It's the Arab Winter and the U.S. Feels a Chill | Opinion

I remember the tension in Cairo, about a decade ago, with my colleagues and friends essentially on a vigil, waiting for the Egyptian military to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. So soon after the so-called Arab Spring, it was obvious to everyone with acumen that this was coming.

But here's the odd thing: many of the more educated, wealthy, and sophisticated among the locals were eager for it. The basic assumption that is so widely held in the West—that people want freedom and democracy—did not hold. Many wanted something else.

The reason for this was as simple as it was dispiriting: they did not trust their fellow Egyptians to make wise choices on leadership and policy, not least because more than a quarter of the population is illiterate. Many of those who were better off believed their fellow citizens were ignorant and susceptible to manipulation.

And manipulation by the Muslim Brotherhood meant exposure to the well-funded skullduggery of a global Islamist spin machine which masks—but only barely—a desire to install an Iran-like theocracy wherever possible. When such are the fruits of majority rule, you will find "elites" looking for other systems of government.

In Egypt's case, in its year or so in power, the Brotherhood government of President Mohammed Morsi proved mild. I recall fevered talk of how "bikinis and booze" would soon be outlawed after Morsi was declared the winner of the first presidential election of the post Hosni Mubarak era. He was the recipient of 51 percent of the 26 million valid votes cast.

No such thing happened, and we may never know if it was part of the Brotherhood plan because Morsi was ousted by the military on July 3, 2013.

Journalists in Egypt at the time faced absurd pressures not to label what had taken place a "military coup," based on the irrefutable but irrelevant fact that Morsi's ouster coincided with large public protests against him. Either way, despite several highly stage-managed elections since then, only the very naïve would claim Egypt today is a democracy. Not only Muslim brothers but many other regime opponents languish in jail—where Morsi himself died—and freedom of speech is for the tremendously brave or terribly foolish.

At the same time, I know that many in the Egyptian elite are happy enough that "stability" has been restored and that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a clear enemy of Islamist extremism and terror groups like the once-fearsome Islamic State. I agree with them that this is not nothing. But democracy, at least in the way that we define it in the West, clearly did not take hold in Egypt.

Much of the rest of the region did even worse:

Syria has been ripped to pieces by a horrifying civil war—yet the forces arrayed against President Bashar Assad have not succeeded in toppling him from his perch in Damascus. This man, despised for his use of poison gas on his own people, responsible for at least a half million deaths (the U.N. gave up counting), and cause of the internal displacement of a third of the nation's population of 21 million (among other crimes), is slowly being welcomed back into the bosom of nations.

In Libya, dictator Moammar Ghadafi was killed in a heinous televised lynching after a brief uprising in which insurgents were aided by the West. But instead of stability, the end of the dictatorship has brought almost a decade of further war in which many thousands died while the country endured rule by militias and militants. It has also become an abusive conduit for African migrants to Europe. A tense quiet has prevailed since 2020.

In Yemen, hundreds of thousands have died in a war featuring Iran-backed Houthi rebels and forces backed by the Saudis. Despite truce efforts in 2022 fighting grinds on and the country features the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.

Lebanon has been rendered almost ungovernable by a huge influx of refugees from neighboring (and once dominating) Syria, and the country is still effectively under the boot of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia (which at any time could trigger another ruinous war with Israel). Its economy, too, is in free fall.

And monarchies throughout the region—from Jordan to Saudi Arabia to the Gulf—have weathered the storm and conceded very little to the Lockean theory of the consent of the governed. They are, basically, what they were.

About the closest thing to a democracy in the region (outside of Israel, which is itself troubled) is Iraq—and it's actually not that close. Twenty years ago, the United States blundered in to remove Saddam Hussein under false pretenses. For much of the time since, the country has been beset by wild militias and terrorists of every kind, resulting in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. At present, elections are basically a census of its various ethnic and religious groups, and the country is distressingly under the sway of neighboring theocracy Iran. As if that isn't enough, a more mild instability remains. Considerably less than a year ago parliament was stormed twice—not least because of raging corruption.

The bright spot—for a little while longer—is probably Tunisia. Though in 2021 the president seized broad powers, Freedom House judges it to be "free," which is no small thing. Maybe that's because leader Kais Saied held a retroactive, low-turnout referendum. That is some small consolation, considering that it was in Tunisia that the so-called Arab Spring was sparked by the December 2010 self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a desperate fruit and vegetable vendor who seemed to offer a sacrifice on behalf of all Arabs humiliated by their horrible governments.

Is this dismal landscape the sum of the Arab Spring's ambition? Can it possibly be the sole fruit of Bouazizi's sacrifice? Is the emergence of what is clearly an Arab Winter a case of the forces of evil prevailing—or human nature revealed?

Might it be folly for Westerners to assume all people yearn to breathe free? Do they not yearn for it? Are they not deserving of it? Simply put, the answer is not so simple.

Travel the world and talk to people, and you will see that everywhere most people tend to reduce democracy to its more vulgar baseline—of majority rule.

The idea that genuine democracy is liberal democracy is a distressed one. It is unclear to some people that a democracy worth living under guarantees human rights, myriad freedoms, and minority protections, all guarded by a separation of powers, checks and balances. And all of it needs fighting for.

Israel is the proof that the fight isn't brief and easily won, but rather enduring. A mammoth struggle is underway to preserve the country's democracy from the clutches of the rightist-religious coalition headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Similar struggles have been lost in Hungary and Poland. Many hopes were placed on them after the collapse of communism three decades ago, but the forces of illiberalism have hijacked both nations.

The struggle will be front and center in Turkey on May 14, when authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdogan, two decades into what has come close to a reign of terror, stands for reelection. The world had better be vigilant there.

The struggle is also present in every discussion of the 1.4 billion people of China, when someone suggests the Chinese are somehow content with their Communist dictatorship. After all, the specious argument goes, theirs is a hierarchical culture where the masses yearn for a father figure.

But the main event, on center stage, almost a quarter century after the American Century, is in the United States. If Donald Trump is somehow elected president again in 2024, it will be taken as a sign by the entire planet that the Arab Winter has become a global one.

Dan Perry is managing partner of the New York-based communications firm Thunder11. He is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.