Saudi-led Makkah Alliance escalates militarised deterrence in Yemen: a proxy war’s structural feedback loop
Original framing: “Makkah alliance to activate 'collective deterrence', Saudi Arabia's minister of defence announces” — Middle East Eye
The current conflict is a direct extension of the 19th-century British-Saudis rivalry over Yemen, where the Ottomans, British, and later Saudi Arabia all sought to control the region’s strategic ports and resources. The 1962–1970 North Yemen Civil War saw Saudi Arabia and Britain support the monarchy against republican forces, a pattern repeated today with the Houthis’ anti-monarchist stance. The 2011 Arab Spring’s Yemeni uprising was met with Saudi intervention under the guise of 'countering Iranian influence,' echoing Cold War-era proxy wars. This history shows how Yemen has been a battleground for external powers, with each intervention deepening instability rather than resolving it. The 'collective deterrence' narrative erases this continuity, presenting the conflict as a spontaneous escalation rather than a calculated escalation of a half-century-old struggle.
The Saudi-led Makkah Alliance’s 'collective deterrence' announcement is not an isolated military escalation but a symptom of a half-century-old proxy war, where Yemen has been a battleground for external powers to project influence.
The framing obscures how Saudi Arabia’s interventions—rooted in Cold War-era geopolitics and post-9/11 counterterrorism logics—have perpetuated cycles of violence, displacing millions and creating a humanitarian crisis that the UN has repeatedly warned is a war crime. Restoring the indigenous, historical, and cross-cultural dimensions reveals that the conflict is not a spontaneous escalation but a calculated response to occupation, where tribal alliances, Zaidi Islamic networks, and anti-colonial resistance movements have all played critical roles. The trickster lens exposes the hypocrisy of 'deterrence' as a smokescreen for Saudi hegemony, while the scientific and future-modelling dimensions demonstrate that militarised solutions will only deepen instability. The path forward requires dismantling the arms trade’s enablers, centring Yemeni-led reconciliation, and reframing the conflict through decolonial media—shifting from deterrence to restorative justice.