On September 26, 1962, a coup in Yemen ousted Imam Muhammad al-Badr. He fled from Sanaa to the Saudi border. Egyptian forces quickly arrived to secure the new Arab nationalist regime, but Saudi authorities saw the Egyptian presence in Sanaa as a threat to its national security and funded the remnants of the imamate. Cairo, in turn, viewed Saudi actions as a reactionary scheme to contain the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s effort to spread Arab nationalism.
While both media accounts at the time described the resulting Yemeni civil war as a battle between republicans and royalists, it was far more complex, as both sides sought to tap into shifting tribal loyalty. The Egyptians even established a bureau for tribal affairs and disbursed subsidies that, at times, reached tens of thousands of pounds per month.
Today’s Yemen war is as complex, even as diplomats and journalists often reduce it to a conflict between Saudi and Iran-backed factions.
In one famous anecdote from the 1967–68 siege of Sanaa, tribal sheikhs stood with Al-Hassan Hamid al-Din, looking down at Sanaa as it teetered on collapse. When the prince urged them to finish the job, the sheikhs demanded he first hasten the arrival of more Saudi gold. Ultimately, after 70-days, the siege failed.
Today’s Yemen war is as complex, even as diplomats and journalists often reduce it to a conflict between Saudi and Iran-backed factions. Failure to acknowledge the motivations of the southern Yemenis, however, leads the Internationally Recognized Government and its Saudi-appointed president ultimately to fumble the fight against the Houthis. President Rashad al-Alimi’s government, operating from its Riyadh exile, continues to insist that southerners must fight to retake Sanaa on their behalf—without any promise of the South’s right to determine its own fate. Riyadh uses the same language as its southern proxies: a South-South dialogue under Saudi tutelage, whose outcomes northern authorities would need to approve.
Such a model does work. When a Yemeni government derives its legitimacy from Saudi paymasters rather than its own people, the result is not Saudi Arabia’s ostensible goal of security on its southern border.
Many U.S. professors and journalists specializing in the Middle East today urge the Trump administration to “oppose separatist movements in countries like Syria and Yemen,” though they seldom acknowledge the Saudi, Qatari, or Turkish largesse their employers receive. Even if the State Department and White House oppose Syrian Kurdish autonomy—the Syrian Kurds did not ask for their own state—Yemen is a different case, since, in the modern political sense, Yemen has never been a single, continuous state. For more than a century, North and South Yemen developed as entirely separate political entities. The British established a colony in Aden in 1839. When the South won independence in 1967, it did not join any other state, but instead became its own sovereign state, which the United States recognized a month after it was declared. The United Nations welcomed South Yemen as a full member that same year.
When North and South Yemen unified in 1990, they did so on a voluntary basis. When that agreement collapsed in 1994, the North sought to impose union by military force. Every call for Yemeni “unity” since has rested on that founding act of force, not on popular mandate.
This is why the South’s demand is not “separatism.” Southerners are not seceding from some ancient homeland; they are seeking to dissolve a union that has failed for more than three decades, and to restore a state they once possessed and exercised sovereignty. The best analogies are cases of the dissolution of voluntary unions between previously independent entities: the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria, the Senegambia Confederation between Senegal and The Gambia, and Czechoslovakia’s split into two states. These are precedents of union and separation between equals—not the fragmentation of a single nation-state.
The Quartet should then call for an international conference on the Yemeni question to resolve the North-South crisis based on the two states’ 1990 borders.
President Donald Trump is right to end the U.S. role as “the world’s policeman” in favor of relying on allies who craft partnerships and take responsibility for their own interests. In such a case, rather than simply accept Saudi dictates that have only brought the United States back to the brink of war in Yemen, Trump should first work with Riyadh to revive the international Quartet—the United States, United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—to chart a course that privileges Yemeni leadership with real constituencies on the ground.
The Quartet should then call for an international conference on the Yemeni question to resolve the North-South crisis based on the two states’ 1990 borders to avoid any disputes or need for demarcation. The Quartet and the United Nations should predicate any recognition of two states emerging from the conference upon commitments, both not to attack neighboring states and to contribute jointly to protecting freedom of navigation.
A stable southern state that genuinely controls its coastline from Aden to al-Mahra is the most realistic guarantor of security in the Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. A government that derives its legitimacy from its own people has a direct incentive to protect that strait and to act as a trusted security and trade partner. Saudi Arabia, in turn, stands to gain a stable, cooperative neighbor, rather than an open-ended commitment with no clear end state.
