Nabil Fahmy, Egypt's former ambassador to Washington, was commenting during a recent visit to the United States about the prospects for the Arab Spring. He cautioned that Americans didn't understand the weather in his part of the world. For Arabs, he said, it is always either summer or winter.
After the exhilarating days in Tahrir Square that led to the resignation on Feb. 11 of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, many observers have felt a chill in the political air -- whatever the season may be. The first electoral test of the new democracy came in the March 19 constitutional referendum. That resulted in resounding defeat for the democracy-building "no" vote urged by many leaders of the Tahrir Square revolution -- and a thumping 77 percent victory for the "yes" position advocated by the unspoken alliance between the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt's democratic revolutionaries, to be sure, are fighting back. They have stepped up their own political organizing and are forming new parties. They see the danger that their revolution will be hijacked, and they are organizing against that outcome.
To say that there are dangers ahead for Egypt and its neighbors is only to state the obvious. For the historical truth is that although revolutions are always lovable in their infancy, they tend to become less so as they age. The idealistic youth on the barricades, who seem drawn from the cast of Les Misérables, are replaced by small groups of determined revolutionaries who have the will and ideological or religious determination to steer the masses. And the revolutionary disorder, which seemed so exciting at first, becomes dark and insecure to the point that people demand order and give up the freedoms they fought so hard to obtain.
I don't mean to predict that the Arab Spring will turn to winter. In truth, we don't know where this process is heading; there are too many inflection points and uncertainties. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had it right when he said in March that this is "dark territory"; it's impossible to read the overhead imagery, so to speak, and know what's down there in terms of outcomes. In what follows, I want to offer a skeptical analytical look -- not predicting failure, but warning of obstacles ahead.
First, the reality of the Arab revolution: In my more than 30 years of covering foreign news, I have never seen anything quite like what is happening now in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria -- and datelines yet to be announced. I see this process as part of a "global political awakening" -- a movement for change that is enabled and accelerated by modern technology, but is also comparable to some other periods of revolutionary change in modern history.
I owe the "awakening" idea to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Three years ago, with the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaching, I worked with Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft on a book called America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy. The theme was that a global process of change was under way -- and that the basics of U.S. foreign policy needed to be reimagined by the next president. In my introduction, I described the central insight of these two former national security advisors this way: "Both men describe a political revolution that's sweeping the world -- Brzezinski speaks of a global awakening, while Scowcroft describes a yearning for dignity. They want America on the side of that process of change."
We are now seeing the full force of that political awakening as it sweeps across the Middle East. How and why did it happen? What similar events have occurred in the past? And what are the consequences for America?
PEDRO UGARTE/AFP/Getty Images
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