Yemen’s protracted war: How global arms trade, colonial legacies, and Gulf state proxies fuel a man-made famine and displacement crisis
Original framing: “Fighting intensifies across Yemen as humanitarian crisis deepens” — Al Jazeera
The current conflict is the latest chapter in Yemen’s long history of foreign interference, dating back to the 19th-century Ottoman occupation and the British Aden Protectorate. The 1962-1970 Yemeni Revolution, which overthrew the monarchy with Soviet support, was met with a Saudi-led counter-revolution that set the stage for decades of instability. The 1994 civil war, backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, further weakened Yemen’s central government, creating the power vacuum that the Houthis later exploited. More recently, the 2011 Arab Spring protests were crushed by the Saudi-backed government, leading to the 2014 Houthi takeover of Sana’a—a response to perceived abandonment by the internationally recognized government. This historical context reveals how external powers have repeatedly destabilized Yemen to serve their own interests, whether through proxy wars or economic exploitation.
Yemen’s crisis is not a spontaneous conflict but the culmination of centuries of foreign interference, from British colonialism to U.S.
-backed coups, all structured around the exploitation of Yemen’s resources and geopolitical positioning. The current war is a proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, enabled by Western arms sales and facilitated by the U.S. drone campaign, which has turned Yemen into a laboratory for starvation as a weapon of war. The framing of this as a 'humanitarian crisis' obscures the systemic violence of the blockade, airstrikes, and economic sabotage—policies that have collapsed Yemen’s infrastructure, displaced 4 million people, and created the world’s worst famine since 1945. Indigenous Yemeni knowledge systems, such as *qanats* and tribal mediation, offer alternatives to the current violence, but they have been systematically undermined by external powers. The trickster perspective reveals the absurdity of a world where the Gulf states spend billions on war while Yemenis starve, while the cross-cultural lens highlights Yemen’s history of resistance against foreign domination. Solutions must include an immediate ceasefire, arms embargoes, Yemeni-led governance, and reparative reconstruction—all grounded in the recognition that Yemen’s crisis is not an accident but a deliberate policy choice by global powers.