The U.S. won't dump favored autocrats in the Middle East.
Josh Rogin reports:
'"The old days of â??as long as we can make a positive relationship with the autocrat who's running the place, then we are friends with the country' are dead and gone," Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) told a group of reporters over breakfast on Wednesday."We have to be much more interested in trying to get the actual populations in those countries to be supportive of us," Smith said. "What we have to start thinking about in the foreign policy establishment is what shifts in our foreign policy do we need to make to target the populations."
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This sounds like a great headline, but is it going to happen? Color me skeptical. The U.S. didn't undertake a comprehensive rethink of its Middle East policy following 9/11, why would it do so now? Consider just how serious the changes would be if the U.S. dumped its favored autocrats in favor of newly empowered democratic governments. It would be far more difficult to keep a "cold peace" between Israel and her neighbors, something American foreign policy is currently heavily invested in. Then there's basing rights. It will be difficult to sustain a forward operating presence in a region that manifestly rejects it if that region suddenly gets a say.
As we have seen following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, American foreign policy is very, very slow to react to these kinds of seismic shifts (and let's not put the cart before the horse here, no autocracy has actually been replaced with a democracy yet). And Washington has shown zero willingness to dismantle or reject a hegemonic position in any region of the world once it's established itself, as it has in the Middle East.
Right now, we have a rather odd dynamic in the U.S. where many of the champions of American hegemony in the Middle East are urging on the very steps that would make the Middle East far more hostile to that hegemony. This is an incoherent position and if the Middle East does truly move toward democracy, and if countries like Egypt start behaving like Turkey, this incoherence will only become more obvious.