Throughout the Arab spring, analysts and policymakers have debated the proper role that the United States should be playing in the Middle East. A small number argued that the U.S. should adopt a more interventionist policy to address Arab grievances; others, that Arab grievances are themselves the result of our aggressive, interventionist policies; and still more that intervention was simply not in our national self-interest. The Obama administration, for its part, attempted to split the difference, moving slowly, especially at the outset, to censure dictators like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Bashar Al Assad in Syria, while eventually supporting aggressive military action against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya.<\/p>\n
The reasons for the Obama administration\u2019s passivity during the Arab spring have been many, but perhaps none is more helpful in explaining it than the notion of \u201cdeclinism.\u201d With the exception of neoconservatives and a relatively small group of liberal hawks, nearly everyone seems to think America has less power to shape events than it used to. An endless stream of books and articles has riffed on this theme. The most well-known of the genre are Fareed Zakaria\u2019s The Post-American World<\/em>, Parag Khanna\u2019s The Second World<\/em>, and, from a more academic perspective, Charles Kupchan\u2019s The End of the American Era<\/em>.The Obama administration has appropriated some of the main arguments of this literature. An advisor to Obama described U.S. strategy in Libya as \u201cleading from behind,\u201d which Ryan Lizza, in The New Yorker<\/em>, explained as coming from the belief \u201cthat the relative power of the U.S. is declining \u2026 and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n But in an ironic twist of fate, even as Americans seem to be placing an all-time low amount of faith in their ability to effect change around the world, many Arabs participating in the recent uprisings\u2014despite their apparent fear and loathing of U.S. power\u2014placed a disproportionate amount of their faith and hopes upon us. Americans\u2014and American liberals, in particular\u2014have yet to grasp this basic paradox. In their time of need, facing imprisonment, torture, and even death, protesters, rebels, and would-be revolutionaries still look to the United States, not elsewhere. Whether they find what they\u2019re looking for is another matter.<\/p>\n During the Bush administration, when anti-American sentiment spread like wildfire across the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq, policymakers on all sides of the political spectrum, but particularly liberals, gravitated away from support for interventionism in general and democracy promotion in particular. The \u201ckiss of death\u201d hypothesis\u2014in which overt American support for Arab democracy movements is considered toxic to the cause\u2014became commonplace.<\/p>\n But it is worth noting that Bush\u2019s short-lived embrace of Mideast democratic reform\u2014despite his deep personal unpopularity throughout the region\u2014did not appear to hurt the Arab reform movement, and, if anything, did the opposite. This is something that reformers themselves reluctantly admit. In 2005, at the height of the first Arab spring, the liberal Egyptian publisher and activist Hisham Kassem said, \u201cEighty percent of political freedom in this country is the result of U.S. pressure.\u201d And it isn\u2019t just liberals who felt this way. Referring to the Bush administration\u2019s efforts, the prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh told me in August 2006, \u201cEveryone knows it. \u2026 We benefited, everyone benefited, and the Egyptian people benefited.\u201d<\/p>\n Liberals had often told the world\u2014and, perhaps more importantly, themselves\u2014that the Bush administration\u2019s destructive policies were a historic anomaly. When a Democrat was elected, America would undo the damage. For many liberals, including myself, this was what Obama could offer that no one else could\u2014a president with a Muslim name, who had grown up in a Muslim country, who seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the place of grievance in Arab public life. But, after President Obama\u2019s brief honeymoon period, the familiar disappointments returned. In a span of just one year, the number of Arabs who said they were \u201cdiscouraged\u201d by the Obama administration\u2019s Middle East policies shot up from 15 percent to 63 percent, according to a University of Maryland\/Zogby poll. By the time the protests began in December 2010, attitudes toward the United States\u00a0had hit rock bottom. In several Arab countries, including Egypt, U.S. favorability ratings were lower under Obama than they were under Bush. Indeed, an odd current of \u201cBush nostalgia\u201d had been very much evident in Arab opposition circles. In May 2010, a prominent Brotherhood member complained to me: \u201cFor Obama, the issue of democracy is fifteenth on his list of priorities. \u2026 There\u2019s no moment of change like there was under Bush.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, while the Arab spring was and is about Arabs, it is also, in some ways, about us. If for decades, the United States was seen as central in supporting autocratic Arab regimes, so it was assumed that it would be just as critical in facilitating their demise. Before the Egyptian revolution, the leader of the liberal April 6 Movement, Ahmed Maher, told The Atlantic<\/em>: \u201cThe problem isn\u2019t with Mubarak\u2019s policies. The problem is with American policy and what the American government wants Mubarak to do. His existence is totally in their hands.\u201d Islamists, meanwhile, have a specific term\u2014the \u201cAmerican veto\u201d\u2014dedicated to a belief in America\u2019s outsize ability to determine Arab outcomes. The United States, so the thinking went, could prevent democratic outcomes not to its liking.<\/p>\n When unrest broke out in Egypt, activists therefore hung on every major American statement, trying their best to interpret the Obama administration\u2019s sometimes impenetrable language. On Al Jazeera, Egyptians asked why the\u00a0United States and Europe weren\u2019t doing more to pressure the Mubarak regime. Two of the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s leading \u201creformists,\u201d Esam el-Erian, as well as Abul Futouh, wrote op-eds in The New York Times<\/em> and The Washington Post<\/em>. Futouh\u2019s op-ed\u2014simultaneously overestimating America\u2019s influence, decrying it, and believing that, somehow, it could be used for good\u2014is representative of the genre: \u201cWe want to set the record straight so that any Middle East policy decisions made in Washington are based on facts. \u2026 With a little altruism, the United States should not hesitate to reassess its interests in the region, especially if it genuinely champions democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n The more repressive the Egyptian regime became, the more impassioned the calls grew. I remember receiving urgent, sometimes heartbreaking calls from Egyptian friends and colleagues. One broke out in tears, telling me that if the U.S. didn\u2019t do something soon, the regime was going to commit a massacre under the cover of darkness. That the military did not open fire appeared to confirm America\u2019s still considerable leverage.<\/p>\n Two days before Mubarak stepped down, I met with several of the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s youth activists. The well-known blogger Abdelrahman Ayyash\u2014only 20 years old at the time\u2014told me that he and other members broke out into applause in Tahrir Square when Obama called for an \u201cimmediate\u201d transition to democracy in Egypt. Ayyash\u2019s remark stood out because it echoed something I have been hearing from activists across the political spectrum for more than five years: Despite their sometimes vociferous anti-Americanism, they almost always seemed to want the\u00a0United States to do more in the region, rather than less. Indeed, while the Egyptian activists were happy to see Obama act, nearly all of them told me the administration stood by Mubarak too long, siding with the protesters only at the last moment.<\/p>\n