Yemen’s Cease-fire Is Challenging Popular Notions of How Wars End

Yemen’s Cease-fire Is Challenging Popular Notions of How Wars End

Earlier this month, the lead U.N. representative for Yemen announced a two-month cease-fire, the first major breakthrough since 2015 in the conflict between the Houthi rebels and Iran on the one side and the Yemeni government and its Gulf backers on the other. The news was a ray of hope in an otherwise unremittingly troubling international context.

Or was it? Coming on the heels of the Taliban’s assumption of power in Afghanistan and the normalization of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the cease-fire, which appears to be the product of Houthi advancement rather than international diplomacy, suggests that, in many cases, it is military might, not a negotiated settlement, that prevails.

This cease-fire is significant. It opens up the major northern port of Hodeida and the air space around the capital, Sanaa, allowing crucial supplies to reach the 21.2 million Yemenis who depend on humanitarian aid for basic survival. Until now, access to or denial of those resources have been used as poker chips by both sides, a form of economic warfare that has been responsible for the majority of the war’s 377,000 deaths since 2015.

Those supplies are all the more welcome given the heightened pace of conflict since last summer, when the Houthis began a major assault on Marib, an oil-rich and government-aligned hub in central Yemen. Humanitarian aid agencies estimate that since then, a hospital or school has been attacked every three days, and that some 25 civilians have been killed or injured daily.

Even more significant than this immediate relief, though, is what this deal signals about how Yemen might finally exit this conflict. The specific terms of the cease-fire have been on the table for more than a year. The fact that both sides have come around to it now may signal a thawing of positions, and that the situation may finally be ripe for a political settlement. It is notable, too, that this deal took place after a February Security Council resolution condemning the Houthis as a terrorist group. Two of the Yemeni government’s backers—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which currently sits on the Security Council—championed that designation. The fact that they are now willing to make a deal with the same “terrorist group” whose condemnation they engineered a little more than a month ago signals how much political will there is for ending this conflict.

The optimism about a diplomatic breakthrough was further encouraged by a major shake-up on the Yemeni government’s side. A few days after the truce was announced, the country’s president, Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, ceded power to a newly formed presidential council. A major hurdle to any successful peace talks has been the high degree of division and infighting between the different parties on the anti-Houthi side. The new council has been interpreted as a Saudi-driven initiative aimed at bringing some coherency to that end of the bargaining table.

There is still a long way to go before a deal to end the conflict is finalized, and the terms of the current ceasefire arrangement offer only limited insights into its potential outlines. At issue are fundamental questions about the nature of the Yemeni state, including whether it would remain as one unified state, as opposed to being divided into two or more sovereign entities, as well as what party or parties would govern these constituent parts.

These were challenging issues even before the major civil war and international intervention kicked off in 2015. They are the same ones that frustrated the post-Arab Spring transition process, and that, in many ways, led to the Houthi takeover in 2014 and the current cycle of conflict. And they have been made even more complex and entrenched by the past seven years of war and the resulting fragmentation of political and security authority, especially in the territory nominally aligned with the Yemeni government.

It would be hard for any future political settlement to exclude the Houthis from the future Yemeni state.

Still, even this temporary ceasefire feels in many ways like a win for the Houthis. For the ceasefire to be extended, and for peace talks to progress, it would be hard for any future political settlement to exclude the Houthis from the future Yemeni state, or even dislodge them from their current control of the capital and northern Yemen.

Moreover, this limited, temporary victory appears to have been brought about not by a diplomatic breakthrough, but because the Houthis’ successful military strategy changed the facts on the ground and the costs of conflict over the past year.

There were precursor factors, to be sure, that softened the way toward this agreement. The Saudi and Emirati sides have been signaling their exhaustion with this long war for some time; the UAE, for instance, made the decision to pull back from the war, at least from direct combat operations, two years ago. And the change in U.S.-Yemen policy brought in by U.S. President Joe Biden—including removing the Houthis from the U.S. list of terrorist groups and withdrawing support for offensive operations in Yemen—has further shifted Gulf countries’ tolerance for continued war-fighting.

But the immediate, precipitating factors for this cease-fire were the Houthis’ gains in Marib and their string of successful drone and missile attacks on valuable Saudi and Emirati targets this year. What has driven the Saudis and Emiratis to make concessions is a recognition that any victory is a long way off—and, in fact, the Houthis may be winning.

International diplomacy and mediation norms assert that the only way to resolve a conflict is through a negotiated peace and a representative political process. Academics are far less sanguine on this front: Most studies suggest that civil wars end in military victory far more often than in negotiated settlements. But despite this evidence, much of the thinking around timing, sequencing and action that goes into diplomatic negotiations is premised on the belief that the warring parties will have to come to the table sooner or later, because that is ultimately how conflicts end.

Such convictions are built into the United Nations’ Charter and are reflected in international statements and strategies of engagement. On the Syrian civil war, for example, former U.S. President Barack Obama declared that only “dogged diplomacy that resolves the root causes of conflict,” and not “military action,” could end the fighting and bring about lasting peace—a conviction that informed U.S. positioning and actions for many years. International diplomats also continuously warned that there was “no military solution” to the conflict in Afghanistan, and tremendous energy was invested in the intra-Afghan talks in Doha in the belief that any solution would have to begin with dialogue.

Recent events in each of these countries raise a frightening counterargument, suggesting that there may, in fact, be a military solution to entrenched conflicts, albeit one that neither the population nor international peace advocates would like. In this light, Yemen’s recent cease-fire, while unquestionably a desperately needed reprieve from suffering, is bittersweet. Few Yemenis welcomed the continued airstrikes, neo-imperialist takeovers and political domination that came along with the Gulf powers’ intervention in Yemen. But many are equally stricken with the prospect of living under the yoke of the theocratic autocracy that the Houthis have imposed in northern Yemen.

In the past year, the military facts on the ground have prevailed over the best intentions of peace-builders, democracy advocates and humanitarians in Syria, in Afghanistan and now in Yemen. That sad record of failed diplomacy and intervention should resound as a call for action. It’s time to rethink how the U.N. and other international actors should approach stalled conflicts like these. These three countries are a painful reminder that, while the peaceful resolution of conflicts may be the hope and mandate of the U.N. Charter, they are far from a foregone conclusion.