The United States has focused on the Middle East since World War II, seeking its oil, gas, and other mineral resources and coveting control of its strategic waterways. The old colonial powers and the superpowers of the Cold War era most often backed dictatorial regimes there, because they were easier to control than democracies, and this country also supported the Israeli settler colony as a bulwark of Western interests. President George W. Bush was the first president to depart (at least rhetorically) from America's romance with regional authoritarians, pledging to “democratize" the Middle East, though he left office with little to show for it. Now, you have to wonder whether, in some strange sense, the shoe is on the other foot and the pathological U.S. support for dictatorships there is now spreading across the Atlantic Ocean, just as the trade winds blow Saharan sand and dust toward the American Southwest.
Democratic Backsliding
Here's something that should sound familiar in the United States today: Qais Saied of Tunisia, elected president in 2019, campaigned against homosexuality and — yes! — African immigrants. In 2021, he lawlessly dismissed his prime minister and parliament and went on to rewrite the country's constitution so that he could appoint yes-men to its Supreme Court. Then he began jailing his political opponents. In four short years, Saied undid all the political progress Tunisia had made in the previous decade, creating a dictatorship arguably worse than that of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in January 2011 in the first of several major Arab Spring youth revolts.
Worse yet — and this should sound familiar, too — Tunisia seemed to sleepwalk into authoritarianism. Trade unionists hoped the president would reject the neoliberalism of the International Monetary Fund, while civil society organizations hoped he would curb the Interior Ministry's past repressiveness. No such luck. Europe declined to punish the newly developing dictatorship by cutting off aid, instead rewarding Saied with an economic deal in return for his willingness to crack down on African emigration. Of course, such democratic backsliding has been a feature of the Middle East for decades, since local civil society remains weak, pro-regime billionaires have proliferated, and Western governments have seldom reacted negatively to (and all too often rewarded) any move toward dictatorship...
Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, or its staff.