Walter Russell Mead: The Conservative Revolutionary

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for The American Interest.

The United States is the most revolutionary power in the history of the world, but after more than 200 years of a brilliant revolutionary career we are still not very good at understanding or responding to the revolutions our example, our ideas, our economy and our technology do so much to create.

The Arab spring is the latest example of the clash between America’s revolutionary world role and our pathetic cluelessness about the forces we do so much to promote.  The Arab Spring is turning into a long, hot summer.  Civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen and the sullen silence of the Shi’a in Bahrain have baptized Arab democracy in blood.  More will flow — and American foreign policy is befuddled and bemused.

None of the experts look particularly smart at the moment.  The ‘realists’ who counseled President Obama to forget George W. Bush’s support of Middle Eastern democracy and cultivate our relations with regional despots like Hosni Mubarak, the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace.  Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the ‘realists’ would have put the US on the wrong side of history in the service of unrealistic assumptions about the stability of despotic regimes.

But the idealists who seek to replace them already have egg on their faces.  “Days, not weeks” is what they promised the President when he began to bomb for democracy in Libya.  The democratic revolution in Egypt is looking less democratic by the day; it looks more and more as if the Army used public unrest to block the Mubarak family’s attempt to turn Egypt into a family possession.  The Army has ruled Egypt since the overthrow of King Farouk, playing liberals and religious conservatives off against each other.  It looks set to go on doing that for some time to come.  In Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the counsel of the idealists seems dark and confused.  US policy overall seems to have found the ‘sour spot’ that is the particular curse of the Obama administration: too friendly to the revolt to earn the trust and gratitude of the despots, too cautious and compromising to win many friends on the street...