The last thing Barack Obama wanted was another Middle East crisis requiring the involvement of the United States. For a president who wished to minimize the American military footprint in the region and envisioned a world in which power politics would be less central, the Yemen crisis has come at just the wrong time. It sheds light on the Arab state system’s enduring structural problems, and highlights the dependence of the regional order on an American security architecture.
 
Although Yemen’s Al-Qaeda problem has long concerned Washington, after the failed Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest airliner by a Nigerian who trained in Yemen, the country has climbed to the top of the priorities list. The Obama administration is thinking long and hard about how to tackle the problems in that dysfunctional society.

Yemen concentrates the worst shortcomings of the Arab state: a fractured society; a corrupt, autocratic regime; and armed sectarian factions exploited by meddling neighboring states as proxies against regional adversaries. Then there is Al-Qaeda, which has managed to graft itself onto the system-wide failures in the state, making inroads among the tribal segment of the population and benefiting from the inability of the central government to spread its authority over all its territory.

The Houthi rebellion against Yemen’s government has given Iran an opening to exploit the country’s weak points against its Arab rivals, above all Saudi Arabia. This Tehran has done, more explicitly and more successfully, elsewhere in the region: in Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq. Some intelligence reports have suggested that Iran is smuggling arms to Yemen through East Africa – where Al-Qaeda has also found support.

This is where the Yemen debate has brought to the fore an uncomfortable truth for the Obama administration. Washington’s initial impulse, best expressed in President Barack Obama’s United Nations speech, has, overall, been one of regional drawdown, exemplified in the pullout from Iraq. But now the US must reassess its position because, as has become apparent, there is a high price to pay for less assertiveness in the Gulf.

The alternative, that of a Saudi-led Gulf alliance to contain Iran, is unrealistic. Saudi involvement in the Yemeni conflict has put the kingdom’s limitations on display, with its forces taking relatively high casualties against the Houthis. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda, whose Saudi militants joined up with their Yemeni comrades after being driven out from Saudi Arabia, orchestrated a near-successful assassination attempt against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, son of the Saudi interior minister and himself a key player in the kingdom’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Moreover, there is a difference in priorities between the US and Saudi Arabia in Yemen. The main Saudi concern is to defeat what it views as Iranian manipulation of the Houthi rebellion to further undermine Saudi national security. The US, in turn, is largely focused on combating Al-Qaeda in Yemen, in other words on counter-terrorism action, even as some observers have cautioned that an Al-Qaeda-centric approach is ill advised.

The CIA has announced it will increase the number of analysts focused on Yemen, while the head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, recently declared that while there were no plans to deploy troops to Yemen, he expected the amount of counter-terrorism funding to Sanaa to double to around $150 million during the 2010 fiscal year. Already, the US military has been providing intelligence and other assistance to Yemeni forces in attacking Al-Qaeda targets.

The aid will not be solely military, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made sure to affirm, emphasizing that development “is as essential to solving global problems as diplomacy and defense.” In other words, the policy may expand beyond pure counter-terrorism to resemble more of a “smart power” approach – Clinton’s hallmark policy.

Nevertheless, the problem is that the administration has not indicated that it regards the situation in Yemen as being integrated into the broader regional confrontation between the US-led alliance system on the one hand, and the Iran-led one on the other. This, with the US pullout from Iraq, is creating an Arab perception that Washington may leave behind a vacuum, which is pushing Arab states to take measures that are likely to further destabilize the region and damage US interests.

One example is the way many Arab regimes have given cover to Syria as it continues to allow Al-Qaeda militants through its borders to strike against Iraqi targets. For these regimes, such activity prevents the consolidation of a Shia-dominated order in Baghdad that, they feel, may benefit Iran.

That is why the Obama administration must finally recognize that only Washington is truly capable of bolstering the alliance system in the Gulf against Iran in a way that maintains stability, while also protecting US interests. American diffidence is not an option. Iran will eagerly try to fill the spaces opened up, and the Arab states will not allow that to happen without a fight. The Middle East will suffer the violent consequences.

Tony Badran is a research fellow with the Center for Terrorism Research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.