The United States is passively following Saudi Arabia’s lead in boosting military assistance to the Riyadh-led collation seeking to suppress rebel forces in Yemen, ex-US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Chas Freeman told.

Axar.az reports that Freeman, who also served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said, "Riyadh, not Washington, now leads."

The US Defense Department is considering increasing its support for Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies in their support for the government of Yemen seeking to suppress Houthi rebel forces, according to US media reports this week.

The US government no longer broadly engaged Saudi Arabia on a wide range of political, economic and cultural issues, but instead the relationship had degenerated into passive support for increasingly aggressive Riyadh policies, Freeman maintained.

"The US-Saudi relationship, which used to embrace a rich menu of political, economic, cultural, and military programs of cooperation, is basically down to intelligence and military support for independent Saudi foreign policies," he said.

President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized the alleged failure of his predecessor President Barack Obama to confront terrorism and Islamist extremists sufficiently energetically across the Middle East, but in Yemen Trump was continuing the same kinds of policies, Freeman said.

"As for the significance of stepping up support for the Saudi and Emirati-led bombing campaigns in Yemen, these are simply a continuation of previous counter-terrorism strategy," he said.

Trump, like Obama before him, failed to realize that increasing the scale of massive air strikes that disrupted and destroyed civil societies across wide ranges of the Middle East radicalized local populations and destroyed their cohesion, Freeman explained.
This made it far easier for extremist forces to grow rapidly and take control, he pointed out.

US counter-terrorism strategy therefore "resembles a plan to reduce hornet stings by poking at hornets' nests," Freeman explained.