Yemen and the Age of Unfinished Wars
In recent days, Saudi Arabia carried out airstrikes in eastern Yemen near Mukalla, targeting weapons shipments and military infrastructure linked to Southern Transitional Council–aligned forces backed by the United Arab Emirates, an episode that exposed a growing divergence between Riyadh’s push for de-escalation and Abu Dhabi’s strategy of consolidating influence through local power structures in a collapsed Yemeni state.
The strikes were not aimed at the Houthis and did not respond to cross-border missile fire. Their logic was internal to the anti-Houthi camp. Saudi officials framed the operation as an attempt to disrupt unauthorized arms transfers and parallel security arrangements emerging outside the authority of the internationally recognized Yemeni government. In practice, the message was narrower and more pointed: Riyadh was signaling that the further institutionalization of STC-aligned armed structures — even those hostile to the Houthis — runs counter to its effort to freeze the war and contain fragmentation.
Yemen has long ceased to function as a recoverable state. This condition did not emerge with the current phase of the war and cannot be explained solely by regional intervention. Decades of fragmented authority, weak institutional reach, and layered local identities produced a political environment in which power is exercised through negotiated arrangements rather than centralized rule.
Years of research on Yemen’s local governance — including detailed case studies of tribal mediation, security arrangements, and informal taxation systems — show that the country no longer functions through national institutions but through localized power zones, each governed by its own mechanisms of coercion, bargaining, and survival. External actors today are therefore not managing a fluid battlefield, but operating within a relatively stable post-collapse order.
For Saudi Arabia, Yemen remains above all a border problem, with risk management as the overriding priority: preventing missile and drone attacks, limiting cross-border spillover, and avoiding a permanently open southern front. Continued support for Yemen’s internationally recognized government functions as a legal framework that preserves a single address of responsibility and avoids formal recognition of alternative authorities. Within this framework, Riyadh has pursued limited, Oman-mediated accommodation with the Houthis while insisting on Yemen’s formal unity to prevent the normalization of fragmentation as an acceptable regional outcome — a logic Saudi Arabia has applied consistently, from Sudan to Somaliland.
The Emirati approach follows a different logic. For the UAE, reliance on the Strait of Hormuz is not merely a security concern but an economic vulnerability, given the strait’s exposure to Iranian pressure and its susceptibility to asymmetric disruption. As a trade and re-export hub with limited strategic depth, the country cannot afford prolonged uncertainty over its primary chokepoint.
From this perspective, Yemen is not treated as a country to be stabilized, but as a strategic maritime space anchored in control over specific coastal assets. Aden, Mukalla, and adjacent infrastructure matter as enforceable nodes within a broader logistics system. This approach is institutionalized through DP World, a state-owned Emirati operator whose port concessions across Africa and beyond translate commercial contracts into durable strategic presence. Southern Yemen thus functions as one controllable segment within a wider chain that also includes Sudanese ports and the Horn of Africa — an architecture designed to secure access and leverage.
Support for the Southern Transitional Council and affiliated security formations fits squarely within this model. Despite possessing greater coercive capacity on the ground than Yemen’s internationally recognized government, the STC functions as a regional authority centered on territorial control, security provision, and infrastructure protection rather than national governance. From Abu Dhabi’s perspective, a functional local actor is preferable to an overstretched state project in an environment where national reconstruction is neither feasible nor necessary. This is the root of the divergence between Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen — not rivalry or a breakdown of alliance, but incompatible definitions of stability.
A similar pattern can be observed in Sudan, though with far less friction. Sudan has been a collapsed state since the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, with the breakdown accelerating into full-scale war in 2023 between the regular army and the Rapid Support Forces. The conflict dismantled central authority, fragmented territorial control, and turned the country into a patchwork of armed zones competing over resources, trade routes, and access to the Red Sea. Since 2023, Sudan’s collapse has been accompanied by mass violence, including ethnically targeted killings in Darfur, where Arab militias have carried out systematic attacks against African civilian populations. This violence has not only destroyed state institutions but erased any remaining national framework capable of mediating the conflict.
Sudan is a critical junction linking the Red Sea, African gold markets, and regional trade routes. Saudi Arabia has focused on mediation and engagement with formal military institutions in Khartoum, seeking to limit further regional destabilization. The UAE, by contrast, has relied on economic leverage and relationships with non-state armed actors, particularly those controlling gold production and transport routes. Distance shields Saudi Arabia from the direct security consequences of Sudan’s fragmentation, allowing divergent Gulf strategies to coexist there in a way that Yemen’s geography does not permit.
Any assessment of Yemen’s trajectory must also account for the durability of the Houthis themselves. They remain a deeply embedded political-military actor with administrative capacity and a command structure adapted to Yemen’s terrain and social fabric. Saudi-backed de-escalation reduces immediate violence but leaves this structure intact. The UAE’s containment limits strategic reach, particularly toward the Red Sea, but does not erode internal legitimacy. One unintended consequence of these intra-Gulf frictions is a diffusion of pressure on the Houthis and, by extension, on Iran’s regional posture, creating space for tactical adaptation rather than delivering a decisive shift in the balance of power.
These Gulf strategies intersect unevenly with external interests — and often differently for governments than for societies. For the United States, Yemen functions primarily as an escalation-management problem, where stability is measured by the absence of crises requiring sustained American involvement.
For Israel, the equation is more fragile. Houthi missile and drone attacks — whether aimed at shipping lanes or Israeli territory — impose recurring operational costs and sustain a permanent security burden without offering a credible pathway to strategic closure. While elements of the regional and business elite may adapt to a logic of managed instability, Israeli society has far less tolerance for an open-ended security equilibrium. Containment can reduce immediate damage, but it cannot deliver the sense of resolution on which Israel’s internal political and social contract depends.
Yemen’s analytical significance lies in what it reveals about a regional shift in managing instability — from resolution to containment. The conflict illustrates how external actors increasingly structure their engagement around risk compatibility rather than political outcomes, treating unresolved armed actors as manageable variables rather than strategic liabilities.
Yemen is one case among a growing number of collapsed and borderline states where sovereignty no longer organizes political life. In such environments, containment and node control, formal unity and functional fragmentation, risk minimization and influence management operate simultaneously, without a mediating state capable of reconciling them. What emerges is not a temporary breakdown, but a durable mode of interaction adapted to persistent disorder.
This model is consolidating, and its spread matters less for Yemen itself than for the regional order it signals. A system built around managing instability rather than resolving it may be rational for actors with strategic depth, buffer zones, and the political space to absorb long-term ambiguity. For Israel, which lacks these buffers and operates within a societal expectation of decisive outcomes, it produces a structural mismatch with a security environment that no longer treats the elimination of threats as a prerequisite for stability.
