Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • barack obama
RIP, Engagement
BY JAMES TRAUB
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a radical rethinking inside the administration
of President George W. Bush about the purposes of American
foreign policy—above all in the Middle East. “Realism died on 9/11,” as an
administration official told me several years later. Changing the insides of
states had become a matter of national security no less urgent than affecting
their external behavior. Bush, previously a hardheaded realist, became an
ardent proponent of democracy promotion.
But the problem—or at least the biggest problem—was that while the terrorist
attacks had changed the United States, they hadn’t changed the place
where the United States hoped to act. Terrorism had made democratic reform
more urgent without making it a whit more likely. Autocratic leaders
in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere regarded the president’s new
preoccupation as a mere irritant.
Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, it’s that world, not the United States, that’s
changing. The Tunisian people took to the streets and ousted a tyrant, just as
the people in the Philippines, Chile, Romania, and Georgia once did. And
that spectacle inspired young people and activists across the region, from
the next-to-fall regime in Egypt to those now tottering in Yemen and Bahrain,
Algeria and elsewhere. Arab leaders are shakier today, and their critics
more emboldened, than they were before. And Barack Obama, like Bush
before him, must adapt to a Middle East different from the one he inherited.
A region that has felt paralyzed by autocratic rule is now in motion.
Leaders are backpedaling. Even before the uprising that toppled his boss,
you could almost smell the fear in the likes of Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt’s
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