We already knew Donald Trump’s bombing campaign against Yemen was unconstitutional. It turns out it was completely pointless too.
Earlier this week, Trump and the Houthi leadership of Yemen announced a sudden cease-fire deal that took many by surprise, with the US president declaring that the Houthis “don’t wanna fight anymore” and had “capitulated.” After two months of often indiscriminate US bombing, Trump told reporters, the Houthis said they “will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s what the purpose of what we were doing” was, so the United States “will honor that.”
The deal has been a rare bit of good news on the foreign policy front, for both Americans, who are tired of being sucked into endless warfare in the Middle East and elsewhere, and for innocent Yemenis, many dozens of whom have been killed by US bombs the past two months. But stop and think about it for a second, and Trump’s cease-fire announcement looks less like a grand accomplishment of presidential diplomacy and more like a fictionalized George H. W. Bush writing the final line of his memoirs in the Simpsons: “Since I’d achieved all of my goals as president in one term, there was no need for a second.”
The key detail missing from the cease-fire agreement is any promise by the Houthis to stop attacking Israeli ships. It’s a key detail, because this was the reason Trump started bombing Yemen in the first place.
As I explained in March, the Houthis only started attacking US vessels after the Trump administration started bombing Yemen, and the reason it started bombing Yemen was to try and deter the Houthis from bombing Israeli ships. (And those attacks on Israeli ships were themselves in response to the Israeli government renewing its policy of starving and massacring the people of Gaza, with no Houthi attacks taking place while the Trump-brokered Gaza cease-fire had been in place).
We now have the same outcome we would have had if…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
