The Houthis vs. Saudi Arabia: Who Can End Yemen’s War?
Contemporary Application to Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 16B
The Houthis vs. Saudi Arabia: Who Can End Yemen's War?
On Saturday a Houthi missile struck Riyadh's airport and killed thirteen people, one of them an American. In Yemen, tribal mediators have spent the whole war bringing the dead home to their families before anyone speaks of terms.
Episode 16B sets the war in Yemen and over Saudi Arabia beside the condolence rite of the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, the rite that answered a grieving man's loss before anyone asked him to make law. Who carries that condolence today: a patron, an interpreter with a stake, or a peacemaker?
This is the contemporary application of Saturday's Episode 16, "The Great Law of Peace," and of Article 16 in our written series, posted October 5. Saturday followed the Six Nations (the Iroquois Confederacy) as a union that began by ending a blood feud. Today asks what that history has to say about a feud being fought right now.
Jeff traces the House of Saud and Yemen's Zaydi imams from 1902 to the war that began in 2015, and the outside powers, from Britain to Iran to the United States, that courted and armed them. He sets Washington's warning against passionate attachments and Jefferson's "entangling alliances with none" beside a partnership with Riyadh that no Senate ever ratified. He follows Saudi oil through its two threatened doors, Hormuz and Yanbu, to a record September at American gas pumps.
Then he turns to the peace that almost happened: Nadwa al-Dawsari's study of Yemen's tribal ceasefires, the Omani-carried talks of 2022 and 2023, and what broke them. The Honest Reckoning names two failures of the liberty movement, and the Skeptic's Case takes three objections at full strength, including the cost of staying out.
Did it leave people more free, or more governed?
⏱️ CHAPTERS
0:00 A missile on Riyadh, a rite in Marib
2:29 Episode 16B: who carries the condolence?
3:31 Article 16, and why this week
5:19 Yemen in plain words: the three camps
8:04 The House of Saud and the British
9:46 Yemen's old house: the Zaydi imams
11:00 The expulsion, the bin Ladens, and the border
11:57 Native houses, courted by empires
12:40 The war of 2015 and its record
13:37 The cost on both sides
14:55 How the war came back in 2026
15:44 The Six Nations stay neutral, 1701
16:45 Washington's Farewell Address
17:36 Entangling alliances with none
18:17 The Quincy and the Carter Doctrine
19:20 Saudi Arabia's eastern door: Hormuz
19:58 The western door: Yanbu and the pipeline
20:45 What it costs at the pump
22:16 Interceptors, deficits, and a personal note
23:46 Two forecasts: Ritter and Malik
25:22 Conrad Weiser, the interpreter with a stake
25:57 The American posture: intelligence and Muscat
27:11 The case for doing more
27:36 Oman, the house where enemies meet
28:08 The Mecca defense pact
28:50 A union made for war
29:19 Yemen's own condolence rite
30:51 The limits of tribal mediation
32:03 Stockholm and the central process
33:01 The truce, Riyadh in Sanaa, the roadmap
33:54 What broke the roadmap
34:38 Tadodaho: not defeated, seated
35:09 Seating the Houthis
36:30 The Honest Reckoning
38:23 The Skeptic's Case: three objections
41:41 The Liberty Test
43:03 Next: Episode 17
📚 Article 16, "The Great Law of Peace," with every source in its endnotes: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/the-great-law-of-peace-the-haudenosaunee-confederacy-and-the-question-of-influence
📚 The backstory, from our Empire of Liberty series: "Lines in the Sand," on Sykes-Picot, Balfour, and the creation of the modern Middle East: https://www.consequentialactions.com/post/lines-in-the-sand-sykes-picot-balfour-and-the-creation-of-the-modern-middle-east
🎙️ Consequential Actions Podcast · Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 · Episode 16B, "Who Carries the Condolence"
Next: Episode 17, "Self-Government Before Theory," Saturday, October 17.
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Consequential Actions is a libertarian, non-interventionist analysis of American constitutional and foreign policy. New episodes weekly.
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