Which Arab regimes, today, are "US installed"? Iraq is the only plausible answer.
As far as stability, I don't know. My view is that Arab democracies are unstable because they will elect Islamists. Dictatorship/monarchy has proven far more stable. Syria is trying to buck the trend; we'll see how it goes.
Maybe more accurate to say “Western-installed” although generally I don’t like grouping Europe and the US together as some coherent entity in this case it’s probably accurate.
All of the Gulf monarchies as well as Jordan are essentially western creations that were created as states mostly by the British and then heavily reinforced by the US from the 70s onwards
> Arab democracies are unstable because they will elect Islamists.
why does that imply instability?
Fundamentalists tend not to be pragmatists.
i don't think you know much about islamist parties and are just grasping for reasons to justify suppressing democracy in certain places.
ennahada (tunisia), pks (indonesia), jui (pakistan) are all examples of islamist parties that have compromised or reached across the aisle at various points just off the top of my head.
besides, isn't the point of democracy to allow people to be led by those who represent their principles? if they are in power, why should the majority expect their elected leaders to compromise those principles?
> ennahada (tunisia), pks (indonesia), jui (pakistan) are all examples of islamist parties that have compromised or reached across the aisle at various points
Would love to read more on this. Naïvely, I shared OP’s view of Islamist parties’ intransigence. (Note to third parties: Islamist != Islamic majority or even Islamic parties, and certainly separate from Arab parties.)
> isn't the point of democracy to allow people to be led by those who represent their principles?
Yes. But nothing says democracies are fundamentally stable. It absolutely follows that intolerant populations can systematically elect intolerant leaders who then cause instability.
> Would love to read more on this.
Brookings Institute has a series of papers about Islamist movements around the world: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rethinking-political-isla...
which includes both analyses from Western academics as well as responses from members of Islamist parties.
> It absolutely follows that intolerant populations can systematically elect intolerant leaders who then cause instability.
Intolerant of what, and what do you mean by "instability"? If the ideology of the political parties and institutions reflects that of the (vast) majority of the population, why would we expect "instability"?
Democracy can descend into demagoguery; I believe that occurs when the "people" feel like the state has been captured by an elite (oligarchy) that doesn't represent their interests (i.e. interests of the majority), "intolerant" or not - e.g. Gracchi brothers, Hugo Chavez, etc etc.
Because every Islamic theocracy to date has been profoundly destabilising for its neighbours and the world, and always ends up imprisoning and immiserating its own people. No one wants more Irans or Afghanistans. (Or Saudi Arabias, though that's not said out loud as often.)
but neither Saudi Arabia nor Afghanistan's leaders were voted in ...
and secular/socialist/monarchic dictatorships have arguably worse effects on their neighbors and citizens - e.g. Saddam, Assad, Nasser, MBZ in UAE, MBS
Yes, there are a lot of bad options in the Middle East; Islamic theocracy has no monopoly on awfulness.
I think the broader point is that a democracy is unstable when the electorate just votes for their favourite warlord / cleric, who promptly ends / rigs any further elections.
In the Middle East, there appears to be a pattern of electorates voting for / staging a revolution in favour of Islamists, which either leads to a terrible Islamist regime, or leads to an elite coup, which of course destroys the democracy in the process. Worst case scenario all of this happens at once in different places, and you get a terrible civil war.
Democracy is great, but it requires an electorate that actually wants to sustain and retain a democracy. Those appear to be few and far in between.
> In the Middle East, there appears to be a pattern of electorates voting for / staging a revolution in favour of Islamists, which either leads to a terrible Islamist regime, or leads to an elite coup, which of course destroys the democracy in the process.
that pattern is hardly unique to middle east/islamists though. look at central/south america. guatemala, chile, brazil etc all had democracies overthrown by "elite" coups.
like almost every instance in the middle east, there is actually a common denominator between these coups... resistance to the US-led order magically seems to invite instability.
That seems rather Whataboutist to me. I never claimed this only ever happens in the Middle East. We are, however, talking about the Middle East, so local examples would seem apposite. You seem to desire to make this conversation so abstract that it becomes about nothing.
> resistance to the US-led order magically seems to invite instability
Or perhaps 'resistance' is an awfully popular rallying cry for demagogues who bring instability, and the US is just the hegemon du jour. "It's the US' fault your crops are wilting! And international capital! And immigrants! And, oh, I don't know, the gays, why not. Rise up for El Generalissimo! Enlist your sons in the blood struggle, that will definitely improve things!" /s
Much sexier to be a revolutionary fighting shadowy foreign forces than to actually fix any of your own problems. No, no, tomorrow's problems will be America's fault too.
> I never claimed this only ever happens in the Middle East.
you said
> Arab democracies are unstable because they will elect Islamists.
whereas my claim is that governments (democracies or not) that run afoul of their local hegemon tend to have a short shelf life. this is not unique to US hegemony.
see: Brezhnev doctrine (USSR), or the canonical example of Athens and Melos from Peloponnesian war
> Rise up for El Generalissimo! Enlist your sons in the blood struggle, that will definitely improve things!" /s Much sexier to be a revolutionary fighting shadowy foreign forces than to actually fix any of your own problems. No, no, tomorrow's problems will be America's fault too.
I'm sorry, you seem triggered by this discussion, it doesn't seem productive to continue on my end.
Real heads know that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.
lol yes exactly.
Realism has more way explanatory power in geopolitics than idealism. Idealist explanations are typically incoherent (e.g. above thread).
> I'm sorry, you seem triggered by this discussion, it doesn't seem productive to continue on my end.
I suppose shall have to make do without 101-level instruction in Chomskyian anti-Imperialism, woven through with whataboutism and international conspiracies.
> whereas my claim is that governments (democracies or not) that run afoul of their local hegemon tend to have a short shelf life. this is not unique to US hegemony.
Wow, big if true. Someone let Iran know.
How many trillions of dollars and gallons of blood did the US expend to make Afghanistan non-Taliban, or Vietnam non-Communist? And who rules Afghanistan and Vietnam today? You mention the Brezhnev doctrine, and yet literally not one of these countries is Russian-aligned today. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan failed just as hard as the British and American ones, all at the height of those respective countries' powers. Not very powerful, these alleged hegemons.
My overall point is that the Middle East (and Latin America, etc) has many local issues (e.g. corruption, misgovernance, sectarianism, organised crime), and an unhelpful habit of blaming some ill-defined global hegemony for misfortunes that are readily explicable as the consequences of these local phenomena. The US is no innocent lamb, but it does no service to the people of any of these regions to pretend that another hundred years of anti-Imperialist rhetoric will somehow bring benefits that the previous hundred years did not.
In these countries, this brand of tired anti-Imperialism is a figleaf for authoritarians. In the West, it is masturbatory politics for a certain type of narcissistic Westerner with a saviour complex, who fundamentally believes only Westerners have agency in the world, and everyone else are just motes of dust floating in the West's shadow. It's this confluence that results in absolute travesties like Chomsky supporting the Khmer Rouge, a far greater evil than all the worst allegations against America stacked together.
If you want to help the Middle East, get involved in civil society building efforts that help bridge the gap between sectarian communities; support charitable and poverty relief efforts that are not affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood; get involved in civil rights advocacy on behalf of the oppressed in the Middle East (women, LGBT communities, religious and ethnic minorities, the list goes on); partake in initiatives aimed at tackling corruption, organised crime, etc. Or at the very least encourage and support the people who do these things, rather than regurgitating half-remembered anti-Imperialist tropes from your polsci 101 class, as though that were a contribution of any value whatsoever.
The one thing that will absolutely not help them, at all, is more meandering, false narratives about how they have no agency in the face of shadowy global hegemons, and how should just lie down and wait impassively for some sort of new, more just world to be given to them by their Western betters.
Ok, lot of stuff to unpack here, but I'll stick to just pointing out obvious misinfo, which is often repeated:
Chomsky never backed the Khmer rouge, he questioned some of the claims and western focus on the Khmer rouge, which was ignoring US culpability. He also never denied that the Khmer rouge were committing atrocities.
Was he wrong? Yes, at least in specific instances. But he was never outright supportive of the Khmer rouge. This is very old propaganda.
Chomsky is deep in the Epstein files. Turns out he might have been doing some “manufacturing consent” himself!