Few analysts or commentators have a more intimate knowledge of Yemen and the Middle East than Elisabeth Kendall. The distinguished academic – whose expertise includes militant jihadist movements, Arabic poetry, and Yemen’s civil war – has previously worked with the Office of the United Nations Envoy to Yemen, and has advised parts of NATO, the British Army, and the United States military. She is currently Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, and chairs a grassroots NGO in east Yemen.

Jack Dickens (JD) – When you look at the current state of the Middle East, do you think that a fundamentally new regional order has emerged since 7 October 2023?

Elisabeth Kendall (EK) – Some really major things have changed in the region since 7 October. But would I say that it has been fundamentally reshaped? I think that is less clear just now, because there are so many persistent, intractable issues that haven’t changed. But let’s start first with what has changed. I think that one of the big ones is the tumbling of Iran’s longest-standing proxies. This is a really big deal. For years, everyone has been focused on what the Iranian regime might do if one were to go in hard against it, via its proxies. And now, look: Iran has been significantly degraded militarily and reputationally, indeed humiliated, and at the same time its most immediate retaliatory levers have been all but incapacitated. We’ve witnessed the decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the decapitation of Hamas in Gaza, the weakening of the Shia militias in Iraq, and, of course, we’ve seen the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Although this last one wasn’t necessarily a direct consequence of Israel’s actions, the toppling of that regime weakens Iran massively, not just because Assad was a useful ally, but because it takes away Iran’s window on the Mediterranean; it takes away key smuggling routes. This means that it is going to be much more difficult for the Islamic Republic to rebuild or re-arm either Hezbollah or Hamas. Of course, we’ve also got new governments in both Lebanon and in Syria – they are quite fragile, but taking root. These are all really big changes.

On the other hand, we have these really big fundamental problems that persist and that haven’t changed. We could probably boil those down to four things. First would be Iran, which, although weakened, remains an enemy of the United States and Israel and still has nuclear know-how. Irrespective of what has happened to its reactors, and its enriched uranium, it still knows how to make nuclear material. And there’s still no nuclear deal, so it is quite possible that a race to a bomb might become more urgent now. Of course, many voices have pointed out that North Korea’s nuclear weapons have been quite an effective deterrent.

The second thing would be that the Red Sea Crisis still persists, and Yemen’s civil war rumbles on. The 6 May ceasefire between the Houthis and the United States, after a war that lasted about seven weeks and cost the United States billions of dollars, has not solved the problem. We’ve just seen the Houthis sink two more ships in early July, and we know that there must be weapons getting through to them from outside Yemen because we’ve just seen one huge shipment of 750 tons of weapons interdicted. That may well be just the tip of the iceberg.

Number three: there are still no further takers for the Abraham Accords. And at the end of June, of course, Trump said that he thought the Arab states would start signing up, because Iran, the primary problem, has been dealt with. But in fact, this brings me to problem number four: it’s not Iran that’s the primary problem, really – it’s the issue of Palestine. The biggest driver of conflict and extremism in the region continues to be the permacrisis of Palestine. So, plus ça change.

JD –  Picking up on what you said about Iran’s various proxies tumbling. What explains the fact that the Houthis are so persistent and have such staying power where other proxies have crumbled away?

EK –  You’re right – the Houthis do have staying power. It wasn’t that long ago that various officials at the heart of the Trump administration were still calling them a ragtag group of rebels. They’re very much not that, or not just that – they are hardened fighters. Let’s just think about what they’ve endured for pretty much 20 years now. Since 2004, they’ve been at war on and off. It’s not just the most recent civil war, which started in 2014 and was internationalised in 2015; there have been several rounds of wars inside Yemen, against the Yemeni government, since 2004. So if you’ve been at war for 20 years, on and off, then it becomes a way of life. You don’t really know anything else. And so, if you’re, let’s say, under the age of 24 and living in the Houthi heartlands, and that applies to millions of people, you will have known only war with just a few breaks. There’s no concept of hankering after peace in the way that we might imagine there to be.

Then there’s also the issue that the Houthis control such a large part of Yemen: around two thirds of the Yemeni population lives in Houthi-held areas, so that’s well over 20 million people out of a population of approaching 40 million. That is a completely different order of power and manpower than that commanded by, say, Hezbollah or Hamas. Added to this, of course, is the geography of Yemen, which has a lot of mountainous terrain; the Houthis have considerable experience of hiding their weapons away in areas largely uncharted by intelligence agencies.

They have also been at war with and, essentially, won against some of the best-funded militaries in the region – the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. So, they’re feeling like they’re invincible, and that translates into how they conduct themselves. I think we quite often forget that the Houthis are not necessarily operating through the kind of logic that we might deem rational. They’re very confident, and they’re not afraid of America – they’ve seen what happened to America in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, they have a very high tolerance for casualties, and they think that they have God on their side. So why would they stop?

People often ask: why would the Houthis throw away the United Nations roadmap that had almost been signed by December 2023? There were a lot of goodies in it for the Houthis. They might have been recognised as a legitimate part of a power-sharing government. The answer to that is that they don’t think they’re throwing anything away. They always think they can get more. They have a supremacist ideology, and they always suffer from deal remorse. And their experience is that they do get more by keeping on exercising threat, that threat pays. This has worked before: they’ve had the blockade lifted, they’ve had the flights resumed, they’ve had bank sanctions removed from them. They’re just going to keep on going as long as they can, and that could be a long time.

That said, there’s one further element here, and that’s intelligence. It is very hard for the US and Israel to get the same kind of penetration with the Houthis that they’ve been able to get with Hamas or Hezbollah, because they’ve not had such a long lead time in trying to get inside the group, and it’s pretty challenging to gather reliable intelligence on them. That’s another reason why it’s been hard to topple the Houthis.

JD – Where do the Houthis come from, in terms of the tribal and religious context of Yemen? What drives them, and why they are so determined to press their claims with the force of arms?

EK – So for the Houthis, first of all it’s important to say they’re not a tribe. Although, ‘Houthi’ is a family name relating to the area that they come from. They are led by the Houthi family, but they are a political, a military and a religious grouping whose heartlands are in the north of Yemen. They were formed in the very late 1980s by Hussein al-Houthi. He died about 21 years ago in 2004, and the current leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, is his younger half-brother. So they’re very much a family enterprise still at their core.

They came about originally as a kind of believing youth movement; they were pushing back against the marginalisation that they had suffered politically, economically, religiously after the Yemeni Imamate ended just over 50 years ago, up in the north of Yemen. They are Shia mainly, although not exclusively, but they are Zaydi Shia, which is not the same kind of Shia Islam as in Iran. The Zaydis are colloquially known as the ‘Fivers’, whereas Iran’s Shia are known as ‘Twelvers’, and that is to do with their different takes on succession to the Prophet Muhammad. Originally, the Houthis weren’t as hardline as the Iranian regime, but they are becoming more hardline. Back when they swept to power in 2014, they were probably more ambitious for power and less concerned about responsibility – power without responsibility.

As time went on, however, they started to talk more about a kind of 50-year plan to reorder the whole of the Middle East. It’s hard to know to what extent that’s just bluster and to what extent they genuinely think of that as an option. What I would say is that it is important to correct a couple of misconceptions about their power, specifically the idea that they were centuries long rulers in Yemen, and the notion that the Yemeni state was their state. Neither of those things are true. They were on-and-off rulers; their lands were in no way equivalent to today’s Yemen (they were only in the northwest corner of Yemen); and they actually only had a state for about 44 years, from 1918 to 1962. So let’s not exaggerate. Of course, they derive their military prowess now largely from Iran, but perhaps that’s a separate question.

JD – The Houthis are often presented as an Iranian proxy. But does that miss the point? Is the most important thing about them that they are an Iranian proxy? Or should we look more closely at their local, Yemeni context? 

EK – Yes, ultimately, the drivers of the Houthi movement were domestic. They were domestically generated: they were about having access to power, territory, and resources. And even today, what do the Houthis really want? They want money and power, and for that, they need access to energy resources, oil and gas, and they need to control coastline, because they need imports; they need customs, they need taxes. And, of course, they’ve got leverage by hanging onto Yemen’s coastline, as we’ve seen.

Now, Iran has been a useful ally for them, and they have been a useful ally for Iran, but it would be wrong to see them as nothing more than a direct proxy of Iran. Iran does not have direct command and control over the Houthis. Right now, that’s almost a moot point, because they’re aligned in their animosity to Israel, and to America. So they’re heading in the same direction, currently. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t diverge, and it doesn’t mean that, if Iran withdrew all of its support, they wouldn’t be able to continue.

Certainly, they might not be able to continue with the same level of sophisticated weaponry, but they could carry on. They have stockpiles, they can produce military arms, weaponry, missiles, et cetera, domestically. And although that might not be as sophisticated and accurate as the kind of material they’re getting from Iran, it still gives them considerable power, because it’s an asymmetric fight. In an asymmetric fight, all they need to do is keep going; keeping going is winning. Not losing, essentially, is winning. You can disrupt global trade just by continuing to launch missiles and drones into the Red Sea. You can terrorise Israel just by launching missiles and drones at Tel Aviv and sending millions of people running to their shelters. You don’t actually have to hit everything: indeed, throughout all of these months and months of the Houthis launching missiles and drones at Israel, they’ve only killed one Israeli, I believe. One is one too many, of course – but it’s interesting, because in asymmetric warfare, they hold considerable power.

The concern is that their weaponry is becoming more sophisticated, and more accurate. For example, there were some arms that were seized recently, which showed that they were going to be using drones with hydrogen fuel cells. That’s important, because that means that they would have a range of about three times what their current range is. They would have a range of about three and a half thousand kilometres, which puts US airbases in reach. It would put many more targets within reach, and provide them with greater stealth quality.

By using these drones, they could not only go further, but their attacks would also be harder to identify. That would be of great concern also to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Both of these countries have reached their own understandings with the Houthis after having suffered direct hits from them. So they’re not keen to have that restarted, which is in part why they’re not being more publicly supportive of US and Israeli strikes, because they don’t want to open themselves up as a renewed front for Houthi counterstrikes.

JD – Thinking about Yemen’s place within the wider region, where does the Arab Spring fit into this? Or, rather, the false dawn of the Arab Spring?

EK – Yes, the Arab Spring was a red herring, wasn’t it? It wasn’t really a spring to very much. I think there were several reasons for that. Of course, we saw the Arab Spring lead to devastating civil wars, quite unlike what a lot of people were expecting, which was a move towards democracy and the emergence of new liberal orders. Instead, we saw the unravelling of Yemen, Syria, Libya, and, to some extent, even Tunisia and Egypt. In Tunisia and Egypt, strong men took over again. The whole thing is a mess. Why?

In each case, there are complex internal dynamics that are unique to those countries, but I think there are also some common threads here, particularly in those countries that ended up in civil war. What are those common threads? One is very weak institutions, which meant that there was little experience of democracy. Indeed, there were many unresolved questions about what democracy would mean anyway. Would it just go down tribal lines or religious lines?

Another common thread is a plethora of non-state armed groups and militias, all of them vying for power, in countries where strongmen predominated. These were also countries where polarisation became a really big issue, partly because repression had led to increased tension, and violence tends to breed polarisation. And lastly, in all of these cases, external intervention fanned the flames, and external intervention by regional powers seeking to extend their influence.

The case of Yemen is especially interesting, because, at first it did look like the poster child for a successful transition, post-Arab spring, towards a democracy. There was a United Nations-led National Dialogue Conference. It lasted a whole year until 2014. It had over 500 delegates, and the US and others talked about it as a wonderful success story.

Yet on the ground, when I was there, a lot of locals just saw it as cosmetic. The reason for that was that the delegates were largely appointed in a rush. It was run top-down, it wasn’t enough of a bottom-up process. Of course, when you’re paid $180 a day to sit and talk, as the delegates were, in a country where your average wage is $2 a day, you’re going to sit and talk for as long as you possibly can. And they did talk, but they avoided the biggest issues: ‘How are we going to share Yemen? How are we going to share power, territory and resources?’ There was no transitional justice. Big decisions, like a plan to divide Yemen into federal regions, were discussed by a side committee of men appointed by the so-called legitimate President, and the Houthis were not included.

Of course, they weren’t going tolerate a deal that excluded them. So they did what they always do: they rode a popular wave. They claimed to be siding with the people, they latched onto contemporary grievances. For example, fuel subsidies had just been removed, so they said, ‘Well, this is unfair and unjust and we need to protest about that.’ They protested against corruption, they protested against nepotism – all of the things that they themselves have subsequently indulged in. But it got them support. They rode that popular wave and swept to power. Just like now, when they’re riding a popular wave claiming to be the defenders of Palestine.

JD – What explains the Houthis’ interventions on behalf of the Palestinian cause? Are they acting purely out of solidarity with the suffering in Gaza, or are they driven by domestic factors?

EK –  We’ve got to be a little bit cynical here. Now, we can’t deny that there is genuine solidarity and that there is a genuine ideological dimension to this. There is concern about the fate of Palestinians, and in particular Gazans. Of course, the Houthis are also living up to their slogan, which includes ‘death to Israel, a curse on the Jews’; it includes ‘death to America’ as well. And America is, of course, Israel’s biggest supporter. So this has worked for them ideologically, and they are to some extent ideologically driven.

At the same time, there’s no question that it’s also worked well for the Houthis opportunistically. They have many reasons to climb up there in defence of the Palestinians. First, domestically, it’s popular, so they can use it to revive a war-weary population and win broader support beyond their existing base. At least, that certainly was the case. Perhaps the latest, more damaging rounds of airstrikes by Israel and the United States, destroying the ports and also killing some civilians, might prove more challenging for the Houthis. It’s very difficult for us to tell what the impact of these strikes will be, because it isn’t possible for those ruled by the Houthis to protest against them. And the strikes do play into their narratives of an evil Zionist-Crusader alliance trying to bomb innocent Muslims, whether in Gaza or in Yemen itself. So it may actually work for them in some ways.

Then, regionally, they are positioning themselves as the heroes of Palestine at a time when no other Arab government is really taking much tangible action. Internationally, well, look, here we are talking about the Houthis. We probably wouldn’t have been otherwise, and they’re getting huge publicity. Certainly, in the early days of their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and on Israel, many people were talking of them as if they were the government of Yemen, saying that ‘Yemen has declared war on Israel’. They’re not the government of Yemen. At least, they’re not the internationally recognised government of Yemen. Yet they’re all over the media and they love that. That’s great for them and for their cause.

So, like I said earlier, when people ask, ‘Why would the Houthis give up their chance at legitimacy by making themselves a pariah in this way, and scuppering the United Nations roadmap?’. The answer is that that they didn’t necessarily aspire to legitimacy in the sense of a seat at the UN or America’s blessing for what they’re doing. What they really wanted was recognition: being recognised as a serious power, and as a force to be reckoned with, is big for them. So when President Trump announced a ceasefire with the Houthis on 6 May, after a sort of seven-week war, that was a big propaganda win for the Houthis, because America has made a deal with them. The Houthis were not previously recognised. They were able to sell it as a win: ‘we went to war against the world’s biggest superpower, and we didn’t lose. We’re still here. And we didn’t even promise not to keep on attacking Israel. We only promised not to touch American ships. So we can still attack other ships, and we are’. For them it’s a propaganda coup.

JD –  What would it take for the Western powers, and for the United States in particular, to deal more effectively with the Houthis? Do you think there is a realisation that the military solution has not succeeded, and that there will have to be some kind of diplomatic engagement?

EK –  I wonder if that lesson has sunk in yet. Here, I think it’s important to recognise that military action can help, in some cases, in leading to a diplomatic solution; it’s not the case that military action is always unhelpful. There’s a place here for military action with a group like the Houthis, but the military action won’t get to a solution. It can only ever help focus the actors on reaching a diplomatic solution.

One lesson here is that we just need to look at what the implications are of Iran being weaker. Does that really stop the Houthis? No, because the Houthis have boasted of being bolder than Iran. The weakening of Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ can also be seen as an opportunity for them, not a setback – or not only as a setback. This axis of resistance is shifting from being vertical and hierarchical to being more horizontal. The Houthis have been developing into a more central pivot, and they’ve made closer ties with some groups, like Islamic resistance groups in Iraq. They’re also creating new ties, ties to groups like Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab in Somalia. These are not natural allies; they’re marriages of convenience. You might see the Houthis as maybe a bit like Hezbollah 20 years ago, but on a bigger scale.

What else would need to happen to try to reach some kind of diplomatic solution? I think there are, apart from military action, probably four or five things here. One would be a multilateral approach. It’s going to have to be more than just Israel and America dropping bombs on Yemen. It’s going to have to be an approach that actually involves other Western powers – Europe, for example – without just saying, ‘Hey, we’re doing your dirty work for you in the Red Sea, and then you can have the bill’, which was one message of the infamous Signal chat.

Regional actors are also vital. We’ve got to include regional actors, and, most importantly, we’ve got to encourage the regional actors to be aligned among themselves. It’s not at all obvious, for example, that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates aspire to the same endgames in Yemen. Indeed, their partnerships and grassroots approaches can often be at odds with each other’s. That’s very unhelpful when it comes to trying to figure out a solution for Yemen because it means that the anti-Houthi forces are not cohesive enough.

In fact, that leads on to the second thing that we need to do: create a viable alternative to the Houthis. The Houthis can sometimes look like the best game in town in Yemen. The internationally recognised government is weak: it’s riddled with in-fighting; it consists of eight men who are mostly pointing in different directions; and it doesn’t seem to have traction on the ground. So, if you’re living in Yemen, you don’t have any great choices at the moment.

The third thing is to recognise that the Houthis must be part of the solution. You can’t have a group that’s so well-armed, that’s got so much military experience, and that controls so much of the population, and then expect it not to be part of a power-sharing government. But this raises a challenging conundrum: how can you have a power sharing government with a group that has supremacist beliefs, and a leadership that believes in its own divine right to rule? It is really difficult to square this circle. I think the only way that you’re going to do it is by shifting the balance within the Houthis from hardliners to moderates. That’s really difficult as well. Military force is one way to do it; economic force is another. But you have to find ways of bringing the moderate voices to the fore.

The fourth thing is: carrot as well as stick. This is a really bad time, for example, for the US to be cutting USAID and for European countries to be cutting similar programmes. There have to be better ways of using the aid; you need to link it to a broader strategy. One of the biggest problems here is that we’re always being reactive. We’re always firefighting. We’re always dealing with problems when they emerge. There’s no long-term strategy that’s joined up. But if you could link aid to certain political outcomes, accountability, and transparency, I think that would be much more helpful than cutting it completely, which just leaves room for others, such as Russia or China.

Finally, and this is a big one: propaganda. Why on earth are we not putting far more resources into dismantling Houthi propaganda? They have a TV channel, they have news websites, they have a gazillion feeds on Telegram and Twitter and other social media, and they’re really, really good at propaganda. They produce this slick material that’s culturally highly attuned. Yes, it includes Arabic poetry, which is my speciality – and it’s very catchy, incredibly powerful stuff, and there’s loads of it. So while we’re busy taking out missile launchers and bombing ports, cement factories and other infrastructure, we’re leaving in place the tools that are creating long-term cycles of violence, conflict, and revenge. Those are the hearts-and-minds tools – we need to pay a lot more attention to them.

JD –  What do you think the future of the Middle East will look like over the next two decades? Is there anything that Western countries can actually do to influence conditions in the region?

EK – It’s really tough to imagine a stable Middle East without a solution for Palestine. I don’t think it’s possible. We’re kidding ourselves if we think that making deals with regimes is going to do it, because the Arab Street – popular opinion – needs to see some kind of solution for Palestine. Now, it’s also becoming impossible, I think, to talk about a two-state solution, because how could it possibly work with what many people call ‘the Swiss cheese effect’ of settlements in the West Bank? It’s hard to see any kind of contiguous Palestinian state here being viable.

But something needs to shift to give a chance for peace. The Abraham Accords are often held up as a wonderful model. But just think about it for a second: there are 1.9 billion Muslims and 50 Muslim-majority countries. Four have signed the Abraham Accords – the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. And one of those – Sudan – has been backtracking a bit. Then think about the UAE: it has a population of 10 million, but only one million of them are Emiratis, that’s 0.05 per cent of the world’s Muslims. In Bahrain, there are only 700,000 Bahrainis out of a one and a half million population.

As for Morocco and Sudan, their governments signed the accords for various reasons: Morocco wanted to have its annexation of Western Sahara recognised. Sudan wanted to be removed from the terrorism list and it needed a $1.2 billion loan. This doesn’t look like real peace. So let’s not kid ourselves that we’re on a pathway, that Israel is going to somehow be on a conveyor belt to being more secure because it has bombed Iran and decapitated Hezbollah and Hamas for the time being. Without some kind of settlement and solution for this big, burning sore that is Palestine, it’s not going to work.

There are other things to watch out for: moving forwards, I think that the intra-regional rivalry might be less about a Sunni-Shia divide. Iran is weakened, but other, new rivalries may emerge within the Sunni block. I think Saudi Arabia versus the UAE could be one. The rise of Turkey could be another. I’m not sure the Gulf Crisis between Qatar and the Arab League is totally put to bed. Perhaps one of the more visible fault lines is still Qatar versus the UAE. I don’t want to overplay these faultlines. I mean, some level of competitive rivalry between states is natural. But I don’t think it’s all going to be a bed of roses just because Iran has been weakened.