沙特与胡塞武装冲突再起：背景与前景解析

Over the past couple of days, just as the war between the US and Iran, has apparently cooled down, another war in the Middle East, this one between the Houthies and Saudi Arabia, has up. Both sides have chucked missiles and drones at each other, and things only look likely to escalate in the near term. So, in this video, we're going to explain why the Saudis and Houthies never really got on, why the war has restarted recently, and why all of this leaves Saudi Arabia with a difficult dilemma.

Which country has the world's best flag? It's not an important question. Certainly not as important as the topic of this video, but we still want an answer. So, we've set up a survey that lets you vote on your favorite flag from a bunch of random matchups. It's actually really fun. Cast your vote now by clicking the link in the description. So, to understand this story, you need to know a bit about Yemen's politics. This is very much in a British history, but Yemen was originally two separate states, South Yemen and North Yemen.

South Yemen originated with the British protectorate of Aiden. The British captured the port of Aiden in the 19th century because they thought the port was in a strategically advantageous location. The Vor itself was a colony. In other words, directly ruled by the British crown, but the surrounding area was established as a protectorate, which basically meant that it was under British jurisdiction, but effectively governed by local tribes.

The boundaries of the Aiden protectorate basically map onto what would become South Yemen. South Yemen achieved independence from the British in the 60s with Aiden as its capital and promptly turned into a Marxist Leninist one party state making it the only avowedly communist nation in the Middle East. North Yemen also came into being as a state during the 60s when local Arab revolutionaries staged a coup against King Muhammad Albada whose family had taken power after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and established the Yemen Arab Republic with Senna as its capital.

Neither Yemen though was able to achieve political stability. On top of two wars between the two Yemens in 1972 and 1979, both countries were beset by civil war. In the 80s, South Yemen essentially collapsed after the implosion of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party and North Yemen was beset by infighting between the Shia tribes in the north and the Sunni population in the south. In North Yemen, successive presidents were either ousted or assassinated until the arrival of President Ali Abdullah Salah in 1978.

Salah was able to hold on to power for more than a decade. And in 1990, his North Yemen essentially subsumed South Yemen, which was basically a failed state at this point, thus creating the modern state of Yemen. Now, the key thing to understand here is that the Shia tribes in the north were never particularly keen on Salah or his government. Many of them felt that they were being marginalized and didn't like Salah's alignment with