The Forgotten Forever War That Cost Mike Waltz His Job

A retired Green Beret and former Florida congressman, Waltz was the first elected official to hold the national security adviser position. He came up as an aide to Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. Ever the politician, he was regularly thinking about and attempting to shape how voters would perceive the administration’s foreign policy choices at town hall meetings across the country, a U.S. official told me.

But there were contradictions Waltz simply couldn’t square. He couldn’t overcome the most militaristic tenets of the Washington establishment, which seems unwilling or unable to seek out a diplomatic solution to Yemen. “If the U.S. stops targeting Yemen, we will cease our military operations against it,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi spokesperson, recently told Drop Site News. “If the U.S. ends its hostile policies against us and our Islamic nation, we will stop our hostile actions against it. So, the ball is in the court of the ruling establishment of Washington.” When Israel stopped hostilities as part of the brief ceasefire Trump’s team negotiated, the Houthi halted attacks on shipping lanes.

Trump officials, to their credit, have engaged in some creative diplomacy with Hamas, Russia, and Iran. But on Yemen, the status quo—or potentially escalation by way of a ground invasion, as the Pentagon is discussing—has been the only approach.