Rami G. Khouri

The stunning situation in Yemen, as the country’s foundations shake and slowly collapse, is an example of the structural weaknesses that plague many countries in the Arab world. 

If you want to teach someone about why the Arab world continues to lurch from conflict to conflict in a region-wide maelstrom of political violence and state incoherence, Yemen could be the best example. The country captures the fundamental, always lethal, structural weakness that now also rears its head in a dozen other Arab states. The lack of citizens’ validation of their own country inevitably leads to the collapse of the integrated state and its fragmentation into smaller units led by armed groups, amid chronic violence.

While Yemen is a telling lesson in how not to practice stable statehood, it also requires more urgent attention because it poses real and major dangers to others in the region and the world. This is because of its proximity to the Gulf Cooperation Council oil producers and major global sea lanes, the presence there of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and the consequences of state collapse and new refugee flows in a country of 25 million low-income people with few economic prospects. 

This highlights the second important lesson in Yemen. After the end of the Cold War in 1990, the Arab region and its tenuous states could not rely on external forces to maintain a regional order – or at least prop up vulnerable states and prevent them from collapsing or allowing their weaknesses and sicknesses to spill over into neighboring countries. Yemen is frightening also because this likelihood occurs at a moment, and in a context, when nobody is in charge of maintaining a semblance of order and national integrity. Local chaos mirrors regional chaos. 

The startling thing is that Yemen has been undergoing such national stresses and ruptures for the past half a century – since the Saudi Arabian-Egyptian, American-Soviet proxy war in that land in the 1960s. The alternating episodes of modern state-building and state collapse that Yemen has experienced since the 1950s include virtually every political element that has shaped and wrecked the modern Arab world during that period. 

The long and astounding list includes, most importantly, tribal and religious forces; Arab nationalist and regional separatist movements; armed sectarian groups; terrorist groups like AQAP; foreign colonial manipulation (in South Yemen before 1967); external Arab power plays and proxy wars; Cold War influences; family-and-security-run governments; attempts at democratization and political pluralism; repeated national dialogues; popular revolutions; direct interventions by neighboring powers such as Saudi Arabia and the GCC, or by the United Nations; indirect interventions by Iran and others; significant external economic assistance; the unification and separation of north and south; serious attempts at consensus-based constitution-writing and decentralization of power; and, to make matters worse, a serious crisis of fresh water depletion that will be catastrophic if it is not addressed quickly and seriously. 

These elements of erratic politics, identity, nationalism and statehood are now joined by the latest development: the Houthi takeover last week of the capital Sanaa and the declaration of a new constitutional transitional system that has sparked new concerns and threats from many directions. The incredible – but positive – element is that the major political groups in Yemen continue to meet this week under the chairmanship of the U.N. special envoy to seek a solution to the constitutional and governance stresses that have torn apart their country. 

Yemen has many options, all of which it has tried or broached before without lasting success. These include the secession of the south, tribal fiefdoms in the north, decentralized constitutionalism, civil war, democratic pluralism and power sharing, or a strong centralized security state. The two new elements that frighten everyone in Yemen and abroad are the established but limited presence of AQAP, and the possibility that ISIS could exploit the chaos to set up an operation in Yemen. 

The GCC is again likely to be the major external player trying to maintain some kind of order in Yemen, as it did several years ago when it helped remove President Ali Abdullah Saleh and ushered in a transitional period to a more pluralistic, but short-lived, system of power sharing via a national dialogue. The GCC states will see the Houthi takeover as another Iranian-backed threat to Sunni power in the region, which they will try to neutralize. 

This short-term approach to political developments cannot camouflage the deeper, older vulnerabilities of the modern Arab order that Yemen once again highlights. This includes a chronic lack of stability and sustainable national development in Arab states that have sought legitimacy through their militaries or foreign patrons, rather than through the state-forming consent and state-building participation of their own citizens.