This post is not about Yemen Posted by Patrick Barry

…At least not directly.  It is about the various reactions which Yemen’s sudden (or not so sudden) relevance has provoked, and in particular what the reactions from the left reveal about their growing anxiety with certain trends in American foreign policy discourse. 

What I find most striking about the commentary is the degree to which what I presumed were temperate recommendations for what U.S. policy toward Yemen should look like have been deemed unsatisfactory, both by the right and left.  The right’s response is fairly easy to explain.  In their view Yemen is just another front in the war on terror. Given the dire threat it poses to American’s security, anything less than a swift and tough response would, as Joe Lieberman suggested, result in Yemen turning into the next war. Though it’s difficult to see how averting a war requires taking immediate and aggressive action, conservatives say things like that all the time, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.

Responses from the left have not been quite what you would expect. Rather than confining their criticism to unfounded hysteria over Yemen’s imminent collapse or inflated threats of military occupation, some progressives have also directed a healthy amount of ire at those calling for more moderate, but still proactive shifts in U.S. policy.  Take Michael’s post from Monday, where he kind of goes after Exum and Fontaine for the wildly outlandish suggestion that the U.S. could “attempt to mitigate the worst of the coming challenges that will plague Yemen,” by “combin[ing] security assistance with mediation efforts, development, regional engagement and an effective communications approach.”  Some people might look at that and conclude it was a prudent set of suggestions.  Michael looks at it and screams, WHY?? HOW??

Yglesias is similarly exasperated by Charles Krauthammer’s willingess to look at cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Jordan as a means of containing instability in Yemen, despite Krauthammer's rather explicit, and unprecedented acknowledgment that Yemen is “not a place we want to go and invade.”  In a rare show of restraint, Krauthammer advises the U.S. to do…pretty much what it’s already doing, that is “have our weaponry in place, like the predators, gather intelligence, give intelligence, and work with the unreliable central government.”  Yglesias rightfully nails Krauthammer for reverting back to his old self and blithely tossing around an idea that could result in proxy war, but there’s still a larger picture here, which finds progressives pitting themselves not just against hawks, but those with ostensibly moderate outlooks. 

So what’s going on? Why are all these progressives attacking seemingly reasonable suggestions? What I think these reactions convey is a growing frustration among with the way in which the fear of a terrorist attack has dramatically lowered the threshold for determining when America should act abroad.  In this paradigm, discussions about whether to take action or not no longer happen as much, and instead, the choice most often facing policymakers is between different ideas on how to respond.  As Marc Lynch and others have so skillfully explained, the obvious problem with this paradigm is that when policymakers don’t have to go through the exercise of prioritizing and analyzing trade-offs, they tend to overreach.   So long as the ideas are good, overreach can still yield some preferable outcomes, at least in the short term. But in the long-term, it's just unsustainable.

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