Noah Feldman, Harvard law professor and Middle East expert, is a democracy promoter who’s been mugged by reality. In “The Arab Winter: A Tragedy,” he analyzes the wave of popular protests that swept the Middle East in 2011. The Arab Spring, as it was optimistically called, generated a sense that democracy was spreading across the region just as it had, in previous decades, across Eastern Europe and Latin America. With the benefit of hindsight, Mr. Feldman now concedes that the Arab Spring “brought little good.” A single ray of light did appear in Tunisia, but everywhere else the “heroic narrative” gave way to “something much darker.”
Arriving at this assessment is personally painful for Mr. Feldman. In 2003, the Bush administration sent him to Iraq as a constitutional adviser. That experience generated the book “What We Owe Iraq,” which argued that the promotion of democracy was both a moral and a strategic imperative. “The Arab Winter” is both a sobering coda to that earlier work and a personal milestone. “As an observer and occasional participant, I feel no longer young and idealistic, but chastened and middle-aged,” he writes.
Yet Mr. Feldman still fans the embers of youthful idealism. A second Arab Spring will come, he promises, but it’s perhaps “a generation” away. By declaring that democracy has only been delayed, not canceled, he allows the dream to live on. Indeed, keeping it alive is the explicit goal of the book, which Mr. Feldman describes alternately as an effort to “save the Arab Spring from the verdict of implicit nonexistence” and to rescue it from a “narrative of nihilism.”
This mission requires countering two currents of thought,one of which depicts the Arab Spring as a mirage. Many observers, both Western and Middle Eastern, analyze Middle East politics in terms of the machinations of American “imperialists,” who pull the strings of their puppets on the ground. Devoting separate chapters to Egypt, Syria, the Islamic State and Tunisia, Mr. Feldman argues persuasively that the Arab Spring ushered in a new era, characterized by politics from below. Arabs exercised “political agency,” working courageously for a more just political order.
The second pessimistic current of thought claims that the soil of the Middle East is uniquely hostile to democracy. Mr. Feldman’s rebuttal of this view rests heavily on the example of Tunisia’s fledgling democratic experiment—too heavily. The Tunisian experience is exceptional. Tunisia is a classic nation-state, one in which the boundaries of a cohesive society and the boundaries of the state that governs it are coterminous. Such a felicitous fit is a gift from the gods. It is the product of historical processes centuries in the making. Even the most enlightened of leaders cannot will it into being.
Few fits between state and society are less felicitous than the brutal realities of Syria, where rival ethno-religious groups feel closer to their brethren in neighboring states than to their countrymen. Failure to give the differences between the two cases their proper due leads Mr. Feldman to explain the chaos and violence in Syria as the result of the Syrian regime’s bad judgment. Tunisia “suggests that the collapse of Syria need not have been inevitable,” he writes. The Arab Spring, according to this view, offered Tunisians and Syrians alike the chance of a better future. The Tunisians had the good sense to seize the opportunity, but the Syrians did not. Next time maybe the Syrians will act with greater wisdom.
Mr. Feldman’s point about “political agency,” the ability of individuals to shape events from the ground up, is well taken, but he overstates it. As a result, he also gives short shrift to the American role. The United States was not a puppet master, but its policies did influence events.
Take, for example, Egypt. President Obama was a major force behind the ouster of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a longstanding ally. A naive faith in the democratizing power of the Arab Spring is what convinced Mr. Obama to turn against America’s friend. “The world is changing. You can’t maintain power through coercion,” the president said in justifying his decision to call publicly for Mubarak’s ouster. “We were on the right side of history,” he added.“It was very important for this to remain an Egyptian event.”
Being on the right side of history meant, in this case, empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, a sworn enemy of the United States. Meanwhile, in Syria, Russia and Iran forged a military alliance that helped Bashar al-Assad mow down and gas civilians with impunity. Iran, more broadly, exploited the Arab Spring to spread militias armed with precision-guided weapons across the Middle East.
President Obama misread the meaning of the crowds. He assumed people power would check the ambitions of America’s enemies and thus inadvertently allowed the worst actors in the Middle East to devour the best. When the Arab Spring first erupted, America was better situated than any other power to shape events to its advantage, but when the dust settled it had been outmaneuvered at every turn.
President George W. Bush, similarly, placed excessive faith in the potential of democracy promotion to stabilize Iraq and safeguard American interests. It was, that is to say, a characteristically American miscalculation. Both presidents believed that, in a democratizing moment, the wheels of history will do the work of American foreign policy all by themselves. When our leaders allow their trust in the inherent power of democracy to override the basic logic of supporting friends and punishing enemies, they serve neither our values nor our interests.
In this age of hyper-specialization, Noah Feldman is that rarest of things: an academic generalist. He asks big questions about matters of public importance and offers clear answers. That is highly commendable. His effort to keep the flame of democracy promotion burning is not. There comes a time to put away the idealism of youth.
Read in the Wall Street Journal