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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • Tunisia
influence the calculations of these domestic actors. It can help delegitimize
rulers in the eyes of their people; it can cause elites to question whether tying
themselves to their leader’s policies serves their interests; it can encourage
and amplify domestic voices calling for change. Precisely because it can
be consequential, it is hard to bring such pressure to bear without causing
diplomatic friction. The alternative, however, is to be inconsequential.
There is another reason why many American diplomats hesitate to challenge
authoritarian governments in public: They believe that those governments
will resist reform no matter what the United States says or does. I’ve
had many conversations with State Department officials in which they have
said something like: “Sure, our diplomatic engagement with Country X
won’t make it better on human rights. But neither will sanctions or public
criticism or anything else.” This cynicism is understandable. History may
teach us that authoritarian regimes project a forced (and therefore false) stability—that
over a 20- or 30-year time frame, most will experience dramatic
political upheaval. But at any given moment, the prospects for real human
rights progress in places like Uzbekistan, China, or Iran are very small.
If you were a State Department official and Hillary Clinton asked you
every day: “What will the weather be like tomorrow” and gave you points
that you could cash in for career advancement every time you got the answer
right, the safest strategy would be to answer that the weather tomorrow
will be the same as the weather today. Likewise, on any given Sunday, the
safest approach to engaging most of the world’s dictatorships is to assume
that they will be governed in exactly the same way on Monday, and base
policy on that assumption. Why risk diplomatic relationships—and one’s
own reputation as a prognosticator—on strategies for promoting change
that are not likely to work before you move on to your next diplomatic post
It would have been rational, for example, for American diplomats to believe
that the revolution in Tunisia was unlikely to spur similarly successful
popular movements in other authoritarian Arab countries, such as Egypt
and Algeria. But by the same token, it would have been rational for them
to believe just a month ago that no such revolution was possible in Tunisia.
Or to discount the likelihood that the people of Kyrgyzstan would overthrow
their corrupt government just weeks before it happened last year. Or
to dismiss as a pipe dream that the mighty Soviet Union would fall and that
60