5 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
The Houthis and the U.N.'s Ship of Fools
Leave it to the United Nations to make a bad problem worse. Using donor funds from governments and companies, the U.N. bought a Very Large Crude Carrier, an oil tanker called the Yemen, for $55 million in 2023. The goal was noble. Off Yemen's Houthi-controlled Red Sea coast was a Floating Storage and Offloading vessel called the Safer, which was rusted and at risk of sinking. Inaction spelled potential environmental disaster, involving the release into the ocean of four times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez spill and up to $20 billion in cleanup costs. And so the U.N. sent the VLCC Yemen to empty the FSO Safer.
Not everything went according to plan. Following the transfer of oil, the Yemen was supposed to be operated by Yemen's state oil company under the advisory oversight of the U.N. Development Program. In practice, the vessel serves as a floating fuel station for the Houthis. On paper, the U.N. transferred ownership to Yemen's internationally recognized government—but control is what matters, and the Houthis have it.
