Defiance

Western mainstream news of a ceasefire between Yemen and the US really signal an American defeat

The American leadership, with president Donald Trump in the lead, has announced that the US is stopping its massive bombing campaign against Yemen. (While the US usually clings to the fiction that it is not bombing a country but “merely” a movement – namely, Ansar Allah, pejoratively labeled “Houthis” – it has, de facto, been at war with Yemen, most of which Ansar Allah rules.) This also de facto sort-of-ceasefire now – which Trump, for some reason, does not want to call a “deal” (for once) – has been engineered with the help of Omani mediation; on the American side, Trump’s inevitable man-for-everything-and-then-some Steve Witkoff played a role.

What exactly the American announcement means – indeed whether it has an exact meaning known to anyone, especially in a White House busy with producing pope and Jedi memes – has remained unclear: For instance, has Ansar Allah agreed to desist from all attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and especially the Bab al Mandab choke-point strait? Or just from attacking US ships? Or merely American military vessels perhaps? An Ansar Allah spokesman, in any case, stated that Israeli ships remain targets. Also, as it happened, Trump informed the media first; the US military second, if at all. Even Israel – certainly something Trump defers to much more than to his own generals or the American people in general – claimed to have been taken by surprise.

Usually, such questions of scope and procedure really, really matter in grown-up-politics world, but hey, no biggie: it’s probably a little too much to expect from the leadership of the “Indispensable Nation” currently very busy with getting “great again” by tanking the world economy through a trade war that isn’t merely aggressive but stupid as well as failing on its own very ill-conceived terms.

After all, bombing Yemen for seven weeks was just a matter of life and death – and, as usually, other, not Americans deaths: Since the fresh US escalation of violence against Yemen in mid-March, American forces have attacked a thousand targets – according to the US – and they have, as is their wont, massacred civilians, including migrants targeted with bunker-busting bombs, Israeli-style, as it were.

One thing is certain: Trump’s claim that his Yemeni opponents “have capitulated” is nonsense. Ansar Allah declaring, in its turn, that “Yemen defeats America” is not: While rhetorical and hyperbolic – no, Yemen has not sunk an aircraft carrier – that claim, actually, has a large kernel of truth, counterintuitive as that may seem. Here’s why:

For one thing, the US, the much stronger power, has signally – no pun intended – failed to achieve its declared war aims. How do we know? Not only from the fact that the current ceasefire-or-something is so vague, but also, actually, from Trump himself.

It was Trump who began the bombing campaign by declaring that it would not even be “a fair fight” – true, for once, from the Great Boaster, but then American warfare never is – and that his Yemeni opponents would “be completely annihilated.” Whatever you think of the current outcome, almost two months later, that certainly has not happened. Not at all.

Yet when a massive bully attacks, shouting it will stomp you into the ground, and you resist, keep standing, and make the bully walk away, you have won – even if you have not stomped the bully into the ground.

Then, there is the issue of international shipping. Washington has pretended that its aggression against Yemen served to open international shipping lanes. Yet experts doubt that much has changed in that area. And why would international shipping companies change their risk assessment? If anything, Ansar Allah has now demonstrated that it can withstand even more pressure and violence than was exerted by the Biden administration. That is the problem when you escalate: In case your escalation fails to make a decisive difference, your position only degrades. Arguably, that is precisely what has happened to the US now.

Moreover, not only has Washington failed to achieve its own grandiloquent war aims, it also has suffered painful losses. Not, it is true, in military personnel, but in prestige. There have been the cringe-level embarrassing indiscretions through the Signal messaging app that have brought down a National Security adviser, Mike Waltz, and undermined a defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, whom no one has ever respected to begin with.

And those two delinquents are only the Trump team’s most directly damaged members. The campaign has also been expensive, costing (at least, officially) over a billion dollars. And, finally, American losses in drones and jets have revealed to the world a military that cannot even beat up the much smaller guy anymore – an old US specialty – without making not only a bloody but a silly mess, too.

Third, shipping this, shipping that, the real reason for America’s assault on Yemen – under Biden and Trump – is, of course, something else: As I wrote already one-and-a-half years ago, Yemen under Ansar Allah de facto rule, has been the only country in the world (with the partial exception of Iran and non-state actor Hezbollah) “that has lived up to the elementary demands of the most basic ethics – as well as the UN 1948 UN Genocide Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute – by taking direct military action to confront the Israeli perpetrators and Western co-perpetrators of the genocide committed against the Palestinians. Otherwise, the heroic Palestinian Resistance defenders of Gaza stand alone.”

In our hell-world under Western management (crumbling yet still devastating), it has been left to Yemen a very “poor and small country, itself recently ravaged by a brutal war of bombing and starvation, conducted under the leadership of Saudi Arabia and, of course, backed by the West, too, to do what all of us should be doing: help Palestine and fight Israel.”

In that regard, nothing has principally changed – even if everything has only gotten worse: Israel and its Western allies are continuing and escalating the genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign. And Yemen has stuck to its guns. Indeed, it has scaled up its direct missile attacks on Israel, and Israel has answered with its usual terror bombing of civilians.

And yet, Yemen’s resistance to Israel and the West’s genocide continues. That is the most fundamental fact testifying to an American defeat. In a broader perspective, imagine the US as a mafia clan whose rule is built on two things: violence and fear. Every time, this recipe is shown to fail, it is becoming less effective. Because the reality is that even America cannot really hold down everyone all the time. Most of its power stems from terror and fear. Successful defiance, hence, is a major strike at the root of US power. Yemen has delivered just such a blow.