Reading Nick Kristof’s claim that “Today, we are all Egyptians,” I thought back to an old column I had written in 2006 that addressed this sort of misguided expression of solidarity with another nation in crisis:

It is ludicrous because, no matter the feelings of goodwill and solidarity, we cannot seriously identify ourselves with another nation, nor can they identify themselves with us, because in so many respects every nation, every people is significantly different in meaningful ways that precludes an identification of any two. The fundamental differences between nations also prevent a ready and reflexive identification of the interests of any two nations on the basis of decent moral outrage at evils perpetrated on another people’s civilians.

When the conflict is an internal political struggle between two groups of people of the same nation, as it is in Egypt, it is even harder to argue that “we are all Egyptians.” The thugs attacking the protesters earlier this week are Egyptians, as are the people who gave them the orders to attack. Those obviously aren’t the Egyptians with whom Kristof wants us to identify. Kristof doesn’t want to be that sort of Egyptian, as they are the ones trying to help Mubarak hang on a little longer, and the purpose of these expressions of solidarity is to declare a side in an ongoing conflict. Certainly, Kristof must assume that the protesters represent the broad majority, and that the supporters of the regime are unrepresentative, but he can’t possibly know that. When both sides in the struggle are Egyptian and they are divided by political goals and interests, it doesn’t tell us very much to declare solidarity with Egyptians. In the end, these expressions of solidarity are sentimental or ideological, and they tend not to mean very much in terms of lending other people anything more than a little moral support, and they are driven by some incessant need to take sides in other nations’ affairs.

More important, these expressions are simply not true. Kristof wants to support the protesters, and he thinks everyone should do likewise, and that’s his prerogative, but what makes his sympathy and solidarity notable is that he is not an Egyptian and never will be. He is identifying with the protesters because he sympathizes with their struggle, and he hopes that they succeed, but like McCain’s meaningless declaration that “we are all Georgians” it implies a degree of identification on our part with another people that simply doesn’t exist. Making these statements gives the misleading impression that “we” are going to do a great deal to help, when most of “us” are not going to do anything. It’s almost presumptuous to claim to belong to another people’s political struggle when “we” don’t have to bear any of the risks or face any of the consequences.

It may also be a mistake to declare support for the protesters before we have any idea what comes of their protests. Burke wrote in his Reflections something that seems most relevant:

I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have actually received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulation on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and it not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people before they declare themselves will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations when those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.

To his critics, especially on the right, Bush’s cardinal sin was timidity. He was the quintessential anti-Reagan. Where Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall and boldly chastised the Soviet Union, Bush stood before Ukrainians eager for independence and told them to calm down .(That speech earned the nick-name “Chicken Kiev” by New York Times columnist William Safire.) When protestors were butchered in Tiananmen Square, Bush’s criticism was muted. Though he celebrated the “new breeze” of freedom blowing across Europe, Bush and his foreign policy team always appeared more worried that the breeze would blow over the old order too quickly. ~Greg Scoblete

I came across Greg’s 2008 column on the virtues of the elder Bush’s “prudential realism” today, and it is striking to me how similar Obama’s overall approach to foreign policy has been. When Bush was in office, major changes were taking place throughout Europe and the USSR, and on the whole Bush’s response to those events was cautious, limited, and prudent. In retrospect, many Americans look back on the elder Bush’s administration’s tenure as the last time that the U.S. practiced a mostly sane and responsible foreign policy, and Bush is now widely credited for handling the swift, sudden changes in the world fairly well to the extent that the U.S. had any role in them. It is a measure of how warped foreign policy discourse has become that Obama can be faulted by self-styled conservatives for being too conservative and cautious, as if caution and prudence were things to be avoided rather than guiding principles.

What I find remarkable is just how certain so many critics of the elder Bush that he was not sufficiently bold, activist, or visionary, and how wrong they were. It is hard for me to take seriously those who insist Obama has responded poorly to the Egyptian uprising when many of them were likewiseinsisting that Obama “do something” for the Green movement. It is even harder when some of themcontinue to misrepresentBush’s Kiev speech. The speech was filled with responsible advice on the potential dangers of political change and a statement of support for genuine democrats as opposed to opportunists and demagogues who would exploit the rhetoric of self-determination and self-government in abusive ways. “Chicken Kiev” is the interventionist’s catchphrase for denouncing a cautious approach to foreign political crises the same way that “Munich” is the tired slogan used to browbeat opponents of unnecessary wars and aggressive foreign policy. The difference is that the Kiev speech isn’t even what its detractors have made it out to be.

Anne Applebaum’s recent distortion of what the elder Bush said in 1991 may be the most glaring in its dishonesty:

In 1991, when Ukraine was about to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush made a declaration (this was the infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech) in praise of the Soviet Union.

The speech became infamous because people in the U.S. lied about what Bush said, and they continue to lie about it even now. This is some of what President Bush actually said:

So, let me build upon my comments in Moscow by describing in more detail what Americans mean when we talk about freedom, democracy, and economic liberty.

No terms have been abused more regularly, nor more cynically than these. Throughout this century despots have masqueraded as democrats, jailers have posed as liberators. We can restore faith to government only by restoring meaning to these concepts [bold mine-DL].

I don’t want to sound like I’m lecturing, but let’s begin with the broad term “freedom.” When Americans talk of freedom, we refer to people’s abilities to live without fear of government intrusion, without fear of harassment by their fellow citizens, without restricting other’s freedoms. We do not consider freedom a privilege, to be doled out only to those who hold proper political views or belong to certain groups. We consider it an inalienable individual right, bestowed upon all men and women. Lord Acton once observed: The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Freedom requires tolerance, a concept embedded in openness, in glasnost, and in our first amendment protections for the freedoms of speech, association, and religion — all religions.

Tolerance nourishes hope. A priest wrote of glasnost: Today, more than ever the words of Paul the Apostle, spoken, 2,000 years ago, ring out: They counted as among the dead, but look, we are alive. In Ukraine, in Russia, in Armenia, and the Baltics, the spirit of liberty thrives.

But freedom cannot survive if we let despots flourish or permit seemingly minor restrictions to multiply until they form chains, until they form shackles. Later today, I’ll visit the monument at Babi Yar — a somber reminder, a solemn reminder, of what happens when people fail to hold back the horrible tide of intolerance and tyranny.

Yet freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local depotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.

We will support those who want to build democracy. By democracy, we mean a system of government in which people may vie openly for the hearts — and yes, the votes — of the public. We mean a system of government that derives its just power from the consent of the governed, that retains its legitimacy by controlling its appetite for power. For years, you had elections with ballots, but you did not enjoy democracy. And now, democracy has begun to set firm roots in Soviet soil.

How dare he praise the Soviet system so egregiously! Of course, there is hardly anything in this speech with which most Americans could seriously disagree, and those things that do come across as nods to the status quo can be explained when we understand the diplomatic context in which Bush was operating. He gave the speech on August 1, 1991, which was just a few weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev. Gorbachev was promoting an idea of reorganizing the USSR along more decentralized lines, and this is why Bush was citing lessons from the experience of the early American republic. As it turned out, some of the speech became redundant when the USSR fell apart, but most of it is so unobjectionable that it is startling to see how people shamelessly use the speech as a means to shame people into supporting “bold” action.

Elsewhere in the speech, Bush made a statement that we can only wish would have been the guiding principle of U.S. relations with the former Soviet republics:

We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.

All of that sounds very sensible. It’s a pity that one of the better speeches by an American President on the question of building and sustaining a liberal and democratic political order continues to be tarred by people who have probably never read it, or who choose to misrepresent it to score some cheap points in the name of reckless idealism. It’s also a reminder that the contemporary reactions by over-eager, idealistic observers initially sound more appealing than the cautious, restrained response from an administration, but it is usually caution and restraint that prove to be the wiser course. Those who demand quick action, “bold” leadership, and immediate changes in policy have usually not given much thought to the consequences, especially the unintended ones, and they are usually in the grip of an enthusiasm that distorts their perceptions and judgments.

Larison has once again let his hyper-realism get the best of him, in arguing that the military has just been playing a clever game and will get behind the exceedingly craven to America and Israel Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s successor. ~Jack Ross

I take the charge of “hyper-realism” as a compliment, since I take it to mean that I am more realistic than most. Better that than hypo-realism, I suppose. More seriously, I am not sure where I have gone wrong in saying that the interests of Suleiman and the military are aligned. Jack says that I am arguing that the military “will get behind” Suleiman, but from everything I have read about him the military is already fully behind him and was before the protests started. After all, he is the person who represents their interests at the top level in the government. There doesn’t seem to be any question of whether the military will “get behind” Suleiman. Since Mubarak’s announcement that he will not run again, the question has been whether Suleiman and the military will make Mubarak leave sooner or later. The answer seems to be later.

Furthermore, it seems correct that they (i.e., Suleiman and the senior military officers) see their interests being served by a transition in which Mubarak co-opts part of the opposition, hands off the baton to Suleiman, and secures the regime against the current challenge. Maybe this isn’t “clever” at all. It is possible that it could backfire, damage the respect Egyptians have for the military, and result in an even bigger mess in a few years’ time. Whether it is clever or not remains to be seen, but it does seem to be what is happening. I should add that Springborg regards all of this as a “bad gamble” by the administration. That’s possible, but even critics of the decisions that have led to this point should be able to acknowledge what is going on.

There is also the power of precedent. As Issandr El Amrani wrote in his profile of Suleiman two years ago:

Every president of Egypt since 1952 has been a senior military officer, and the military remains, by most measures, the most powerful institution in Egypt.

Meanwhile, Suleiman had already been gaining supporters as the next successor years ago, because he appeared to be a more acceptable alternative to Mubarak than his son:

Publicly, Suleiman has started to gain endorsements for the job from Egyptians across the political spectrum as the increasingly public discussion plays out of who will follow Mubarak. A leftist leader of the Kefaya movement, Abdel Halim Qandil, has urged the military to save the country from a Mubarak dynasty. The liberal intellectual Osama Ghazali Harb — a former Gamal acolyte who turned to the opposition and founded the National Democratic Front party — has openly advocated a military takeover followed by a period of “democratic transition.” Hisham Kassem, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, also has stated that a Suleiman presidency would be vastly preferable to another Mubarak one. On Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, partisans of a Suleiman presidency make the same argument, often seemingly driven as much by animosity toward the Mubaraks as admiration for the military man.

Meanwhile, here is some reporting from CNN that is worth reading:

“The military’s refusal to act is a highly political act which shows that it is allowing the Egyptian regime to reconstitute itself at the top and is highly, utterly against the protesters,” said Joshua Stacher, assistant professor of political science at Kent State University and an expert on Egypt. He was among more than a dozen Middle East experts who met Monday with three White House National Security Council officials to talk about the Egyptian crisis.

The absence of military action serves two purposes, Stacher said.

“(One,) make the protesters go home, and two, scare the population that isn’t protesting,” Stacher said. “They want the Egyptian people to submit to the police state, and they want the people to pine for their police state so that they have stability back.”

“It’s getting really ruthless,” Stacher added.

In Egypt, Vice President Omar Suleiman issued a statement saying that dialogue with opposition forces, as ordered by Mubarak, won’t begin until the demonstrations stop.

Like the protesters who have flooded the streets of Egypt in the past week, the country’s large minority of Coptic Christians worry about joblessness and lack of freedoms. But most want President Hosni Mubarak to stay in power.

Fear of what may follow the removal of Mr. Mubarak, a secular strongman who has ruled the country for the past 30 years, is making reluctant supporters out of the country’s Christians, an estimated 10% of Egypt’s 80 million population. Mr. Mubarak has been aggressive in pursuing perceived Islamist extremist groups, a policy that has endeared him to Coptic Christians, not to mention the U.S.

Many Copts worry that Mr. Mubarak’s exit would leave them dangerously exposed—either by chaos, or to a government that may be more tolerant of Islamist extremists. ~The Wall Street Journal

These are very reasonable fears. Since the secular authoritarian government in Iraq fell after the invasion, the Christian minorities in Iraq have been exposed to frequent atrocities and intimidation. While there were some encouraging signs of Muslim solidarity with the Copts after the Alexandria church bombing, there is reason to worry that Copts and other Christians would face the same threats if the current regime fell. Even if a new government were not tolerant of attacks on minorities, it might be too weak to offer effective protection. Protections for ethnic and religious minorities are essential for preventing new democratic governments from devolving into majoritarian tyrannies, especially when those minorities may be identified (fairly or unfairly) with the old regime. Democratists have had a bad habit of ignoring the dangers to minorities that promoting democracy in the region has worsened, and Near Eastern Christians have been among those most harmed by this project. We may hope that the Coptic Church and the other Christians living and working in Egypt do not share that fate.

The clashes, which broke out barely an hour after the government allowed Internet connections to resume, have added a new twist to the drama that has gripped the Arab world’s largest country: Has the army been on the side of the government after all? ~Time

Yes, of course it has. It remained “neutral” because that helped Mubarak and his allies play for time, and it gave Mubarak the chance to try to hide behind the military’s popularity. Apparently there are quite a few people who bought into the idea that the army, which is the foundation of the regime, wasn’t actually part of the regime. Instead of focusing on the silliness of the question quoted above, I would point everyone to Roberty Springborg’s grim, but basically accurate assessment of where things stand now:

The threat to the military’s control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new Vice President, General Omar Suleiman. The military high command, which under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system, can now breathe much more easily than a few days ago. It can neutralize any further political pressure from below by organizing Husni Mubarak’s exile, but that may well be unnecessary.

The military has not directly participated in the crackdown, which preserves the appearance that the military was not involved in attacking the protesters and keeps the military from being split, but it has stood by while Mubarak’s goons target the protesters. As the new cabinet is filled with figures representing the interests of the military, this ought to have been clear to all a few days ago. If Mubarak is on the way out after the next election, Suleiman will be taking over for him. In Tunisia the uprising prompted a “soft” coup against Ben Ali, and Ben Ali could not stay so long as the military was unwilling to use force to defend his hold on power. As quite a few people expected earlier this month, the alignment of interests between the military and Mubarak mattered more than the outrage and persistence of the protesters. Instead of a “soft” coup approved by the military, there won’t be any sort of coup, but an organized (though perhaps not all that “orderly”) transition from one military-backed strongman to another.

I’m not sure that this means that the “historic opportunity to have a democratic Egypt led by those with whom the U.S., Europe and even Israel could do business, will have been lost, maybe forever.” That assumes a great many things about what would have followed. It could also be that Egypt has avoided even more destructive political upheaval and massive suffering.

If Huntsman won the GOP nomination, he would be challenging the reelection of his former boss. White House officials are furious at what they consider an audacious betrayal, but know that any public criticism would be likely to benefit Huntsman if he enters the primaries. ~Mike Allen

Why are they furious? The administration already knew Huntsman was going to leave after two years, so it’s not as if he misled them about how long he was willing to stay. A Huntsman candidacy shouldn’t worry them in the slightest. Consider these results from Utah, where Huntsman was governor and left office with an incredible 84% approval rating:

Utah Republicans overwhelmingly favor Mitt Romney over Jon Huntsman Jr. as a potential Republican presidential candidate, according to a January statewide survey.

In a poll conducted for the Exoro Group and the Center for Public Policy & Administration at the University of Utah, Republicans in the state said they would prefer the former Massachusetts governor over their own former governor by a staggering margin, 65 to 16 percent.

This wouldn’t be a big problem for Huntsman if it were a poll from Massachusetts or even New Hampshire, since everyone expects Romney to dominate in those places. It also wouldn’t be a problem if these results were from any other state except Utah, but Utah is where Huntsman is well-known and still quite popular. If Utah Republicans don’t want him as their presidential nominee, who would? Put another way, if he can’t win against Romney in Utah, where he has almost all the advantages and the fewest liabilities, where could he possibly win?

The good news for Huntsman is that he would be the Utah GOP’s choice for Senate when Hatch comes up for re-nomination, but it appears that this isn’t the campaign he wants to run. So Huntsman is preparing to jump into a contest he can’t win and passing on one that he could. He has just consigned himself to political irrelevance, at least until 2016, which is all that matters to members of the Obama administration, so they should be very pleased.

Of course, Southern evangelicals may not be looking for a candidate with Hindu credentials, I told Huntsman. But he insisted that issues like religion are ultimately “just campaign sideshows.” ~McKay Coppins

He does understand that he is going to be running in the Republican presidential primaries, right?

I will be the first to argue that the power of Christian conservatives is not as great as many people outside the GOP seem to think, and I agree that much of what Republican politicians offer Christian conservatives is little more than meaningless symbolism and lip service. However, it is because Christian conservative voters are taken for granted (and more important, many of them feel taken for granted), their main issues are not priorities for the party leadership, and their interests are not served by the party’s agenda that the symbolic appeals and lip service have become so important. Bush won the loyalty of a lot of evangelical voters by identifying with them publicly on a somewhat regular basis, and it was that identification that mattered more than anything else he proposed to do or did while in office*. Many Christian conservative voters know that they’re being had, but they at least want to hear their politicians pretend to share their convictions, and they’re even more enthusiastic when the politicians actually do share them. Let me suggest that a candidate who says that he gets “satisfaction from many different types of philosophies” is not going to get anywhere with very many of these voters.

Leave aside Huntsman’s professed religion for the moment. I am fairly confident that there are very few Christian conservative voters who will be excited by someone as “ecumenical” as Huntsman. Holding different religious beliefs is one thing. That might alienate a lot of religious conservatives if they hold different beliefs, but at least there would be some clear idea of what it is that the candidate believes. The “many different types of philosophies” position will leave a lot of people cold, because it sounds as if he is avoiding the question, and to some people’s ears it makes him sound as if he has no firm convictions. Notice that Huntsman doesn’t even attempt to make the “values” argument that Romney and his supporters make, because he seems to believe that appealing to voters on the basis of “values” is a campaign sideshow. It isn’t a sideshow. For large numbers of Republican voters, it is the main event. It is the reason why they vote Republican in spite of everything. Dismissing religion as a sideshow tells these voters that not only is Huntsman not “one of them,” which they may have already known, but that their understandings of politics are dramatically different. More and more, I am getting the impression that Huntsman 2012 (assuming that it happens) is going to follow McCain’s script in 2000 of running against all of the things in the party that “centrists” and moderates don’t like (e.g., religion in politics, social conservatism, opposition to mass immigration, etc.).

* Isn’t this proof that religious identity politics is harmful to the selection of qualified, knowledgeable nominees? Absolutely! Still, that is the way these things seem to work.

Wilsonians and necononservatives alike have fetishized “democracy promotion” as a key goal of American foreign policy under the impression that it would lead to all those other good things, when in fact we probably had the cart before the horse.

So I’m not nearly as optimistic as some others are about the fate of a country that, given its druthers, would freely and fairly elect the Muslim Brotherhood in overwhelming numbers. And I’m highly sympathetic to the strategy of the Obama administration which — though it may look clumsy and wishy-washy from the outside — seems pretty clearly driven by a desire to save the Egyptian regime even as it shows Mubarak the door. ~Daniel Foster

That sums things up rather nicely. Foster has this one right.

What has stood out in a lot of American commentary over the last week is an embarrassing giddiness about the upheaval in Egypt. It’s partly the usual reckless American enthusiasm for anything that can be described as “people power,” but there is an eagerness to get on the “right side of history” that resembles nothing so much as a rush to mouth the most preciously politically correct pieties. There are not “right” and “wrong” sides of history. Indeed, the implied notion of historical inevitability in that phrase ignores everything about history that matters–its contingency, its uncertainty, and the importance of human agency.

There have also been the Iraq war supporters desperately trying to claim credit on behalf of Bush administration policies. Fortunately for them, what is happening in Egypt has nothing to do with those policies, because the outcome may prove to be as disastrous for all involved as the invasion of Iraq was. What is telling is that not even the Bush administration was foolish enough to continue pushing democracy promotion in Egypt. We have repeatedly heard the laughable counterfactuals that if only Obama had embraced the “freedom agenda” and publicly hectored Mubarak the Egyptian people would not now be rising up, as if fewer restrictions on secular and liberal candidates and free elections were going to lower the price of bread, slash inflation, magically produce more jobs, or reduce mass poverty. This idea would almost be comical if it weren’t shaping policy debate and pressuring the government to make foolish decisions.

If there were a free and fair election in the future, the current economic conditions in Egypt would make a liberal democratic or “democratic capitalist” movement even less popular now than it would normally be. Current Egyptian economic policy has taken a noticeable neoliberalturnunder Mubarak, liberal parties have difficulty winning broad public support for their economic policies in the best of times, and liberal movements tend to do badly in economically stratified societies, in which the liberals are badly outnumbered by a poorer majority that usually sees little benefit from liberal policies. Everyone has understandably been speculating on the possible role of the Muslim Brotherhood in a democratic Egypt, but that is hardly the only political misfortune that could befall a democratic Egypt. While the protesters undoubtedly have real political grievances, it is economic woes that have triggered both the Tunisan and Egyptian uprisings, and it is not an accident that these are two regimes that have been doing many of the “right” things on policy in the eyes of economic neoliberals. In those countries with the weakest foundations as democratic states, the backlash against neoliberalism in Latin America empowered political movements in several countries that have produced economic mismanagement, political illiberalism, and the emergence of authoritarian populist rulers. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if the same thing happened in a democratic Egypt.

These arguments are facile, as Tunisia, with its very un-Islamic revolution, has just demonstrated, and Turkish democracy shows, and Egyptian restraint suggests. ~Roger Cohen

Turkish democracy in its present form took roughly eighty years to develop to a point where an Islamist party could win a general election, form a government, and remain in power uninterruptedly for almost a decade. Until very recently, Turkish democracy was severely constrained by the military and the courts. Egypt has had less time to develop the habits and institutions of representative and constitutional government than Turkey had since the foundation of the republic. Tunisia’s “un-Islamic revolution” was “un-Islamic” because of two decades of severe repression of Islamists.

While the Egyptian government has used the Muslim Brotherhood as a foil to justify its abuses and keep the rest of the population from agitating against the government too much, the Tunisian government crushed Islamists to such an extent that it could no longer use them as a bogey to scare the rest of the population into obedience. Ben Ali was too effective in his program of forced secularization for his own good. In the same way, the success of Kemalism in securing the secularism of the Turkish republic and much of Turkish culture made possible the political enfranchisement of Islamists. Once they ceased to appear as threats to a secular society, they became an acceptable political alternative. If Egypt isn’t Tunisia, it isn’t Turkey, either. Citing these two as reasons to be hopeful about what Egyptian democracy might produce is not much better than the propaganda we heard before the invasion of Iraq that “we had done it” in Germany and Japan before when skeptics challenged the idea that the U.S. could install a functioning democratic government in Iraq.

The outcome in Tunisia is still not certain, and we might remember that triumphalist Westerners were crowing about the “Arab spring” of 2005 on account of the anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon. Almost six years later, there is not much in Lebanon for these people to celebrate. It’s true that Najib Miqati as PM is not the end of the world, but we can say that only when we lower our expectations considerably. At each false dawn of Iraqi elections, the “Cedar” revolution, and the Green movement, Western pundits reliably dismiss past experience and the reasonable arguments of skeptics, and each time they are proved wrong. Ideas that were thoroughly discredited are recycled as if nothing had changed from 2003. Now we have Roger Cohen channeling Rumsfeld saying that democracy is “messy.” Actually, Rumsfeld said freedom was messy, but the two words were used interchangeably and ignorantly by Bush administration officials all the time.

Egyptian Islamists are biding their time so far, and there does not appear to be any rival faction that can command the same sort of organization and numbers. Yes, this is partly the doing of Mubarak’s government: he wanted non-Islamist political opposition to be weak to make the Muslim Brotherhood the main alternative, thereby guarding against Western pressure for allowing political competition, but it does suggest something about the basic weakness of liberal democratic forces in Egypt that they are not merely disorganized, but do not seem to exist in large numbers. Considering the sharp social and economic stratification, high illiteracy rate, and considerable poverty in Egypt, this is not surprising.

Cohen writes near the end:

Still, Iran’s paranoid rulers will shudder at Egyptian people power.

That would be interesting, except that the rulers in Iran aren’t shuddering, or if they are they aren’t letting on that they are worried. Officially, the Iranian government is spinning the uprising as a new Islamic revolution. That is obviously self-serving propaganda. What is objectively true is that one of the main foes of Tehran in the region is on the ropes, the allies of Tehran’s proxy in Hamas are in a position to acquire some stake in the Egyptian government if the regime falls, and Israel may no longer have the luxury of taking “cold peace” with Egypt for granted. Iran is gaining from Egyptian weakness, and the same people who confidently predicted that the Iranian regime was fatally wounded now believe that the protests in Egypt are going to dislodge Mubarak’s regime. Of course, Egypt isn’t Iran, either, but that is one more reason to doubt the success of Egyptian democracy.

Jim Antle is right to challenge the renewed enthusiasm for U.S. democracy promotion, and he also cites Kirkpatrick’s essay as I did the other day. Looking at the Economist Intelligence Unit’s report on democracy in 2010, I would add that Jim’s argument is even stronger than he thought. Their standards measure a broader number of factors including respect for civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, electoral process/pluralism, and political culture when they place countries on a spectrum from “full democracy” to “authoritarian state.” According to their calculations, 52.7% of countries in the world are ruled by “hybrid”* or authoritarian regimes, and this accounts for how 50.5% of the world’s population is governed. In MENA (Middle East/North Africa), 80% of the countries are authoritarian, and 15% are “hybrid” regimes:

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) remains the most repressive region in the world—16 out
of 20 countries in the region are categorised as authoritarian. There are only four exceptions:
Israel is the only democracy in the region, albeit a flawed democracy; and there are three hybrid
regimes (Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories).

So, no, it isn’t 1979. It is the twenty-first century, and most of the world is still governed by authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political systems. Notably, of all the “beneficiaries” of so-called color revolutions, the EIU report classifies just one, Ukraine, as a “flawed democracy,” and the rest are “hybrid” regimes. While the last thirty years have seen remarkable advances in the spread of democratic government and liberal political culture, it cannot be stressed enough that many of these advances are still fragile and reversible in many places, and they are also very recent developments that everyone has to acknowledge to be historically atypical. That doesn’t mean that we should ignore political change, or pretend that democratization always leads to a new form of despotism, but it does mean that we shouldn’t ignore the clear lessons of the dangers that come from democratization-as-shock-therapy when they are clearly relevant. If democratists would like a more up-to-date version of the warning about the potential dangers of rapid democratization and economic liberalization, they can consult World on Fire.

* “Hybrid” regimes are identified by these characteristics:

Elections have substantial irregularities that often prevent them from being both free and fair. Government pressure on opposition parties and candidates may be common. Serious weaknesses are more prevalent than in flawed democracies–in political culture, functioning of government and political participation. Corruption tends to be widespread and the rule of law is weak. Civil society is weak. Typically there is harassment of and pressure on journalists, and the judiciary is not independent.

Update: Jim Antle wrote a follow-up post, in which he says, “So the basic point that creating democracy is difficult remains valid today.” It certainly does. If it weren’t for the odd inversion of the Bush years, in which most mainstream conservatives felt compelled to defend or at least acquiesce in a “freedom agenda” that could have been copied from the Carter or Wilson administrations, there wouldn’t be much of an argument on the right about this.