Even if Democrats capture both Georgia Senate seats and with them control of the House and Senate, Joe Biden will remain hamstrung in pushing his preferred policies by Republicans and possibly conservative Democrats looking to stymie efforts that even hint at positive change for working Americans. On foreign policy Biden will be much less constrained, however, which means that on Day One he could achieve an important policy objective by cutting off support for the war being waged in Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

In this clip from The Damage Report, John and Yasmin Khan point out that a group of more than 80 different organizations have written to ask Biden to take the unique opportunity of a new administration coming in to make this very demand. John notes that even though the conflict began during the Obama/Biden administration, more than a dozen former Obama officials have added their voices to the call for ending the war, including Susan Rice and Samantha Power.

Yasmin says that like every other aspect of the US’s involvement in the Middle East, our support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war is based on oil, and extracting ourselves from the Middle East while reducing our dependence on oil overall will be very difficult. That said, she feels that a Yemen pullout would be a critical, and simpler, first step, and one that Biden can launch immediately.