Skip to content
Politics & Current Affairs —

Yemen’s Radical Transformation

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Until 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, Yemen was barely on the Western public’s radar. Ever since, it has found itself the nexus of a raging debate. How large is the terrorist presence there? What has fanned the spread of radical Islam within its borders? Will the country become a third front in the war on terror? In a Big Think interview this week, Princeton University Yemen expert Gregory Johnsen provides detailed answers.

Dissecting Yemen’s volatile political history, Johnsen explains the “three layers of crisis” facing the nation and why they form the foundation for a thriving Al-Qaeda. He also addresses President Obama’s pledge not to put U.S. “boots on the ground” in the country, claiming that to break it would be “catastrophic” and assessing the alternatives the U.S. must consider.

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
Related
Can Obama Order You Killed?
On September 30, 2011, The New York Times reported that the C.I.A. had killed a fundamentalist iman named Anwar al-Awlaki in a drone strike over Yemen. Heralding the strike, President […]
Frontline: al-Qaeda in Yemen
Last night Frontline aired the film al-Qaeda in Yemen, which was reported by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad who writes for the Guardian and who, along with Declan Walsh when he was at […]
Up Next