Andy Burnham put the national-interest case directly. (Henry Nicholls/Getty)
In February 1940, my godmother, Freya Stark, arrived in Sana’a carrying a forbidden cinematograph projector. Her mission was to loosen Fascist Italy’s influence over Imam Yahya, the formidable ruler of Yemen’s Zaidi imamate. Fortunately for Stark and the British, scratchy Ministry of Information footage of Royal Navy ships in Portsmouth made what she called a tremendous impression, with Yahya and his court unable to resist this display of naval might. The Italian legation was furious, and talked of importing a projector of its own. But it was too late. Within a fortnight, Stark believed, Italian influence in Sana’a had been broken.
Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refuelling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refuelling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.
Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defence industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defence export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air- defence systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defences. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.
The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.
The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.
Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.
Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”.
The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.
Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defence. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.
Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilise a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.
Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognised camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.
In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refuelling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations centre, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”
Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.