President Trump ordered dozens of air raids on many targets spread around the country of Yemen. The US military claimed the strikes killed “multiple” leaders of the group Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis. As many as fifty-three people were killed by the bombs, including some women and children.
The Houthis had ceased their attempted blockade of Israeli shipping off Yemen’s coast in the Red Sea after Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire back in January. But after Israel blocked the entry of aid and all other goods into Gaza two weeks ago, the Houthis announced last week that they would resume their “ban” on Israeli ships entering the waters around Yemen. It appears Trump bombed Yemen in response to this announcement.
Former President Biden had taken the exact same approach in response to the Houthi’s blockade. Trump’s actions over the weekend make it clear he intends to continue Biden’s Yemen policy. And it isn’t the first time Trump followed a Democrat’s lead on Yemen.
Just like the current government of Ukraine, the Houthis rode a wave of mass protests back in 2014 and seized control of the capital city and the vast majority of the country’s populated territory, causing the previous president to flee. The leaders of Saudi Arabia were upset about that because the previous president—Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi—was a close ally of theirs. So, they launched a war in 2015 to try and put him back in power.
At the time, the Obama administration had just negotiated the JCPOA, or Iran Nuclear Deal, and knew the Saudis were upset about it. The monarchs in Riyadh didn’t want the US cozying up with Iran, their chief rival in the region. So, to make the Saudis a little less mad, Obama decided to support their war in Yemen.
At the time, that was somewhat of a stab in the back as the US had been working with the Houthis—who were, by then, the de facto government of Yemen—to fight al Qaeda. But by that point, the Obama administration effectively fighting on al Qaeda’s side was nothing new, so the US switched sides without much of the American public even noticing.
The Saudi war on Yemen was brutal. It involved a heavy air campaign—aimed mainly at civilian infrastructure—a ground offensive, and a savage blockade that kept food and medicine from the Yemeni people. Effectively, the Saudis put Yemen under siege, thinking that if the population began starving and dying of easily curable diseases, they’d turn against their new government and overthrow it on behalf of the Saudis. But as the “war” entered its second year, the plight of the Yemeni people got worse, and Obama left the White House; the siege strategy did not appear to be working.
That is the situation Trump inherited when he took office in 2017. And what did he do? He continued Obama’s policy and supported the Saudi war for every single day of his first term. The US-Saudi siege of Yemen lasted for seven years in total. It killed at least 377,000 people. Many died from cholera—a disease that didn’t even require medicine to cure, only clean water. 70 percent of those killed were children under five years old.
Trump bridging the gap between Democratic presidents by continuing their horrific Yemen policy was the most shameful thing he did in his first term. And when it ended in 2022, the Houthis remained in power. The political outcome was the same as it would have been had Trump ended it on day one—only now with a lot more hatred being directed towards the United States.
Today, we again find ourselves at the beginning of a Trump term where he has decided to govern exactly like the Democrats before him when it comes to Yemen.
Of course, a lot of Republicans don’t feel that way because they’re being tricked into returning to a George W. Bush-era mindset where Democrats are weak and timid on the world stage while Republicans are tough and firm and willing to bomb the hell out of anyone who stands in their way.
But the defining characteristic of Biden’s foreign policy was not weakness; it was recklessness.
His administration botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan. First, he unnecessarily changed the timeline of Trump’s deal with the Taliban, setting the stage for a Taliban advance while Americans were still there. Then, Biden and his team refused to admit that the nation-building mission had been a complete failure and ran with the lie that the regime in Kabul would hold until they were forced to scramble to pull the last Americans out.
Later, Biden refused to engage with Russian concerns about America’s anti-Kremlin policies in Ukraine and Belarus, which helped hand Putin enough public support in Russia to invade Ukraine in 2022. He then helped scuttle an early peace plan and encouraged the Ukrainians to instead wage the exact kind of conventional artillery war in which Russia was always going to have the advantage.
And finally, after Hamas killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and took hundreds of hostages in October of 2023, Biden unquestioningly backed the Likudnik hard-liners who used the attack as an excuse to level Gaza—including the buildings and tunnels where the hostages were being held.
That approach handed people like the Houthis an easy PR win in the region for using what little leverage they had over a part of a shipping lane to try and stop it. In response, of course, Biden tried to stop the Houthis by dropping bombs. But doing so only emboldened the Houthis and gave them more credibility with the Yemeni people.
When it came to foreign policy, Biden was not some spineless wimp or starry-eyed peacenik. His administration intervened heavily and violently in multiple conflicts at the same time. And every one of the reckless interventions led to more chaos, more violence, and a more dangerous world for the American people. Trump abandoning the mandate for change that carried him back into the White House to instead follow Biden’s lead on Yemen is a bad sign of what’s to come. Because continuing down this path would be a tremendous mistake.
Connor O’Keeffe (@ConnorMOKeeffe) produces media and content at the Mises Institute. This commentary is reprinted with permission from the Mises Institute.
