Another Country for “Brandon” to Scuttle
13th October 2021
If you’ve thought about Yemen lately, you’re one in a thousand, or maybe a million, but it’s a place worth thinking about. Occupying the eastern shore of the strait between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, it is an excellent position from which to interdict shipping between Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. It is also mired in a long-running civil war pitting proxies for Saudi Arabia (the post-Arab Spring government that was forced to flee the capital in 2015) against proxies for Iran (the Islamofascist Ansar Allah, commonly called the “Houthis”). This combination of geopolitical position and international conflict makes the country strategically important.