On Wednesday, a mere day before Yemen's monthslong crisis collapsed into such chaos that rebels ran the president out of the country, and several days after US special forces had fled the country themselves, the White House did something it has been doing for some time: it publicly hailed the Obama administration's "Yemen model" as a success in fighting terrorism.

The White House has been widely mocked for patting itself on the back for its Yemen strategy at a moment when swaths of the country are controlled by Shia Houthi rebels allied with deposed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, and when Saudi and Egyptian forces are threatening to invade and turn this into a regional war. But it's no coincidence that the White House has been praising its "Yemen model" right up until the moment of the country's near-total collapse. (And that chaos, by the way, is great news for the al-Qaeda affiliate that is based in southern Yemen.)

The Obama administration's approach to Yemen has all along exemplified some of its worst foreign policy instincts in the Middle East: treating drone strikes and armed proxies as the solution for everything, finding short-term solutions to long-term problems, and refusing to deal seriously with the underlying issues that keep creating crises in the region.

But this model failed in Yemen — just as it has failed, and will continue to fail, in the rest of the Middle East.

The Yemen model: support for whatever proxy is available + drone strikes = success!

The "Yemen model" of counterterrorism is all about achieving short-term goals. It focuses on treating the symptoms of terrorism — going after specific militant targets and attempting to disrupt specific plots — but does nothing to address the underlying political problems that allow terrorist organizations to flourish. The US partners with whichever local group or dictator will help fight our counterterrorism enemies today, then throws in some drone and air strikes to back them up. And sometimes that does bring short-term successes! But evidence is mounting — not that it should have been difficult to see this coming — that the long-term costs of this model outweigh the short-term gains.

In Yemen, in order to fight local terrorist groups, the US initially partnered with Ali Abdullah Saleh, who'd ruled as a dictator for decades. Saleh was generally happy to accept US military aid for operations against the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), although he did have a tendency to exploit the partnership, diverting resources toward his own goals. His regime was undemocratic and un-inclusive, which was one of many factors contributing to his country becoming a haven for terrorists. His rule was also unstable, and eventually collapsed after the Arab Spring.

So then the Obama administration partnered with Saleh's old vice president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who took over as a "transitional" president but did very little transitioning. Hadi was also happy to help the US to bomb terrorists, but he was not very inclusive or democratic, either. His government was ineffective at addressing Yemen's deteriorating economy and security situation, and proved deeply unpopular.

The US was very excited about its "Yemen model" of working with Hadi, but he outraged the country's powerful Houthi movement of Shia Yemenis, who thought they would have a say in the new government. After about a year of this, starting in mid-2014 or so they rose up violently and attacked the capital city.

Hadi's government, too, has now collapsed, leaving Yemen in chaos and AQAP substantially less challenged. Yemeni government forces, focused on fighting the Houthis, can do a lot less about al-Qaeda. US special forces based in Yemen have had to flee, making it difficult or perhaps impossible for the US to carry out drone strikes against militants. Oh, and apparently half a billion dollars' worth of US weapons have gone missing.

The Obama administration saw Yemen as a big success

Throughout this process of Yemen's collapse, current and former administration officials, including President Obama himself, have repeatedly held up Yemen as a model for US counterterrorism. Last June, for instance, Obama singled out Yemen as a model of the approach he hoped would work in Syria. In September, he cited it as a successful example of the strategy he would use to degrade and destroy ISIS. Daniel Benjamin, a former administration counterterrorism official who now teaches at Dartmouth, told the LA Times in June that Yemen is a "basic template for how we do counterterrorism" around the world.

The administration's faith in the Yemen model appears to be unshakable: just last Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration continues to see Yemen as "a template that has succeeded in mitigating the threat that we face from extremists," in that country and elsewhere.

On the day Earnest said this, Yemen had already descended so far into chaos that no one could even tell for sure whether its president had fled the country. (It turned out, according to Saudi state media, that he had.)

It is easy to see why the Obama administration has been so enamored of the Yemen model. It fits with Obama's minimalist, "don't do stupid shit" theory of foreign policy. It doesn't require substantial US ground troops beyond special forces. It offers solid, if limited, short-term gains. But as the current and perhaps predictable mess in Yemen itself shows, the Yemen model is not working very well.

The Yemen model keeps failing — and it keeps failing the same way

This is hardly the first time the Obama administration has employed this counterterrorism model, only to find that it buys short-term solutions at the cost of long-term disaster. In Iraq, the administration for years backed former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Though Maliki was helpful in managing short-term problems, he was very clearly building an authoritarian, sectarian Shia state that marginalized Sunnis and set up Iraq for catastrophe, which then duly occurred.

The Obama administration belatedly realized Maliki's heavy-handed policies were helping create a ready-made base of Sunni support for ISIS. The US finally came to support his successor, Haider al-Abadi, who has indeed been more democratic and less sectarian — but the damage had been done. By then, ISIS had already taken over a large swath of Iraqi territory.

In Libya, a slight variant of the same fundamental model has also turned out very poorly. There, the US had special operations forces on the ground working with Libyan rebels to topple Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, along with US and NATO air power. That was successful in achieving the Obama administration's short-term goals: it prevented the mass atrocities that Qaddafi was rumored to be planning in Benghazi, and it led to Qaddafi's overthrow.

But as proxy war expert Erica Borghard has put it, "The long-term implications, the second- and third-order effects, have not been so dandy." After Qaddafi's overthrow, Libya was left with a power vacuum and has become an attractive destination for militant groups, including an ISIS affiliate. In the long run, that situation "could potentially undermine American and allied security more than Qaddafi did."

Those experiences in Iraq and Libya, not to mention similar US experiences so many times before (sponsoring the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan comes to mind) should have given the Obama administration pause about whether its minimalist, short-term, work-through-local-proxies model works. But that doesn't appear to have happened.

Rather, the administration continued to tout that Yemen approach, calling it a model for intervention against ISIS in Syria and refusing to admit that Yemen is anything other than a success story.

And that led to the bizarre spectacle, last Wednesday, of White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest flailing haplessly in response to questions about how Yemen could be considered a success. He lamely contended, "We have not seen that kind of — of — of progress in terms of strengthening the central government. I think you could make a pretty strong case that we've seen the opposite of that. But we do, you know, we do continue to enjoy the benefits of a sustained counterterrorism security relationship with the security infrastructure that remains in Yemen."

You know, I think you could make a pretty strong case that we've "seen the opposite of that," considering that the central government has now for all intents and purposes ceased to exist.

The underlying problem is that Obama is so eager to avoid doing "stupid shit" that he's reluctant to even look at the big picture

There are, it turns out, limitations in Obama's "don't do stupid shit" theory of foreign policy. As David Rothkopf pointed out in Foreign Policy last year, this animating ideology appears to primarily be focused on limiting the negative effects of US action — it's designed to avoid "doing" things that have bad consequences, not to avoid bad consequences overall.

No one expects the Obama administration to solve all of the problems in the Middle East. The inherent instability of current and former dictatorships, combined with sectarian tensions and regional power dynamics, means there are no easy solutions available. And certainly, as the yearslong US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan show, being too ambitious about the capabilities of US power can be disastrous.

But it's a bit peculiar to assume, as the present leader of the free world appears to have done, that you are being graded only on your actions, not on overall results. The Obama administration may think it has a successful track record of identifying and averting specific threats to the interests of the US and its allies. But what it actually has is a track record of identifying and averting specific threats, but doing very little to address the root causes of those threats — and then being caught unawares when those root causes lead to catastrophic chaos. Which, in turn, proves to be far worse than the threats the administration was trying to address in the first place.

One would have to grade on quite a curve to call that a success.

Obama seems to assume the only two options are either short-term thinking or hubristic, Bush-style attempts to remake the region in America's interests. But surely there is some middle ground available that takes underlying political problems into account, and accepts short-term costs in exchange for pursuit of long-term gains. But instead, we get the continuous insistence that the Yemen model is super-duper awesome in the face of its obvious, significant, demonstrable failures.

That is a frustrating sign that the administration has let its fear of getting drawn into "stupid shit" lead it to do exactly that.