1848: History

Robert D. Kaplan is one of my favourite writers and kudos to Stratfor for hiring him.  He writes below of the challenge posed to the Middle East's fragile order by the West's renewed push for democracy.

One of the ongoing problems of the post-11 September 2001 world is that, in order to fight Sunni jihadists, it somehow became necessary that everywhere in the Middle East be made into a secular democracy.  The rationale for this was never explained by the Bush Administration and the proposition was, sadly, never challenged by sufficient numbers of conservative Americans, custodians of the realpolitik tradition.  As a result, the years since 2001 have been seen, inter alia, the US and its allies attempt to remediate Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and now Syria.  At the same time, even allies hosting US facilities like Bahrain have been pressured to give more ground to dissentients even ones allied to Iran.  However this toppling of previously friendly or at least benign Arab regimes has come at a cost - to locals, to Arab women and to Arab Christians.  No one seems to have thought ahead and asked "what comes next"?  It is almost as if no lesson was learned from the Iraq debacle.  At no stage has the national interest test been passed whereby any Western country can say its security has been improved because, say, Mubarak has been toppled and now a military council (requiring Islamist backing) is in charge.



"While there is no equivalent in the Middle East of the Habsburg system, not every dictatorial regime in the Arab world is expendable for some of the same reasons that Habsburg Austria's was not. That is the burdensome reality of the Middle East today: If conservative -- even reactionary -- orders are necessary for inter-communal peace, then they may survive in one form or another, or at least resurface in places such as Egypt and Iraq."


Read more: 1848: History's Shadow Over the Middle East, by Robert D. Kaplan | Stratfor


1848: History



I should add, meanwhile, that while the US is expending billions to somehow perfect the Middle East, the US is borrowing the money from China ... what sense is there in such a policy?