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Putin Is Embroiling Russia In The “Yemen Syndrome”
We all saw the buildup of Russian forces nearly surrounding Ukraine, but most of us didn’t believe Putin would allow his own pride to take him down the road to starting a war of naked aggression against the second-largest nation in Europe. But he has done just that, and so sealed his own fate.
How can that be so? How can we be sure that Putin has set his own comeuppance in motion? Because of what we might call the “Yemen Syndrome”.
What does Yemen have to do with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? Directly, not much, except for the harsh lessons it is even now teaching the leaders of nations far more powerful than itself. You see, Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest nations, has been rife with civil war since 2014, and over 100,000 of its people have been killed in combat (and perhaps 100,000 more killed by famine and disease because of the war) during that time.
For the purposes of this article, the causes of the Yemeni civil war matter not at all. What does matter is that
- Yemenis on all sides are continuing to fight on despite no real hope of victory,
- the conflict has become a proxy war between the Sunni and Shi’a, the former led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the latter by Iran,
- the ongoing costs in blood and treasure…
