Article 4.
The American Interest
The Conservative Revolutionary
Walter Russell Mead
June 12, 2011 -- The United States is the most revolutionary power in the history of the world, but after more than 200 years of a brilliant revolutionary career we are still not very good at understanding or responding to the revolutions our example, our ideas, our economy and our technology do so much to create.
The Arab spring is the latest example of the clash between America’s revolutionary world role and our pathetic cluelessness about the forces we do so much to promote. The Arab Spring is turning into a long, hot summer. Civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen and the sullen silence of the Shi’a in Bahrain have baptized Arab democracy in blood. More will flow — and American foreign policy is befuddled and bemused.
None of the experts look particularly smart at the moment. The ‘realists’ who counseled President Obama to forget George W. Bush’s support of Middle Eastern democracy and cultivate our relations with regional despots like Hosni Mubarak, the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace. Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the ‘realists’ would have put the US on the wrong side of history in the service of unrealistic assumptions about the stability of despotic regimes.
But the idealists who seek to replace them already have egg on their faces. “Days, not weeks” is what they promised the President when he began to bomb for democracy in Libya. The democratic revolution in Egypt is looking less democratic by the day; it looks more and more as if the Army used public unrest to block the
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031886