… But such lessons were quickly forgotten as Arab regimes regained control through military coups, political engineering, and wide-ranging repression. Autocrats throughout the region helped other autocrats restore their power, and the West simply stood by. The United States, for example, did not act as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf states supported Bahrain’s vicious repression of its protests in 2011 and poured financial and political support into the 2013 Egyptian military coup. The autocratic restoration that followed brought a level of repression that went far beyond that which had existed before 2011, with regimes across the region crushing and silencing civil society, fearing any resurgence of opposition. Digital surveillance aided these repressive measures, giving regimes unprecedentedly nuanced understandings of their citizens’ views and the potential for opposition movements to appear.
The autocratic restoration quickly resulted in the return of an older model of Western foreign policy based on cooperating with autocratic elites and ignoring the views of Arab publics.…
…. U.S. President Joe Biden, despite promising campaign rhetoric, instead wholeheartedly embraced Trump’s approach to the Middle East, pushing for Arab-Israeli normalization and ignoring democracy and human rights. After his inauguration in 2021, Biden abandoned his promises to put human rights first and make Saudi Arabia a pariah for its murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its war on Yemen.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/coming-arab-backlash
Interesting article looking at the US policies in the Middle East. Maybe we can just skip the same old same old arguments about Israel and see why the region does not see the US as a supporter of democracy or free speech. No a good record but we still seem hell bent on continuing down the same path.
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