In a moment of unguarded honesty that went viral last week, President Biden was asked by reporters if U.S. airstrikes in Yemen targeting the Shia Islamist group known as the Houthis were “working.”
The President sheepishly replied, “Well, when you say ‘working’—are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” In a single sentence, Biden captured the impuissant hollowness of two decades of U.S. foreign policy bromides on the use of military force, the Middle East, and deterrence.
Washington’s critics have often said that, whenever a crisis occurs, U.S. policymakers exhibit an almost Pavlovian instinct to reach for military options — no matter the facts on the ground or the odds of success — in a desperate attempt to “do something.” Amid mounting tension in the Middle East stemming from the Israel-Hamas conflict, the foreign policy establishment is again hand-waving those criticisms away amid vague calls for indefinite U.S.-led intervention in Yemen and even war with Iran — this, despite the President’s own admission that doing so will fail to change a thing.
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