POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
military aid and full bilateral cooperation with a
reestablished, military-dominated government in
Egypt. This new reticence was most evident in 2013,
when the administration declined to take military
action against the Syrian government even though
the regime had used chemical weapons against
civilians, and the cancer of ISIS was metastasizing
across Syria and back into Iraq, threatening
Obama’s tentative success in withdrawing forces
from Baghdad. Indeed, just one year later, the fall of
Mosul to ISIS compelled the president to announce
the reinsertion of American forces into combat in
the Middle East. Today, American military officials
speak of the war against ISIS and its regional allies
as a battle that will last for years. 46
In the years prior to the Arab uprisings, the
United States and other outside parties sought
to encourage liberalizing political, economic, and
social reforms that they believed would move
regional governments toward
more responsive and effective
governance and stave off crisis.
The incentives offered were
insufficient to overcome the fear
of change, the vested interests,
and the other forces driving
regional leaders and the elites
who supported them away from
the necessary path. Perhaps no
external incentives would have
been sufficient given the state
of governance in the region and
the obstacles to change, but the
incentives provided were limited,
and the expectations set forth were inconsistent and
often muddied or overridden by other, often shortterm,
interests that pushed Western governments
toward robust support for existing governments
despite their weaknesses.
After the crisis of 2011, the United States proclaimed
support for democratic transitions, but amidst
budget battles with Congress, competing aid
priorities, and a preference for burden sharing with
Europe, it provided little material support for those
transitions. It proposed a major new aid program to
advance positive reforms (the MENA Incentive Fund,
worth $770 million), but did not lobby Congress
to appropriate funds for its implementation.
Washington also quickly found that fearful autocrats
46 Tamara Cofman Wittes, “The Slipperiest Slope of Them All,”
The Atlantic, March 12, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/
international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-goldberginaction/473520/.
. . . [T]he United
States found
itself with limited
influence over the
political trajectory
of the region after
2011. . .
facing new challenges were not especially drawn to
embrace limited American incentives for democratic
change; they prioritized their own survival, and made
clear their displeasure when American preferences
for political outcomes diverged from their own.
Some major US partners in the region made clear
their determination to invest in opposing American
preferences in specific cases like Egypt, Libya, and
Bahrain. Faced with the steely counterrevolutionary
determination among key regional partners, the
Obama administration saw little to be gained in
confronting its traditional friends over domestic
governance when it needed their cooperation on
the Iranian nuclear negotiations, energy policy, the
Middle East peace process, and the urgent security
challenge from ISIS.
At the end of the day, the United States was willing
to accept democratization in the MENA (Middle East
and North Africa) region, but saw no compelling
reason to fight for it. This was, at
the least, shortsighted. And yet,
in rhetorical declarations and also
in private conversations, Obama
administration officials still hold
to their analytical judgment from
May 2011 that stability in the
Middle East requires democratic
reform and the empowerment of
individuals both politically and
economically. Administration
officials express no optimism
about the outcomes of Sisi’s
authoritarian experiment; indeed,
they are increasingly alarmed at
the degradation of the Egyptian state, even as they
are resigned to their inability to do anything about it.
In my assessment, the United States found itself
with limited influence over the political trajectory
of the region after 2011 for three reasons: 1) it did
not consistently back its announced preference
for democratic reform with resources (either
carrots or sticks) or consistent policy focus, instead
leaping from crisis to crisis and taking a “wait
and see” attitude; 2) it held back from engaging
in some arenas (especially Iraq) where it could
have influenced domestic governance, from the
belief that it could not or should not play a larger
role or from a desire to avoid responsibility for
potential negative outcomes; and 3) it found itself
increasingly at odds with its main regional partners
regarding the sources of the regional upheaval, the
drivers of ongoing instability, and the necessary
pathway to return the region to a stable order. As
34 ATLANTIC COUNCIL