The Immunity Against Understanding Yemen
Reflecting on the passing of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, the former President of Yemen, a man both constrained beyond his power and limited within it.
I have found myself reflecting today on how little space Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi occupied in the history he was supposed to lead, and on how quickly many gave in to the temptation to undermine his presidency and ridicule the man. He died on Thursday at the age of eighty. The Hadi years are essential for understanding where Yemen is now, and one of the easiest entry points into a very complicated subject. So I wanted to write something that captures Yemen through his time. Hadi was the first president the country produced after the 2011 uprising that ended Ali Abdullah Saleh’s thirty-three-year rule, and he governed Yemen remotely for a decade through its most violent years. He held no capital, commanded no army in the field, and rarely set foot in the country that still carried his name abroad. His presidency had become a quiet fiction maintained by outsiders, a signature at the bottom of documents placed before him in a foreign capital.
He was always measured against the man he replaced, and the measurement never flattered him. Ali Abdullah Saleh governed Yemen for thirty-three years by dancing, in his own phrase, on the heads of snakes, a politician to his marrow who kept everyone around him on edge because no one could be certain which way he would turn next. Hadi could not dance that way, and neither could anyone else, but it was Hadi the comparison shadowed from the day it began.
The Compromise Candidate
Hadi was the compromise of a very turbulent transition in 2012 following the Arab Spring, the consensus candidate, the lone name on a single-candidate ballot, a vice president raised up precisely because he threatened no one and stood for nothing in particular. Yemen’s transition wanted a figure neutral enough to be acceptable to every side, which in practice meant a figure too slight to become anyone’s champion, and the assumption folded into his selection was that he would be easy to manage. He was a southerner with no northern base, a soldier with no political machine, a deputy who had spent eighteen years at Saleh’s side without once becoming a rival worth purging.
The phrase that came to define Hadi’s career was a parting gift from his predecessor. In a public address to his loyalists, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that “Hadi had an immunity against understanding.” It was a calculated strike, meant to dismantle the authority of the man he had once chosen as his deputy. The character assassination neutralized him politically.
Saleh’s personal barbs against Hadi traveled far, but they were self-serving. Hadi had been instrumental in securing Saleh’s victory in the 1994 civil war, and he had a sharp grasp of the regional map when he chose to engage with it. By the time the Houthis seized Sana’a in late September 2014, he had already anticipated the geopolitical fallout of their advance, identifying the chokepoint vulnerabilities of a Houthi-held Bab al-Mandab before anyone outside Yemen was willing to think them through. It was a precise diagnosis of what was coming.
Hadi had come up through the southern army and fought on the losing side of the 1986 war in the South, the faction loyal to Ali Nasir Muhammad in a short and vicious power struggle that tore through the southern leadership, left thousands dead, and sent the losers fleeing north. Hadi was among them, crossing into a northern state that was then still a separate country. When the two Yemens united in 1990 and the South tried to break away again four years later, Hadi sided with Ali Abdullah Saleh against his own region. Saleh made him the defense minister during the fighting and vice president once the secession was crushed. A man of their own at the top of the Yemeni state might have crystallized something for them, but instead they read him as a southerner who had borrowed the logic of the North and spent his life trying to fit into it. He never quite fit in the North either.
A Presidency Without a State
Hadi took office in February 2012 with regional and Western backing, tasked with managing a transition framework that fused revolutionary ambition with Western design. The expectation was that he would quietly follow the script he had been handed, but he surprised the people who had placed him there. He moved on the command structure, reshuffled senior officers, and installed his own men to build a small circle of loyalists around himself. Yet this internal restructuring held no broader state project beneath it. The loyalists were kept close to the capital to keep his circle within reach, leaving the rest of the country exposed while the National Dialogue Conference launched in 2013.
Operating under Western donor support, this consultative architecture was meant to produce a blueprint for a modern state, but the project vanished almost the moment the ink dried on the final documents. The diplomatic process had insulated itself from physical reality that was affecting Yemenis outside of the conference rooms. During the dialogue itself, the Houthis had already laid siege to Dammaj in the north, and by the summer of 2014 they took Amran and killed the army commander defending it, signaling the start of their march south toward Sana’a. Yet Hadi did nothing, choosing to let the peacebuilding script run its course while a militant group systematically dismantled the state.
Meanwhile, the south of Yemen represented a different challenge that Hadi never truly acknowledged. Since unification, the South had lived inside a state that excluded it politically, neglected it economically, and treated it as territory to be administered. Hadi did not address any of it. The southern political response to him was split throughout his presidency. He had a constituency in his native Abyan, and opponents who read him as a southerner who had borrowed the logic of the North. When the Houthis took Sanaa in early 2015 and Hadi made his way to Aden, the South received him. When he fled to Riyadh weeks later, the reception ended. The Southern Transitional Council took its current shape soon after.
The War With the Houthis
Against the Houthis, he had nothing close to their public presence, and the gap between him and Abdulmalik al-Houthi was the cruelest thing about the war. Al-Houthi was young and certain and ideologically armed, a figure who speaks to his public nearly every day, issues sermons, and hands his followers a story about themselves and their place in the world. Hadi could not match that performance, but he understood the raw geography of the conflict. In late September 2014, four days after the Houthis took Sanaa, he warned that whoever held the keys to Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz would not need a nuclear bomb. The international community heard a Saudi puppet making the case for an intervention his patrons wanted, treated his words accordingly, missing the strategic argument he was actually making. There is an irony in this that Yemenis grasped long before outsiders did. Abdulmalik al-Houthi is bound to Iran more deeply and more openly than Hadi was ever bound to Saudi Arabia.
Hadi and the Saudis needed each other. When the Houthis took Sanaa in 2014, Yemen had no unified army to push back. Saleh had spent his last months allied with the Houthis he had once fought, and the alliance had hollowed out the institutions Hadi inherited. He requested the Saudi intervention because nothing else could resist the takeover. The Saudis hoped a legitimate partner could help them contain the Houthi advance and Iran’s interest in Bab al-Mandab, even if that partner was weak and had no presence on the ground. So Riyadh kept him in place. The war they were waging depended on his legitimacy more than on the man who carried it. Title intact, country gone.
Whatever clarity he had in 2014, by the late years of his exile he was a different figure. The Saudis who hosted him grew used to watching him fall asleep in meetings, an old man who flew to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio on a Saudi plane often and was not capable of returning to Yemen. Yemenis watched this and lost patience.
Western analysts and Western think tanks settled into a register of contempt toward Hadi that no comparable figure on the other side of the war ever received. He was dismissed as a “puppet,” a “clerk,” or a “statue,” while the same analyst class spent its energy elsewhere on careful sociological argument about whether the Houthis are really an Iranian proxy, parsing their ideology with patience, and treating Abdulmalik al-Houthi as a political figure worth taking seriously.
His own talent, however limited, never served the country well. He had studied in the Soviet Union and come away fluent in Russian, the kind of preparation that should have meant something in a war where Moscow returned to the region as a quiet protector of the network tearing his country apart. But none of that served Yemen when Russia abstained on Security Council Resolution 2216, refusing to back the arms embargo on the Houthis, and within a year was receiving Houthi delegations in Moscow while Hadi remained in Riyadh.
When he signed his powers over to the Presidential Leadership Council in April of 2022, the office had already been emptied to pure form. The presidency was pulled out from under him and handed to a chairman, Rashad al-Alimi, who had spent the previous eight years as one of his own advisers, a man from inside his own government who now took the chair from him.
Yemen’s Real Loss
Set him beside Abdulmalik al-Houthi, and the contrast does the arguing for you. For all his faults and for all the grievances people had with him, Hadi never committed the mass atrocities currently being inflicted on Yemenis. He did not recruit children to fight his wars. He did not fire missiles into cities that had nothing to do with his war. Hadi did not jail journalists by the dozens, did not disappear dissidents into secret prisons, did not pull boys out of classrooms and return them in coffins, and he certainly did not build a sectarian indoctrination machine that has replaced Yemeni education with religious militancy. He did not turn Palestinian suffering into a recruitment slogan for his own war. Hadi never remade Yemen in Saudi Arabia’s image the way Abdulmalik al-Houthi is remaking it in Iran’s. Is the bar low? No, not really. What the Houthis are building is the most coercive and ideologically aggressive non-state political order Yemen has seen, with a depth of institutional capture that deepens as they consolidate.
The international diplomatic community, however, is structurally unequipped to grapple with an ideological order like that. Foreign capitals and multilateral institutions operate on the assumption that political problems are solved by squeezing and reforming recognized states, a habit that automatically directs their leverage toward the entity that responds to their paperwork. In my years tracking this conflict, I have noticed that proximity shapes what gets analyzed about the country. Western observers have access to the recognized government, but not to the movement that took half the country from it. As a result, the analytical pressure has fallen overwhelmingly on the state, and Yemen has been read through that asymmetry ever since. Today, Rashad al-Alimi sits in the same chair under the same pressure, while the country drifts toward terms its representatives never negotiated.
If there is a wake-up call in Hadi’s death, it is not about the man. It is the realization that Yemen has lacked steady leadership since the Iranian project took root on its soil. Saleh, the shrewdest political operator the country produced in half a century, the man who outmaneuvered every rival for thirty-three years, ended his life on his knees inside an alliance with the Houthis, and they killed him for it. If Saleh could not face the Iranian project and survive, then measuring Hadi by his personal flaws completely misses the point. The issue wasn’t the man’s shortcomings; it was that the Yemeni state was no longer equipped to defend itself. Hadi did not invent the collapse. He managed its early stages. The political establishment he left behind is now finishing the job, codifying its own liquidation, paragraph by paragraph in the UN.