As Ansar Allah’s successful strikes on the aggressor states escalate, the US government looks increasingly likely to drop its hollow pretense of trying to end the war on Yemen.

One might have expected the successful drone and missile strike by Yemen’s Ansar Allah-led government on targets in the United Arab Emirates to draw attention to the appalling man-made carnage imposed on the Yemeni people by the western-backed coalition’s senseless blockade and bombing campaign. Instead, American and European officials shed crocodile tears over the three fatalities, declared it to be a ‘terrorist attack’, and had the gall to paint the besieged Sanaa government as primarily responsible for the danger to civilian life. 

Even when Saudi and Emirati airstrikes struck the northern Yemeni city of Saada, slaughtering upward of dozens of civilians, including African refugees held in a prison building, the western pantomime of moral outrage continued. In fairness, it is the only real option open to them for when your side in an armed conflict is responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, you must focus attention on the "crimes" of your opponents, no matter how much they pale by comparison. 

It is against the backdrop of this inverted sense of morality that momentum is gaining for the Biden administration to walk back one of the few positive breaks it made with the Trump years. Upon assuming office, one of president Biden’s first actions was to rescind the previous administration’s designation of Ansar Allah as a "terrorist" organization. Almost exactly a year later, the US appears poised to reimpose that designation, plunging the Yemeni people to even deeper depths of suffering and all but killing any hope that the conflict can be settled with diplomacy. 

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A US designation of a foreign terrorist organization essentially constitutes its expulsion from the global financial system, with states, organizations, and individuals engaging in any form of dealings with them, opening themselves up to the threat of secondary sanctions that could see them suffer the same fate as the designated organization. Naturally in a country where some two-thirds of the population live in areas governed by Ansar Allah-controlled Sanaa, a reimposition of the designation would largely close the country off to international humanitarian efforts. The current experiences of Afghanistan and Iran are similarly illustrative. Even when humanitarian payments are explicitly exempted from sanctions, banks and other financial entities are notoriously reluctant to facilitate financial transfers of any kind, lest they find themselves pursued by the US Treasury Department. 

Consequently, it is hard to imagine what purpose a redesignation would serve other than for Washington to signal that it has abandoned all pretenses of trying to end the war or of reining in its GCC proxies. 

That the new US administration would continue the Trump regime’s policies is really not surprising when one remembers that the former President’s own atrocious backing of the Saudi-led intervention was itself a mere continuation of Obama-era policy. It was after all, on President Obama’s watch that the war began in March 2015 and not a year later that the volume of arms sales to the Saudi Kingdom topped US$115 billion, a record for any US administration at least at that time. 

With the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia among many other states scandalizing the world with obscene arms transfers to the aggressor states and the parasitic involvement of private mercenary companies from South America to Africa and Scandinavia, it is little wonder that there is a lack of urgency felt by western leaders to end the bloodshed. In the era of pandemic-induced economic collapse, the industry of death is among the few not to have seen a down-turn.  

Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite the ballooning costs of the war and their transparent failure to achieve any of their objectives, cannot really afford to end it themselves due to the enormous loss of face that would follow such a public admission of defeat. President Biden is therefore the single individual most empowered to order the belligerent states to cease their aggression and end the blockade. Anything less is Washington continuing to publicize its support for a campaign whose death toll is approaching 400,000, of whom the overwhelming majority are Yemeni civilians. 

Since the west is still unconvinced of the necessity to end the war, further Ansar Allah retaliation strikes on targets in the GCC states are all but assured. Sanaa is presumably convinced that they will have to deliver sustained and truly spectacular strikes against globally significant targets in order to force the world powers to the negotiating table.