When ‘good intentions’ are not good enough.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was talk of two ‘arcs of instability’: one to the East, resulting from the breakup of the USSR, and one to the south, including Africa and the Middle East.
America and Europe chose to concentrate entirely on the East, leaving the South exposed. Not only shunned by the West, the region has also been plagued by a series of never-ending national crises. The Arab world has been left with nothing but desperation and omnipresent dictatorships, all very different but all equally oppressive.
The result was the explosion of the Arab Spring, which first took the West by surprise, then gave it cause for alarm. The entire Arab region quickly became as delicate as a china shop, in which we moved with the consummate skill of a bull.
In Egypt, we supported the Muslim Brotherhood, even though it was unable to govern the country and lost control of vast areas, left in the hands of armed extremists. In Syria we were unable to decide which faction to back until it was too late to even take sides.
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When ‘good intentions’ are not good enough.
