A Dose of Cautious Optimism on Yemen

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! We suggest you end your Thursday with some light reading of a war court filing on the “Memorandum for Military Commissions-related Visitors to U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” The U.S. military just released the 20-page document, labeled “unclassified/for public release”—and completely blacked out every single page. Score one for government transparency.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Yemen peace talks gain traction, the Biden administration closes in on a prolific leaker of top-secret U.S. documents, and Poland wants South Korea to send the big guns to Ukraine.

Let’s make a deal. Saudi officials this week visited Yemen’s capital, controlled by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, to hash out negotiations on a settlement to the country’s ongoing civil war, and there seems to be meaningful progress on those negotiations after years of impasse and deadlock.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Tuesday spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, touting the “remarkable progress” both sides are making in negotiations to end the war. Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s special envoy for Yemen, Tim Lenderking, jetted off to Riyadh this week for follow-up meetings with Saudi officials, signaling a deal may soon be on the horizon.

During the nine-year conflict, Yemen has been called one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with millions teetering on the brink of famine and a majority of the country relying on humanitarian assistance.

What’s on the table. The deal in question includes an initial six-month truce, an agreement to pay government salaries for public employees in areas under Houthi control, and Saudi Arabia lifting blockades on Yemeni ports.

The catch. The deal could bring immediate relief to Yemen’s most vulnerable populations and help right-size a war-wracked economy, but a sustainable peace is still far off, said Scott Paul, senior manager for humanitarian policy at Oxfam America.

“The current peace negotiations are promising because they have the potential to address some of the key drivers of Yemen’s economic collapse,” Paul said. “But this round of talks will not achieve a sustainable peace. To do that, the parties and mediators must lay the foundation for an inclusive, Yemeni-led political process that includes the voices and priorities of women, youth, and other marginalized groups.”

When interests align. The prospective deal follows a slight warming of relations between Saudi Arabia and its archrival in the region, Iran. The two countries agreed to reestablish diplomatic ties last month for the first time in years (a deal that was, by the way, brokered by China, leading to some breathless panic among the China hawks in Washington). Iran in turn vowed to stop covertly arming the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia in 2015 poured tens of thousands of troops and 100 warplanes into Yemen to try to reverse the Houthi takeover of the country, in an operation dubbed “Decisive Storm” that was undoubtedly stormy and anything but decisive.

In the years since, the war in Yemen has transformed into Saudi Arabia’s own Vietnam War, a costly and brutal quagmire with no clear path to military victory that has invariably tarnished Riyadh’s image on the world stage—and severely damaged relations with Washington.

Seeking off-ramps ASAP. Saudi Arabia has in recent months sent less-than-subtle signals that it’s eager for an exit ramp, and this is the first sign that there’s an exit both Riyadh and the Houthis can agree on.

Hans Grundberg, the U.N. envoy for Yemen, described the current talks as the “closest Yemen has been to real progress towards lasting peace.”

But, but, but… Still, there are some major caveats to this moment of “real progress.” Yemen’s presidential council, the internationally recognized government, didn’t take part in the negotiations, nor did other warring parties in the conflict, such as the secessionist Southern Transitional Council. Nor, as photos from the talks show, were any women or other marginalized groups included at all in the discussions.

The deal also doesn’t address the staggering investments it would take to rebuild Yemen’s nearly cratered economy or help its traumatized and war-weary civilians recover from the conflict in the long run.

This opens the real possibility that the conflict could spiral out of control again between other warring factions, and the humanitarian crisis could spiral right along with it.

For now, however, officials involved seem to be taking the glimmers of good news one day at a time. “This is a moment to be seized and built on and a real opportunity to start an inclusive political process under U.N. auspices to sustainably end the conflict,” Grundberg told the Associated Press.

Matthew Miller has been named the State Department’s top spokesperson, after holding a top comms job at the National Security Council earlier in the Biden administration. He replaces Ned Price, who left the job to take a policy role close to Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year.

The Defense Department has tapped Brynt Parmeter as its first chief talent management officer. Parmeter was previously an executive at Walmart and before that had a long career in the Army.

Grace Kim is now U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s national security advisor. Kim previously served as a policy advisor in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl (who’s joining FP Live for an on-record discussion next week).

Scott Carpenter, the managing director of Google’s Jigsaw, and Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman, have joined the board of directors of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Drip, drip, drip. The leaker of the largest cache of classified U.S. documents to pop up in the open since Edward Snowden’s revelations about the intelligence community’s domestic surveillance programs a decade ago is not the typical whistleblower type. In fact, he’s not really a whistleblower at all. According to the Washington Post, “OG” is a U.S. national guardsman obsessed with God, guns, and video games, who took to his private Discord server to impress a cohort of Russians, Ukrainians, and American teenage boys on a private chat known as “Thug Shaker Central” where he was the undisputed leader.

Reporters at the Post talked to one teenage member of the server, who has not been contacted by law enforcement, and said that OG would get angry at the members of the server when they appeared more interested in YouTube videos of military gear than his classified disclosures. On Thursday, Biden, traveling in Ireland, suggested U.S. officials were close to identifying the leaker. Earlier today, the New York Times identified the leader of the Discord group as a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard named Jack Teixeira. The FBI arrested Teixeira in a raid on Thursday afternoon.

What the shell? Prolific defense exporter South Korea has been reluctant to pledge its tanks and artillery shells to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion of the former Soviet satellite. NATO ally Poland has no such compunction. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who is in Washington on a visit, called for Biden to directly intervene to push Seoul to send the weapons in the New York Times this week. (Poland has already bought South Korean tanks since Russian troops poured into Ukraine last year.)  

Je ne regrette rien. If a cadre of civil servants have to start issuing “well, actually, what he meant was” statements, you’ve probably already lost the PR war. That’s the problem French officials are facing with the fallout from French President Emmanuel Macron’s latest visit to China and a controversial interview in which he said Europe should reduce its dependency on the United States and avoid getting dragged into a U.S.-led confrontation with China over Taiwan.

That interview, with Politico Europe and French daily Les Echos, sparked a lot of anger and backlash in Washington—even if the full interview had more nuance than the top-line quotes that lawmakers and policymakers were reacting to. It also kick-started a new debate in Europe about how the continent should balance its relations with China and whether the concept of “strategic autonomy” has any traction. Macron isn’t backing down from his comments.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is heading to China next, where some members of the ruling coalition government are hoping she’ll “set the record straight” on China and Taiwan.

U.S. country music star Brad Paisley performs in front of destroyed Russian military equipment at the Mikhailovsky Square in Kyiv on April 12, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Today: Joe Biden is on the second day of a three-day trip to Ireland that wraps up on Friday. The U.S. president will address the Irish parliament today. It’s unclear that Biden, who is clearly, for lack of a better word, stoked to be in his ancestral homeland, actually wants to come back to the United States. The Black and Tans want him to.

Friday, April 14: Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are set to meet in Beijing.

Tuesday, April 18: Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned on falsified espionage charges at the behest of the Kremlin, is set for a preliminary appeal hearing. He is the first American reporter to be charged with espionage by Russia since the Cold War.

“We believe that more America is needed in Europe. Today the United States is more of a guarantee of safety in Europe than France.”

—Marcin Przydacz, a foreign-policy advisor to Polish President Andrzej Duda, told Polish broadcaster Radio Zet this week that Warsaw wants to move closer to the United States in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s comments this week that have riled people up. 

Big yikes. The professional wrasslin’ giant World Wrestling Entertainment was forced to apologize after using an image from the Auschwitz concentration camp in one of its promo videos. The WWE said it was an accident and removed the image as soon as the organization learned of it.