This month marks the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden’s promise to end “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” The announcement, among other things, represented a major public relations victory for the administration just weeks into its first term. Hailed, perhaps for good reason, as a “dramatic” shift in America’s foreign policy and a clear break with the course pursued by Donald Trump, it’s today unclear how much, if anything, has qualitatively changed.

Though Biden’s statement generally scanned as unequivocal — and was widely reported as such — it also included a passing mention of continued US support for Saudi Arabia in a defensive capacity. As the Intercept’s Alex Emmons noted last April, the administration consequently offered few details about how it actually planned to distinguish defense from offense, the upshot of which was that forty members of Congress were compelled to send an open letter asking for clarity.

In its much-delayed reply, the State Department effectively stonewalled: offering few new details about its attitude toward future arms sales or how exactly it proposed to delineate between offensive and defensive support — leaving one Democratic signatory to lament what he called a “disappointing non-answer from the Biden administration.” As Representative Peter DeFazio told the Intercept in May: