At the start of the Yemeni Civil War in September 1962, Yemeni revolutionaries, led by Abdullah Sallal, overthrew Imam Muhammad al Badr, who rallied Zaydi tribal supporters to their northern highlands stronghold. Within days of the revolution, Egyptian troops arrived in Yemen in support of the revolutionaries with Soviet supplied munitions and recognition of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). Fearing Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s ulterior motives of Arabian oil conquest, Saudi Arabia gave refuge to the deposed Yemeni Imam, and provided his followers with military and financial assistance, thereby declaring support for the royalists. From the vantage point of the port of Aden, the British supported anti-Nasser royalists in defense of colonial interest in Arabia and to the ire of the United States. Three months into the conflict, in December 1962, the U.S. recognized the YAR, thereby further drawing local events in Yemen into the global arena and Cold War competition. Hostilities in Yemen continued until 1968 during which Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., the USSR, Britain, Canada, Israel and the UN invested military, economic, and political capital to manipulate local events. I argue that the ramifications of global participation in the Yemeni Civil War greatly impacted regional power politics in the Middle East and Cold War alliances globally. The Yemeni Civil War is a prime candidate for an international history that redefines regional events by broadening source bases, language breadth, and geographical boundaries. I combine the numerous perspectives of the countries and national grand strategies competing in the global arena of this localized conflict allow in a comprehensive analysis of the multilayered interactions of the parties involved. How did local events on the ground in Yemen affect the global alliances of the Cold War, the Arab World, and the non-aligned nations? Using International Relations statistical and theoretical analyses including a discussion of civil wars as a post-colonial phenomenon, the effectiveness of diplomacy and intervention in regional civil wars, and the reasoning behind the decision to participate in a civil war, I discuss a number of important thematic questions: At what point does a post-WWII local civil war turn international and can it still be called a civil war? What varying motivations draw international participants into a civil war? Does international participation prolong or shorten the duration of hostilities? What precedent and lessons does the Yemeni Civil War leave for future internationalized civil wars?

The “Arab Awakening” heralds the breakdown of the republican political order established in the revolutionary upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s. The modern state of Yemen emerged in the context of an epic battle for legitimacy between the revolutionary republics headed by Egypt and the conservative monarchies headed by Saudi Arabia—a struggle carried out largely on the blood-soaked soil of Yemen from 1962 to 1967. In order to comprehend the republican meltdown of 2012, one needs to revisit Egypt’s crucial decision to send its armed forces to aid the fledgling Yemen Arab Republic in 1962. Surprisingly little scholarship exists on the Egyptian intervention in Yemen. Interpretations of Nasser’s decision to intervene have tended either to blame Egypt for premeditated aggressive expansionism or to exculpate Egypt for selflessly reacting to Saudi meddling in the internal affairs of a sister Arab state. A careful review of newly available evidence, including recent Egyptian and Yemeni memoirs and declassified documents from Russia, the United States, and Israel, reveals a more complicated truth. On the one hand, the intervention had deep roots in Egypt’s traditional support for nationalist revolutionaries. That commitment pertained especially to Yemen, situated strategically in the backyard of Egypt’s emerging rival: the oil monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Yet Egypt was not planning a military campaign in 1962. On the contrary, the Egyptians responded impulsively, on the basis of incomplete information, to the news of the coup d’état in ?an‘?’ in late September 1962. The coincidence of the coup with a struggle for power within the Egyptian regime contributed to the hasty adoption of half-way measures, generating unintended escalation. As Nasser later remarked: “I sent a company to Yemen and had to reinforce it with 70,000 men.” The quagmire that ensued carried major implications for Yemen, for Egypt, and for the region. In an effort to secure their regime against internal opposition, the Yemenis ended up building a police state plagued by many of the problems that afflicted Egypt and the other Arab republics in the decades since. The war accelerated a number of negative trends in Egypt itself, including runaway defense spending, rampant corruption, and decreasing tolerance for dissent. These and other factors did much to discredit Arab nationalism and the republican model of government. In retrospect, 1962 marked both the birth of modern Yemen and the distant origin of the Arab Spring.

This paper argues that the 70-Day Siege of Sanaa from late November 1967 to early February 1968 turned the tide of the Yemeni civil war, and set the stage for the successive military regimes of contemporary Yemen. On September 26, 1962 a small palace coup in Sanaa, Yemen forced the ruling Zaydi Imam to abandon his capital for a tribal refuge in the far north of the country. The years of fighting that followed split the country into Royalist and Republican sides and, in the process, turned Yemen into the only place in the Arab world where the competing ideologies of Arab nationalism on the one hand and conservative Islamic monarchism on the other were in direct conflict with each other. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Britain were all drawn, in various and varying ways, into this confusing conflict, where tribal loyalties clashed with Cold War ideologies. Set against this backdrop, my paper will document how at the conclusion of the war a right-wing faction of the military was able to take control of the Republican side and secure victory. This right-wing faction broke from the more liberal-wing of the Republican defenses during the Siege of Sanaa and defeated not only its internal enemies but also its larger Royalist foes. I will further argue that the right-wing faction that emerged victorious from the siege and the civil war itself laid the groundwork for the series of military regimes that continue to rule Yemen until today.