The Muslim Brotherhood is celebrating. Despite President Donald Trump’s executive call for the U.S. Department of State to designate Muslim Brotherhood chapters as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Trump increasingly appears permissive toward the group. First, Qatar and Turkey—arguably the two greatest state financiers of the group—received passes, presumably because of Trump’s friendship and joint investments with their leaders. More recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) resurrected the Muslim Brotherhood’s fortunes in Yemen by bombing their more Western-leaning, laical alternatives like the Southern Forces.
MBS is giving the international community a choice: the Houthis or the Muslim Brotherhood, but no one else.
In effect, MBS now repeats the strategy of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during the civil war. Rather than bomb the Islamic State, Assad targeted the more moderate opposition to eliminate any attractive alternative to his rule. In Yemen’s case, MBS is giving the international community a choice: the Houthis or the Muslim Brotherhood, but no one else. While Yemen is a separate country—something a generation of Saudi officials forget—MBS simply treats the appointed but powerless Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council chair Rashad al-Alimi as a proxy to launder his diktats. That Alimi allows the murder of Yemenis in his name while he sits in Riyadh will saddle him with a legacy much like Vichy French leader Philippe Pétain or World War II-era Norwegian leader Vidkun Quisling.
Trump may partner with MBS diplomatically in Gaza and Syria, as well as in business, but his transactional approach need not extend to giving Saudi Arabia carte blanche to impose the Muslim Brotherhood on southern Yemenis, especially since the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood chapter is among the Brotherhood’s most radical affiliates and, after Hamas, the most permeated by terror. Where the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood goes, safe haven for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and, separately, weapons smuggling to the Houthis follows.
Saudi Arabia justifies its military intervention in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2216 of April 14, 2015. The Security Council passed the Resolution “under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,” a designation that allows member states to use military force to enforce it.
While UNSCR 2216 focused on the Houthis, the Iran-backed insurgent group that had seized the capital Sana’a less than seven months previously, Saudi Arabia now relies on the resolution to target both political factions within the International Recognized Government with which it disagrees and to further its own rivalry with the United Arab Emirates.
When fourteen members of the U.N. Security Council voted for UNSCR 2216, their intention was to target the Houthis and roll back their illegitimate government, not protect the Iranian-backed group by undermining the most effective counter-terror groups inside Yemen.
The United States should introduce a new Security Council Resolution to supplant UNSCR 2216.
Saudi Arabia, however, now interprets UNSCR 2216 to give it an open-ended right to target any Yemeni at any time for any reason. In effect, MBS has twisted an open-ended resolution to counter the Houthis and reinterpreted it to make him the de facto colonial commissar of his southern neighbor.
The way forward should be clear: The United States should introduce a new Security Council Resolution to supplant UNSCR 2216. It might continue the sanctions against the Houthis and maintain the demand that the Houthis withdraw from territory they seized and surrender their weapons. It might continue the Chapter VII status to compel the Houthis to abide by force. But it should narrow its breadth to prevent deliberate Saudi overinterpretation to justify arbitrary interventions and bombings.
Such a new resolution need not be anti-Saudi nor target MBS; it would simply recalibrate the Yemen coalition to refocus on the Houthis after more than a decade of mission creep. Still, if Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio continue to allow MBS to have a free hand, their legacy may be not only letting the Houthis off the hook, per the whims and cynicism of MBS, but also empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and enabling Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to regrow in the vacuum that wanton and ill-thought-out Saudi bombing has created.
