Comparatively, Yemen is situated between the 2011 uprisings; the relative tranquility of the GCC rentier states; and US-led regime-change military interventions in Libya and Iraq as opposed to exercise of ‘soft’ Western power in Tunisia and Egypt. It is one of the five republics where mass popular demonstrations demanded the downfall of (what Owen called) “presidents for life.” Whereas four other ‘Arab spring’ republics face the Mediterranean, however, Yemen lies at the geographic and socio-economic periphery of the Arabian Peninsula – effectively ‘under’ the GCC petro-monarchies. Low intensity American firepower targets enemies of the US, the GCC, and Yemen’s government. To untangle these comparisons I modify Johan Galtung’s classic schematic ‘structural theory of imperialism’ mapping relations among cores (the US and Europe), cores of peripheries (KSA and the GCC), and peripheries of peripheries (Yemen) in terms of ‘harmonies’ and ‘disharmonies’ of interests. Decisions, models, investments, opportunities for employment, weapons, lessons, policing, communications media, and so forth, originate in the core, whereas the periphery provides inept or disruptive students, consumers, a reserve labor force, make-overs, battlefields or targets, disorder, and psychological dismay. Galtung postulates a harmony of interests between the core and the core of the periphery and a lot of disharmony in the periphery of the periphery. The methodology is comparative even though the focus is on one country. I will compare, as measures of what Galtung calls vertical relations, flows of bilateral aid, corporate investments, diplomatic engagement, weapons transfers, military deployments, and people between the US (and possibly the EU) and the following countries: Tunisia and Egypt, whose transitions did not involve direct foreign military intervention; Iraq and Libya, both sites of forcible regime change; and Yemen, to date an in-between case of armed engagement, where, uniquely, the US backed a GCC- managed transition. I expect Yemen will come in last on all the relations indicators (not sure about per capita controls or what else the data might show.) Table 2 will compare US and Saudi relations with Yemen using the same indicators. Except for drone attacks against AQAP, this data (particularly aid and population flows) will probably show much stronger vertical relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia than between Yemen and the US.