As much as the Obama administration certainly supported the Saudis and continue to sell weapons to Saudis and embed American

targetters with the Saudis, Americans support for this campaign has accelerated even further under Trump.

Right, thinking about how much weapons were sold, there were 110 billion dollars sold under the Obama administration and Trump made contracts for

worth 350 billion dollars. So, we think about why the U.S. is in Yemen, frankly, there's a lot of money to be made.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me? Your host, Chris Hayes.

Okay, so here's a question for this week. What is the worst thing the United States is currently doing? What's the worst thing our country is doing?

I think it's a useful question to ask ourselves as citizens and there's a lot of ways you can answer that question. I think most of us because if you're listening to this and you're in the U.S. and you live in the U.S. we tend to think of what the U.S. is doing here.

I think my instinct in that answer normally, if you ask me what's the worst thing that the U.S. government, our government is doing right now.

My instinct would probably be to say that there are still hundreds of children who were taken from their parents and have not been reunited with them and are experiencing unthinkable trauma and the government isn't reuniting them.

And that's something that we've covered on the show and we've covered on the podcast and that would be probably my first answer.

But that's partly a product of the fact that when we think about what our government does, we are naturally inclined to think about what our government is doing within our borders.

Because that's where most of us live. That's where most of us experience life. That's those are the places and things that are the most relatable to us.

And the things that our government does outside our borders feel more remote. Now, there are times when what our government is doing outside its borders are absolutely at the front of our politics and the way we think about the country, the Vietnam War, being a very obvious example, the Iraq War, another obvious example.

In both those cases, that was the top news story of those times. I remember watching the run of the Iraq Wars, a 23, 24 year old, debating about it, protesting it, opposing it, watching it happen, feeling impotent, feeling outrage, and thinking about what my government, our government, our representatives were doing.

I think it's a product a little bit of the Trump age that it's harder to think in that way about what's happening outside our borders because Trump looms so large.

But the US government does a lot of stuff outside its borders and we are still waging wars in roughly 11 different countries. I think of the totals right. We're doing bombings in Syria and in Iraq, Somalia, all sorts of places.

There is one place where we are actively facilitating a war that is arguably the most morally bankrupt and indefensible international conflict currently happening.

And it's easy for it to slide off the front pages because it's not US troops that are doing it. We have some small number of US servicemembers who are involved in this conflict.

But largely it's being done through one of our allies, Saudi Arabia. It's the war in Yemen and it's not in the front of our political discussion for a bunch of reasons.

Yemen is a remote poor country. Like I said, the US armed services are not deployed there. There aren't a lot of journalists there. It's very hard to get into the country.

The war is being waged for reasons that are really hard to scan unless you know the context and the history of the region. They're being waged by US ally who also Saudi Arabia happens to spend a lot of money lobbying the government of the United States,

closing up to the Trump administration. And yet what is happening there is horrifying. And it's horrifying in a way that I think some of the things that happen during the Vietnam war or horrifying and some of the things that happened during the Iraq war or horrifying.

...