The “Arab Spring” as it has been called is both a matter of great international as well as a subject of intense academic investigation. The significance of this event arises from the belief that it is a revolutionary action and therefore a turning point in the region’s history. Yet history has also shown that such great social changes may provoke a reaction and that counter revolutions are indeed possible. Surely, counter-revolutions deserve philosophical engagement; not to consider them is to avoid examining human behaviour. So how precisely must we look at revolution and counter-revolution in a time when the prevailing discourse is the war on terror? I examine the case of Yemen. Here the spontaneous uprising was early declared a failure. Consequently politicians and analysts have made two possible scenarios imaginable. First, a civil war that will shatter a highly fragmented society, creating a space for Al-Qaida to take over assuming that it enters any vacuum which assigns it of course an almost supernatural power. Or second, the implementation of the Gulf Initiative, a political settlement proposed by the ’Friends of Yemen’, led by Saudi Arabia, GCC States, and packed by the USA and the EU States. This Initiative has been portrayed as the only force that can establish a political good even while avoiding chaos and evil. Under the weight of such an extreme choice, the Yemeni people have been compelled to live in fear of a purportedly immoral internal enemy while they are expected to draw strength and hope from a morally responsible external friend. I contend that this embodied claim of ethical responsibility towards the Other is colonised by an imperial counter-revolution. Drawing on work by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida I argue that such a morally responsible action towards the Other is indeed an amoral attempt to deactivate the emancipation of this same Other. It is my contention therefore that the discourse of responsibility has allowed the foreign sovereign to penetrate the local sovereign in a hegemonic fashion, giving birth to a new form of sovereign political subject that awards itself a factual power to make the political decision (decisionism) in the Schmittian sense.