Editor's letter: The Middle East, reconsidered

last updated 8 January 2015

Events now bring us to a rather unpleasant thought: What if Egypt—and Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and most of the Islamic world—aren’t interested in becoming liberal democracies? In a fine essay in The-American-Interest.com this week, Walter Russell Mead points out that it wasn’t just the neocons who believed, with near-religious fervor, that it was the destiny of these nations to throw off autocratic rule, hold elections, and embrace Western values. Liberal Democrats—including President Obama—were swept up in this fantasy, too, in the giddy aftermath of the Arab Spring. (A nation with Twitter has to be free!) But as is so often the case with elections, the “wrong” side won in Egypt, and its brief flirtation with democracy appears to be over. Both the Obama administration and its critics, Mead says, now face the sobering realization that freedom and democracy aren’t inevitable—and that the U.S. has very limited influence in the region: “We can’t fix Pakistan, we can’t fix Egypt, we can’t fix Iraq, we can’t fix Saudi Arabia, and we can’t fix Syria.”

Why did we ever think otherwise? Human beings are, by nature, tribal creatures. Democracy is unnatural. For it to work (and then, just barely), a society must have an educated middle class and a philosophical commitment—developed over centuries—to free speech, religious tolerance, individual liberty, and the checks and balances of a constitutional system. These values are not widely held in Egypt or most of the Middle East, even by those we’ve bribed with billions of dollars and our finest weapons. These societies will come to democracy in their own sweet time, over the course of decades or even centuries. Or not. The nerve of them.