ADEN, YEMEN—Ask any diplomat and he or she will tell you that the purpose of diplomacy is to save lives. In Yemen and Somalia, though, the State Department’s policies are getting hundreds of people killed just so U.S. diplomats can promote the niceties that the two countries are unified and should remain so. Call them the “Axis of the Underappreciated” but there cannot be a solution to the Houthi problem until the United States works separately with Somaliland and South Yemen, or South Arabia as many in the region prefer to call their land, harkening back to a name during the period of British colonization.
Somaliland and South Yemen are countries apart. Both have a longer history of self-rule than unity with the states into which the State Department and the international community seek to subordinate them.
Call them the “Axis of the Underappreciated” but there cannot be a solution to the Houthi problem until the United States works separately with Somaliland and South Yemen.
The British formed the protectorate of Somaliland in 1884, co-opting a local tribal system that had governed the region for decades, if not centuries. In 1960, the United Kingdom gave Somaliland its independence, and 30 countries including the United States and the other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council recognized it. Within days, though, Somaliland entered a voluntary merger with the former Italian Somaliland to form what eventually would become Somalia. It was a marriage made in hell, and by 1991, Somaliland had enough and ended the marriage. It has been independent, even if unrecognized, ever since. Even if 1960 is taken as its start, Somaliland has been independent from Somalia longer than it was ever a part. Eighty percent of Somaliland’s population was not alive during the Somalia interlude.
South Yemen’s situation is similar. The British arrived in Aden in 1839 and established control for subsequent decades over what would become South Yemen. North Yemen, meanwhile, was under the control first of the Imamate, the religious precursor of the Houthis, and then under Arab nationalists; it developed a different identity from the south. After the British left, communists took over the former British protectorate for just over two decades. They built infrastructure but they imprinted neither their economic philosophy nor worldview. With the collapse of the Cold War, North and South Yemen unified but their differences were too great, and after just four years, South Yemen sought to reassert its independence. It lost the subsequent war; southerners consider themselves occupied ever since. But even if the international community considers Yemen whole, Sanaa controlled the south for only 14 years out of more than 140. Today, diplomatic smoke-and-mirrors or not, the Southern Transitional Council is the government of South Yemen, while the Internationally Recognized Government essentially plays make-believe from Cairo and Riyadh.
The cost to such a fiction measures billions of dollars. The United States (at least until the current Trump administration) and the international community dumped tens of billions of dollars into Somalia and Yemen in failed efforts to buy legitimacy and build capacity, but both Somalia and northern Yemen remain morasses of corruption and state failure, if not hotbeds of terrorism.
With the renewal of Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, the international community no longer can afford to prioritize diplomatic virtue signaling over effective strategies.
Draining Houthi supply and protecting shipping need not cost billions of dollars.
Draining Houthi supply and protecting shipping need not cost billions of dollars. With a negligible budget, Somaliland’s small coast guard has managed to secure the country’s 500-mile Gulf of Aden coastline to weapons smugglers and terrorists, at least when its few patrol boats have fuel. South Yemen’s coastline is rugged and often isolated. In areas such as the Hadramawt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has a presence, smugglers can land weaponry and transport it inland to areas of Houthi control. A few million dollars, training, and perhaps upgraded patrol boats could help the Southern Transitional Council prevent weaponry reaching the Houthis, Al Qaeda, and Islah militants, all of whom increasingly work in concert.
The United States could go further by basing its own patrols in South Yemen’s capital Aden and Somaliland’s commercial capital Berbera, two port cities that would welcome a skeleton U.S. air and sea presence to secure shipping. The only impediment is self-inflicted reticence from a State Department prone to promoting Mogadishu’s and Sanaa’s interests over Washington’s.
For more than two decades, successive U.S. administrations have ignored the obvious solution. As someone who prides himself in breaking diplomatic constraints, it is time for President Donald Trump to embrace a simple and inexpensive solution and order Secretary of State Marco Rubio to draw up plans to help train and fund the Somaliland and South Yemeni coast guards. Delaying will only enable the Houthis and their terror partners to continue to arm and threaten hundreds of billions of dollars of international cargo.
