Yemen and the Sixty Year War An Important Study by the American Researcher and Diplomat Gerald Firestein

Yemenat

Hamid Oqabi

The study “Yemen: The Sixty-Year War” by the American researcher and diplomat Gerald Firestein is considered one of the important contemporary analytical studies that attempts to read the Yemeni war as a deep historical crisis that goes beyond daily military events and temporary political divisions. The study was published in 2019 by the Middle East Institute in Washington, a U.S.

research center specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. The significance of this study stems from the fact that its author is a former American diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Yemen. He worked for many years on Gulf and Yemen-related files, which gives his analysis a character that combines political experience with field-based knowledge.

The Yemeni Problem Is Not a Crisis of Individuals but a Crisis of State Structure

Firestein proceeds from a highly important foundational idea: the current war in Yemen is not merely a conflict between the Houthis and the legitimate government, nor is it simply a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Rather, it is the result of a long accumulation of failures in building the Yemeni state since the 1960s. For this reason, the author describes Yemen as having lived for more than six decades inside a recurring cycle of wars, coups, assassinations, and internal divisions, due to the inability of political elites to establish a just state capable of accommodating social, regional, and sectarian diversity.

The study rejects simplistic narratives that attempt to reduce the crisis to a single party or a single event. Firestein does not place sole responsibility for the collapse on the Houthis, nor does he absolve the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, traditional forces, or even the Yemeni opposition.

He argues that most Yemeni political forces are corrupt and have been implicated to varying degrees, reproducing