Allison Minor
Introduction
The Yemen conflict is widely seen as a case where the United States could and should have done more to prevent the outbreak of war. Such admonitions come not only from analysts, but also from precisely those senior officials overseeing U.S. policy in the region in the lead-up to the war. In 2018, thirty former senior officials wrote an open letter with that argument, including President Obama’s national security advisor and CIA director. 1 In an interview shortly after leaving office, former Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco also cited U.S. actions in relation to the Yemen conflict as one of her primary regrets during her time in office.2 Ten years after the war began, it is clear the conflict has eroded U.S. and partner security in the region, creating one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises and entrenching an actor now capable of disrupting freedom of navigation in a critical global waterway.3
The first objective of this paper is to rigorously explore this argument and assess whether there were credible pathways for the United States to mitigate or prevent the outbreak of the Yemen war in 2015, given U.S. political realities, dynamics inside Yemen, and a nuanced understanding of the nature of U.S. influence. But I also seek to understand what we can learn from the U.S. experience in Yemen. Therefore, the second objective of this paper is to use the Yemen case to help delineate the kinds of levers the United States has to prevent violent conflict abroad, to identify obstacles to the U.S. ability to use those levers, and to assess existing U.S. conflict prevention initiatives. In particular, I will look at the 2019 Global Fragility Act (GFA) and the degree to which it has enabled reforms that could have helped the United States prevent or mitigate the Yemen war.
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