David Commins: belief

Transcript context

…Now, as you know, in 1962, Egypt is bombing parts of Yemen. They have some involvement in that war. Some of the bombs, it seems, even fall on the Saudi side of the border. Is there a historical memory of that? Does it matter, or is it just forgotten, that was some mistake in the past and who cares? I don’t think Yemen has forgotten about it, and I don’t think everybody in Saudi Arabia has forgotten about it. I think the men around Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, are quite aware of the history of relations between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. I think that they may have been responsible for tempering some of the adventurous foreign policies. If anything, what the Saudis did by intervening in Yemen in 2015, was similar to what Nasser did, when he intervened. He sent 40,000 Egyptian troops to Yemen, eventually, in the 1960s. That was a terrible mistake for Nasser. It fatally weakened his regime. I think some Saudis may not have read what they did, in terms of what Nasser did, but looking at it from the outside, it was a comparable mistake. It just reminds me that foreign policy is always a matter of experimentation and seeing what works. I hear a lot of talk about grand strategy. It’s hard to think of a case where grand strategy really worked out. There’s a lot of luck involved in achieving foreign policy success, no matter what country we’re talking about. Is there still a meaningful historical memory of the 1934 Saudi-Yemen border war, or is that just forgotten?…

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