Yemen

Confronted with serious challenges but also blessed with remarkable assets, the United Arab Emirates has developed a distinctive national security strategy.

The campaign along the Red Sea coast of Yemen is a miniature version of the problems facing the Saudi-led coalition seeking to reinstate the legitimate president of Yemen to power. The expected battle to wrest Hodeidah, Yemen’s largest Red Sea port, from control of the insurgent Houthis, brings these problems into sharp focus.

Moscow increasingly aspires to play the role of mediator in the Middle East, but how seriously should we take this? Russia, along with Turkey and Iran, has been attempting to mediate between the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and some of its opponents in negotiations in the Kazakh capital, Astana, and in Geneva. There...

AGSIW was pleased to host a discussion of these issues and other challenges facing the Trump administration and U.S. partners in the Gulf as they push back against growing Iranian influence in the region.

President Donald J. Trump’s administration and U.S. partners in the region – in particular, Saudi Arabia – see Yemen as an important arena in which to confront Iran’s destabilizing behavior, and to neutralize the threat it is seen as posing to Gulf Arab states.

As it did during the Cold War, Moscow is now working with Yemeni forces that are in conflict with each other. Moscow officially recognizes the government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who in 2012, at the height of Yemen’s Arab Spring protests replaced the unpopular Ali Abdullah Saleh through a transition that the Gulf...

Hopes that an end to Yemen’s punishing civil war might be within reach were briefly ignited last month. They faded almost as quickly as they came, when the government of exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi rejected a plan put forward by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

On October 14, 2016, AGSIW and b’huth, the Dubai Public Policy Research Center, co-hosted the workshop “Yemen after the War,” at the AGSIW offices in Washington, DC.