As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China means Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

Ahmed Lamlas, the governor of Aden, had been cheerfully describing his progress in rebuilding Yemen’s interim capital—a program aiming to ensure that most cars in the city had license plates was under way, and Saudi-funded projects to rebuild a hospital and dig new water wells were moving forward—when the power went out, plunging the dilapidated conference room into darkness.

“This,” a Yemeni sitting with our small group interjected sarcastically, “is one of the accomplishments.”

Aden is known as the Eye of Yemen, the gateway through which foreign ideas and would-be conquerors enter the country. This southern port city spent more than a century under British rule, connecting London’s imperial possessions in Egypt and India. It fell within the Soviet sphere of influence following the collapse of the British empire, becoming the capital of the Middle East’s only communist state. Now it is under the sway of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and at the center of their efforts to drive back the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia, in Yemen’s long-running civil war.

Even though the Houthis were driven out of Aden seven years ago, it looks as if fighting ended seven days ago. Houses lie in rubble across the city; Lamlas had only enough funds to remove debris from one of eight municipal districts. Across the street from where I stayed, the Aden Hotel—once known for hosting lavish weddings—was half-collapsed from shelling years prior that had left gaping wounds in its facade. Lamlas mused about putting up billboards to boost the morale of citizens frustrated by the slow pace of reconstruction, but as he himself acknowledged, his entire budget would not cover repairs to the Aden Hotel. In November, Yemen’s prime minister promised to repair a single power generator. It remains broken. “We are poor,” Lamlas said simply.

Lamlas’s matter-of-fact comment to me, if anything, understates the despair in Aden, and in Yemen. No one involved in Yemen’s war, at any level, has any significant aspiration for the country. Hopes—to the extent that any exist—are limited to improving the odds of surviving. In Yemen, in Saudi Arabia and the UAE (the dominant powers in non-Houthi areas), in the United States, there is no discussion of how to rebuild Yemen, let alone how to make it thrive as it once did. The grandiose ambitions of the war’s major players were dashed long ago, and yet the conflict still grinds on, leaving a country ruined. The war has created its own logic and its own momentum.

Two weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden described the war here as a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” He had good reason: The Saudi-led air campaign has killed at least 9,000 civilians and precipitated the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, while also failing to dislodge the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Aden, meanwhile, has seen its economy and security collapse under the rule of Saudi- and Emirati-backed politicians.

The Yemeni government’s poverty has made it dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In return, it has ceded no small amount of sovereignty. Ships hoping to dock at Aden’s harbor must first undergo inspection by the Saudi-led Coalition, primarily by passing through the Saudi city of Jeddah, and the decision to grant a foreign journalist like me a visa had to be approved by officials in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. (The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, an independent research institution focused on Yemen and funded by grants from the EU and European states, organized the trip and handled these negotiations.) Even Yemen’s airspace is no longer its own: Our flight to Aden sat on the runway for seven hours, waiting for approval from the Saudi-led coalition to take off.

Yemenis deeply resent this dependency. “This is bullshit,” one fellow passenger yelled as our wait dragged on. “Someone call [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman!”

The country’s horizons were not always so limited. Some Adenis still remember when the city was the Dubai of its era, prospering from its global commercial links in the dying days of the British empire. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1954, less than a year after her coronation, hailing the city as an “outstanding example of colonial development.” Decades later, a Yemeni hotel still promoted the legend that she had spent a night in one of its rooms, decking out a “Royal Suite” with photographs of Her Majesty.

If I had visited in the 1950s or ’60s, one older Adeni told me, the bombed-out Aden Hotel would not have been the central landmark in the neighborhood in which I stayed. Instead, I would have seen a neon-lit cinema, the Shenaz, that played that era’s biggest English-language blockbusters, including Ben Hur and Cleopatra. Next door was an adjoining night club, the Shalimar, which imported international bands and German beer. The Shenaz was partially destroyed in the mid-2000s during a property dispute and now sits derelict. The Shalimar has been demolished.

“It was an era where going out was something you did with a bit of aplomb,” Dadi Motiwalla, the eldest son of the Shenaz and Shalimar’s owner, told me. “If you didn’t have a tie or a bow tie, we wouldn’t let you in.”

A hotel damaged by the war, in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

This was once a vital city, Adenis wanted me to know, connected to global commerce and culture. It was a place where one’s aspirations could extend beyond cleaning the streets of rubble. Motiwalla described having his birthdays at the Shalimar: large parties with more than 100 children scrambling around the dance floor, and the chefs making cakes with sugary lakes and toy boats floating upon them.

The cinema’s theme song, he remembers, was “Sail Along Silvery Moon.” “I never forgot that,” he said quietly, choking up. “It brings a lot of memories back.”

Nobody is trying to restore Aden to what it once was. Yemen’s leaders aspire only to hold on to power so that they can wring the few remaining dollars out of state coffers. The wealthy Gulf states involved in Yemen’s war seem only to want the government to limp along ineffectually until they can extricate themselves from the conflict. And the United States’ primary concerns are counterterrorism and the maintenance of its security relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

There was a time when Saudi leaders imagined that they would swoop in as Yemen’s savior. Mohammed bin Salman launched Riyadh’s military campaign against the Houthis a mere two months after he was appointed defense minister, and the 2015 intervention became integral to the young prince’s rise to power. He argued privately that the kingdom’s old guard—including his chief rival, then–Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef—had failed to stop the Houthis’ rapid gains across Yemen in the preceding year. It now fell to him to take the sort of bold actions that his elders refused to contemplate. The Houthis, and by extension Iran, had to be stopped.

MBS cultivated an image of himself as a decisive, dynamic military leader. The kingdom’s official news agency published photographs of the prince flying on a military helicopter to inspect army positions near the Yemeni border, and Saudi television broadcast clips of him overseeing the campaign’s first air strikes from an air-force operations center. He claimed that the Saudi-led coalition could “uproot” the Houthis “in a few days” if it chose to do so, and posters touting him as a military leader proliferated across Riyadh.

By 2019, however, the Saudis had what one analyst described to me as a “come to Jesus” moment about the war’s trajectory. Their military campaign had stalled, their local allies were weakened, and Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi territory were becoming deadlier. MBS, now firmly ensconced as crown prince, stepped back as the public face of the war and charged his younger brother with negotiating an end to the conflict with the Houthis.

That diplomatic opening paved the way in April of this year for the first nationwide truce since 2016 in Yemen’s war. Although the agreement has resulted in a notable decline in violence, U.S. diplomats acknowledge that it does not address the root causes driving the war. Fundamental questions about how to share political power and rebuild the country’s shattered institutions remain unresolved. The current diplomatic goal is to freeze the conflict in place, in the hope that this will open the door to broader political negotiations.

For many people whom I spoke with in Yemen, however, that risks simply freezing their lives in an impossible situation. In an encampment overlooking an abandoned stretch of Aden’s beachfront, for example, a community of Ethiopian refugees has suffered multiple displacements, by multiple tormentors: First they were driven from their home country by ethnic conflict there, then out of Sanaa by the Houthis, and finally they were dumped in Aden and forced to fashion shelters out of tree branches and roadside debris.

Internally displaced–persons camp in Modereyet el-Shaab, Aden, Yemen, Feb. 9, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Beyza, 22, remembers only life in Yemen. She and her mother fled across the Red Sea in 2004, settling in Sanaa when her mother found work cleaning houses there. After the Houthi takeover of the capital, however, the Islamist movement came to see the Ethiopian community as a humanitarian burden and, later, as transmitters of the coronavirus. Beginning in 2020, the Houthis began sending refugees on forced marches to the Saudi border and locked up others in detention facilities.

When refugees protested against their dismal conditions in the detention center, Houthi fighters locked the facility doors and launched projectiles inside that ignited a raging fire. International organizations reported that scores of people burned to death; the refugees in Aden insisted to me that the true death toll was in the hundreds. A tattered poster featuring gruesome images of the fire’s aftermath and demanding justice for the victims still hangs outside the encampment I visited.

The community launched protests outside the United Nations refugee agency’s headquarters in Sanaa to demand support for the families of those who died. The Houthis, unwilling to condone even this minor expression of dissent, came for the protesters at dawn on a Friday morning. “They took everyone,” Beyza told me. “Those who could pay 2,000 Saudi rials [$533], they took to the passport center. If they didn’t pay, they took them to the front line.”

Beyza and her mother handed over their meager savings to the Houthis. From the passport center, they were placed on buses and transported out of the group’s territory to Aden. “They took our photos and said, ‘If you come back to Sanaa, you will be killed,’” said Beyza. “Some people’s children were still in Sanaa, and they couldn’t go back for them.”

In Aden, the beleaguered Ethiopian community now suffers more from neglect than abuse. Its members had to construct their own rudimentary shelters, and say they received little to no humanitarian assistance from the Yemeni government or international organizations. They beg for food at nearby restaurants and gather water from a broken pipe at a nearby derelict hotel.

Abandonment, too, can be deadly. One 33-year-old Ethiopian, Jawar, told me how his seven-month-old son fell ill and died due to the lack of basic medicine. He could not find anywhere to bury him, so he pleaded with a guard at the nearby hotel to lay his son to rest in the garden.

“This is what it is like here,” Jawar said quietly. “Children are born, and children die.”

Photographs of severely malnourished infants hung on wall in the administrative office at the Aden Hospital, in Yemen, Feb. 13, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Eight years into this conflict, any hope of a decisive victory has vanished. Many Adenis I interviewed have grown cynical about the point of this seemingly pointless war: It only continues, they say, to justify a small elite’s grip on power and continued looting of state coffers.

I have been covering and studying this war—first from Beirut, then from Riyadh, and now from Washington, D.C.—since its inception and, frankly, that explanation is as good as any. The Gulf Arab states have abandoned the pretense that they will deal a death blow to Iranian expansionism; MBS has secured his position in the Saudi hierarchy; the Houthis’ boasts that they would win a swift victory over their foes have been proved false. What better reasoning can I put forward than that proffered to me by those Adenis?

Last year, retired Brigadier General Naji al-Arabi found himself leading a group of angry protesters massed outside Aden’s presidential palace. Inside, Yemeni leaders were meeting. As the protesters approached, the soldiers at the gate fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. The demonstrators, many of them military veterans like Arabi, didn’t back down: They surged forward toward the entrance, and after a brief scuffle the guards stepped aside and allowed them to enter the palace.

“We didn’t know the government was having an emergency meeting,” Arabi told me. “We just heard the helicopters flying away.”

The Yemeni government fled shortly after the palace gates were breached. The protesters soon departed peacefully, returning to a nearby mosque to read their list of demands, calling on the government to improve the dismal living conditions in the city. It made little difference: An atmosphere of imminent collapse and simmering revolt still hangs over Aden.

Wedding dresses on display in Lelte boutique on a street in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Arabi, a blunt man who wears a perpetually exasperated expression, joined the army in 1978. He trained in the Soviet Union for three years until being forced into retirement in the ’90s, after the unification of South Yemen and North Yemen. He and thousands of his comrades now survive on their pensions: Arabi is owed roughly $30 a month.

But even this paltry sum comes in rarely. In 2016, Arabi and fellow ex-soldiers formed a protest movement to pressure the government to pay its debts to veterans. Since the protesters breached the palace, Arabi says he has not received a cent.

Arabi has eight children who depend on his pension for their survival. Some of his sons now chop wood to make ends meet during the long stretches when the money does not arrive. Many well-trained military officers have similarly been forced to scratch out a living by whatever means necessary. “You can find a fighter pilot watching over sheep, or selling newspapers or cigarettes,” Arabi said.

In addition to pressuring the government and its foreign patrons, the protest movement is a way for officers like Arabi to maintain some influence over the thousands of desperate ex-soldiers abandoned by the Yemeni state. Arabi fears that, without any way of supporting themselves, some of his former comrades could drift into Islamist militancy or work for criminal gangs to earn a living. In fact, he believes that the government is hoping they do, as it would then have a pretext to crack down violently on the protest movement.

“We think the government is trying to repress us so that people will use their weapons to sabotage and to steal,” he said. “They are trying to create new front lines to keep the war going, to feed on it.”

The movement has sputtered in recent months, however, as its members grow further impoverished. Arabi admitted that it has become difficult to persuade veterans to bear the costs of leaving their home in the countryside to travel to Aden for protests. With their pensions gone, members are devoting their energies to simply surviving. If Yemen’s leaders hope to silence the protest movement by starving it of resources, as Arabi believes, they may soon get their wish. But it will be a pyrrhic victory.

Arabi and his fellow soldiers will not be the last victims of Yemen’s collapse. Spend any time at all in Aden, and you will find a whole new generation furious at the impossibility of building a life here: There are the medical students without textbooks or functional internet, the psychiatrist specializing in conflict trauma who had his desk taken away by university administrators, and the government official who works from home because heavily armed men occupy his office. The list goes on.

If you listen to diplomats, this moment constitutes a hopeful one for Yemen. The truce is for the most part holding, in no small part because of coordination between U.S. and Saudi diplomats. When it was renewed in June, Biden praised Saudi Arabia’s “courageous” diplomatic efforts. His administration is now trying to leverage its ties with the Saudis to forge a permanent peace agreement.

For residents of Aden, however, international diplomacy often seems divorced from the daily struggles of life. So much has already been lost. What remains feels ephemeral. And there is only one employer that is always hiring.

Standing in the courtyard of the University of Aden, I asked a medical student what would happen if he couldn’t find work after graduation. “There’s always the war,” he said. “You can make 1,000 Saudi rials [$266] each month as a fighter.”

In Aden, your salary and savings can shrink to nothing; your physical security can be threatened at a whim; even electricity is fleeting. But the front line is a constant, fixed reality, and it’s not going anywhere.

Aden port, before sunrise, Yemen, Feb. 18, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)