{"id":61437,"date":"2020-12-18T10:32:33","date_gmt":"2020-12-17T23:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=61437"},"modified":"2020-12-18T10:32:33","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T23:32:33","slug":"the-legacy-of-the-arab-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-legacy-of-the-arab-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"The legacy of the Arab Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When the struggling street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, he could not possibly have imagined how consequential his desperate protest would be. By sparking a wave of civil unrest across the Arab world, he touched off the region\u2019s most profound transformation since decolonisation.<\/p>\n

First, Tunisia\u2019s Jasmine Revolution erupted, leading to the ouster of the country\u2019s longtime president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Protests quickly engulfed other Arab countries, and more autocrats\u2014namely, Egypt\u2019s Hosni Mubarak, Libya\u2019s Muammar Gaddafi, and Yemen\u2019s Ali Abdullah Saleh\u2014were toppled.<\/p>\n

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad managed to hold onto power\u2014at the cost of plunging his country into a brutal civil war that has killed more than half a million people, forced millions to flee the country and left millions more internally displaced. The conflict returned Syria to the Russian fold, and turned its territory into an Iranian-Israeli battlefield.<\/p>\n

Most of those who managed to overthrow their autocrats in the so-called Arab Spring didn\u2019t see their democratic hopes blossom. Yemen\u2019s \u2018Coffee Revolution\u2019 quickly evolved into a civil war between the central government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Though Saleh eventually resigned, the Yemeni people got no relief. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia led a brutal intervention against the Houthis, turning Yemen into the site of a savage proxy war with Iran. The result has been the world\u2019s worst humanitarian catastrophe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As for Libya\u2014already an artificial colonial creation\u2014its regime change, brought about by Western humanitarian intervention, was chaotic. Since 2011, the country has been subsequently torn apart by fighting among forces backed by a variety of external actors, including Egypt, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, as well as renegade generals and local warlords.<\/p>\n

The dominos continued to fall for years, with Algeria\u2019s Hirak Rif Movement erupting in February 2019\u2014six days after Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his candidacy for a fifth presidential term. The protests drove Bouteflika to resign and resulted in a large-scale boycott of the presidential election in December of last year. The winner of that election, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, is merely a new civilian face for seemingly eternal military rule.<\/p>\n

The Arab Spring exposed the innate fragility of many of the affected states. While some leaders managed to hold onto power, and some repressive military apparatuses remain robust, weak legitimacy, often based on rigged elections, leaves them highly vulnerable, especially in the face of tribalist and Islamist sentiment. (It is no coincidence that the Arab monarchies\u2014Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia\u2014which derive their legitimacy largely from religious sources, fared much better than the pseudo-presidential republics.)<\/p>\n

By exposing state weakness, the Arab Spring opened the way for the rise of the Islamic State, a Sunni terrorist group, in parts of Syria, Iraq and the Sinai Peninsula where central governments had no control. Though local and international forces eventually dismantled IS\u2019s \u2018caliphate\u2019, the group still has affiliates in Egypt, Syria and Libya. As long as the problem of state weakness goes unaddressed, Sunni warlords will continue to emerge.<\/p>\n

People seem to be pinning their electoral hopes on political Islam, which has emerged as the main alternative to secular autocracy over the last decade. Wherever free elections took place, Islamist parties won power. Tunisia\u2019s moderate Ennahda party, for example, was integral to making the country the Arab Spring\u2019s only true success story, with all three elections since 2011 having led to peaceful transfers of power.<\/p>\n

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2012. But, after just over a year in power, the military, led by Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, ousted him and installed a regime even more repressive than Mubarak\u2019s.<\/p>\n

No story of the Middle East\u2019s recent transformation can be complete without the United States. In his recently published memoir, Barack Obama confessed that if he were a young Egyptian, he would have joined the protesters in Cairo\u2019s Tahrir Square in 2011. Instead, as US president, he sacrificed America\u2019s two closest regional allies, Mubarak and Ben Ali, opening the way for a redrawing of the Middle East\u2019s strategic map.<\/p>\n

As Mohammed bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE Armed Forces, made clear<\/a> to Obama, allowing Mubarak\u2019s ouster and accepting Morsi\u2019s electoral victory gave the impression that the US was not a reliable long-term partner. Compounding this sense of betrayal among America\u2019s Arab allies, Obama subsequently negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and rebalanced US strategic priorities toward Asia, opening the way for Russia to expand its influence in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Non-Arab regional powers\u2014Iran, Turkey and Israel\u2014have also been quick to capitalise on Arab woes. While America was busy fighting IS, Iran helped rescue the embattled Syrian regime and deployed its own forces along Israel\u2019s borders. Its reach now extends from Syria and Iraq to the shores of the Mediterranean in Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Turkey has become the dominant force in northern Syria, where it claims to be preventing an autonomous Kurdish state from emerging on its doorstep, and has consolidated its military presence in Qatar. Even the influx of Syrian refugees to Turkey has become a powerful bargaining chip for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to send millions to Europe if its leaders criticise his dictatorial practices.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most shocking outcome of recent upheaval in the Arab world relates to Israel. Viewing the country as a necessary power broker in America, and now a reliable ally in the fight against Iran, a number of Arab states\u2014Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan\u2014have normalised bilateral relations. Once Saudi Arabia follows suit, the Arab-Israeli conflict will effectively end, even though the Palestinian question remains unresolved. This is a dramatic paradigm change in Middle East politics.<\/p>\n

As 2021 begins, the geopolitical terrain in the Arab world will continue to shift. The outcome will depend on a number of factors, not least whether\u2014or when\u2014the goal of democracy mobilises Arab populations once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the struggling street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, he could not possibly have imagined how consequential his desperate protest would be. By sparking a wave …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":484,"featured_media":61440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[581,2008,106,218],"class_list":["post-61437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-arab-spring","tag-autocracy","tag-democracy","tag-middle-east"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe legacy of the Arab Spring | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-legacy-of-the-arab-spring\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The legacy of the Arab Spring | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When the struggling street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, he could not possibly have imagined how consequential his desperate protest would be. 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