With China and Russia as its allies, the authoritarian regime is assembling a Middle Eastern coalition as Washington\u2019s influence wanes<\/p>\n
The first of what may be many US-led air strikes <\/a>on Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militants in Yemen marks another dismaying milestone on a long trail of western policy failures in the Middle East \u2013 the most pivotal and consequential of which remains the decades-old failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.<\/p>\n The fact the US, backed by Britain, was obliged to use force in response to trade-strangling Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping reflects an unpalatable reality: Washington\u2019s political leverage is waning, its diplomacy ineffectual, its authority scorned. Undaunted, the Houthis vowed attacks would continue.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With China and Russia as its allies, the authoritarian regime is assembling a Middle Eastern coalition as Washington\u2019s influence wanes The first of what may be many US-led air strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi Shia militants in Yemen marks another dismaying milestone on a long trail of western policy failures in the Middle East \u2013 the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}