be conceived as the largest coalition of autocrats the Middle East has ever seen. The United States, the...