{"id":8924,"date":"2011-05-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brookings.alley.test\/research\/a-history-of-meddling\/"},"modified":"2022-09-09T09:11:50","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T09:11:50","slug":"a-history-of-meddling","status":"publish","type":"on-the-record","link":"https:\/\/mecouncil-afkar.fuegodigitalmedia.qa\/en\/on-the-record\/a-history-of-meddling\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Meddling"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a\u00a0video debate on bloggingheads.tv,<\/a>\u00a0Shadi Hamid discusses President Obama’s Middle East speech, the current situations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and broader implications for U.S. policy.<\/i><\/p>\n

Shadi Hamid: <\/strong>I thought [Obama’s speech] was a rather pedestrian speech and disappointing in a number of ways, and the last thing I would call it is “ambitious.” […] There was nothing, I mean America always says that it\u2019s on the side of democracy and reform, so all the rhetoric was there, that was nothing new, but what I found surprising was that there were no surprises in this speech. The White House spokesman Jay Carney had been talking about a sweeping, comprehensive speech that really brings all the different strands of U.S. policy together and I didn\u2019t really see that. Where were the bold new initiatives? Where was the vision? Saying that you support democracy in the Middle East is not a vision. There was some criticism of Bahrain; that\u2019s nice. That was welcomed, and I think the Bahraini opposition appreciated that. But what are we going to do about Bahrain? So we have to figure out how we translate that rhetoric, where we say we support democracy, into actual policy changes on the ground. I was waiting to hear a road map, I was waiting to hear how that kind of comes together, and it wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Shadi Hamid:<\/strong> I agree that the goals are ambitious, but America\u2019s role, as presented by the Obama administration, was less so. I didn\u2019t really see, and this is where we get to the discussion about Obama\u2019s general foreign policy orientation and that big New Yorker article; there was this description of Obama leading from behind and I think that\u2019s really an appropriate way of describing how the U.S. now sees itself in the broader community. That we\u2019re going to be humble, we\u2019re going to move back, we\u2019re going to let others lead, it\u2019s up to Arabs to make their own decisions (and of course it is, no one\u2019s disagreeing with that), but what I found to be a little bit disingenuous in a lot of this kind of talk is we aren\u2019t a neutral party. We aren\u2019t innocent bystanders here that are going to just kind of jump in altruistically and what I had actually wanted to see Obama do is acknowledge America\u2019s really, quite frankly, tragic role in the region over the last five decades and say \u2018listen (and address this to Arab audiences), we made serious mistakes. We supported autocratic regimes for five decades. We did not support your democratic aspirations and you know what? We were wrong.\u2019 And I had actually written an article for Slate the day before this speech where I called on Obama to actually issue an apology. And I knew of course that wasn\u2019t going to be realistic, but at the very least acknowledgement of that kind of role because if we don\u2019t understand where we\u2019ve been, it\u2019s very hard to correct our past policies and come up with a new, bold, ambitious foreign policy if that is, in fact, what we want to do. And I\u2019ve been an advocate of the U.S. fundamentally re-aligning and re-orienting its policy in the Middle East to be in line with Arab democratic aspirations. But I don\u2019t think we can do that until we really face our past and try to understand why is it that we supported these autocratic regimes in the first place and why is it going to be different this time around.<\/p>\n

Watch the full debate \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-8924","on-the-record","type-on-the-record","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mecouncil-afkar.fuegodigitalmedia.qa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/on-the-record\/8924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mecouncil-afkar.fuegodigitalmedia.qa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/on-the-record"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mecouncil-afkar.fuegodigitalmedia.qa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/on-the-record"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mecouncil-afkar.fuegodigitalmedia.qa\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}