Episode 10 | Translating Scholarship Into Statecraft

You know, as someone who had focused her career on the Middle East and whose scholarship was rooted in you know, the sort of dominant conventional wisdom of academic Middle East studies was these autocracies always muddle through.

They're here for a long time, right? That Lisa Anderson article from, you know, the 1990s, that was the conventional wisdom in the field.

And so I would say that academic Middle East folks didn't necessarily do a great job of anticipating the uprisings.

I was one of a fairly small number of scholars who were writing about the potential for disruption of that autocratic status quo in the years ahead.

And there was actually a wonderful roundup of kind of how academic political science on the Middle East predicted, didn't predict that was published.

Oh, I wish I could remember the details.

So let's start with the assumption, with the understanding that most academics and policymakers didn't see it coming.

So once we were there, I think what frustrated me was, number one, that the United States government, and I don't just mean the executive branch, I mean Congress also, was not in a position that it could respond with the kind of To meet the moment.

We were in budget fights, you know, at one point during the spring after a number of regimes had been overturned, we had a brief government shutdown.

We were on a continuing resolution.

So even if the administration had wanted to do what the H.W. Bush administration did when the Berlin Wall fell and go to Congress and say, this is a historic moment and we as a country have a huge interest in this going in a democratic direction and a stabilizing direction, direction that will produce greater peace and prosperity and stability in this geostrategic region, let's invest in that, right? Like that's what the Freedom Support Act was and the support for Eastern European Democracy Act.

And when you go back and look at that late 80s, early 90s, it's kind of amazing that Congress was able to pass those vehicles and create the assistance coordinator for Europe and do all that in a matter of months.

During the Arab uprisings, Washington was not in that place anymore.

There was no political way to make that happen.

So that was a huge frustration because we had this historic opportunity.

We could not marshal the political will or the fiscal space, frankly, to make that happen.

So I felt like we were responding to a historic opportunity with change that we could scrounge out of the couch cushions of the foreign assistance budget.

And I was really fortunate that part of what I was doing in the Near East Affairs Bureau was running a very modest civil society program that worked across the Middle East.

So we overturned our whole budget and came up with some startup funds for Tunisia and for Egypt and for Libya and for, you know, to help have elections where everybody could participate and, you and help civil society groups organize after, in Libya, 42 years where the Qaddafi regime had destroyed civil society.

But that was all pushing Iraq uphill in the context.

The Europeans also had a huge stake in this going well, in some ways a bigger stake than we did, because they then experienced the migration when those countries collapsed into conflict, Syria and Libya in particular.

The Europeans could not marshal the political will to offer the thing that would have made the biggest difference in shifting political and economic incentives in the Middle East, which was more open trade.

That was what these countries were asking for.

That's what their economies needed.

But it just wasn't doable in the EU.