Obama's administration has lent support to the Arab Spring. In doing so, it has spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars in various schemes and aid as a token of endorsement. However, one thing must be noted clearly: The US administration, regardless of who sat in the White House, had no choice but to support the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The manner of support and its substance varied in the three uprisings. In Libya and Tunisia it was fairly straightforward: Ditching Gaddafi and Ben Ali was not a problem, despite huge endorsement of Gaddafi's sons by both the Bush and Obama administrations.
In Egypt, the Obama administration dithered, and to the last minute its statements were noted for ambiguity. At stake was not just equality for the Egyptian people; there was also the security of Israel, which matters a great deal to many US law-makers, Congressmen and Congresswomen. This is still under-researched and deserves thorough analysis of the various speech acts and decisions produced by the Obama administration before the ouster of Mubarak.
Thus far, Obama's achievements in the Middle East may be summed up in a "speech act", the 2009 Cairo speech - talk and no action in the eyes of many Arabs. This is in spite of the fact that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has restored some respect in American diplomacy, coming after Bush's Condi Rice.
Hilary Clinton is the best US Secretary of State since the days of James Baker. She is more of a soft than hard power stateswoman, who one hopes would make a bid for the 2016 presidency. However, in the Middle East, political imperfections complicate the task of even the most "perfect" of Secretaries of State and diplomats.
In that distance, one finds a peace process tattered by US inertia, with Obama performing way below the bar raised by Carter's Camp David Accords and Clinton's Declaration of Principles. Obama inherited the idea of Palestinian statehood from his predecessors, but so far did no more than pay lip service to it.
Obama must take a leaf from the Eisenhower book: Sometimes resolve and a degree of risk are needed for impact-making in foreign policy. However, impact-making requires stock-taking and revision. Neither the US nor the EU has drawn lessons from their moral deficiency in supporting Arab dictatorships up to January-February 2011. They launched almost immediately into "mentoring" the new polities in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, in varying degrees, without pause to think about what went wrong in the chancelleries of power, from Paris to Washington, when endorsement of dictators was routine policy from administration to administration.
Thus US foreign policy calls for readjustment. In the context of the Arab Spring it must not be driven by the imperative of introducing "order" into the lives of "Orientals". Security seems to be the constant that informs foreign policy-making before and after the Arab Spring; and this happens at the expense of development and a degree of self-determination such as in democratic reconstruction.
Beyond security, oil, and Israel
Moreover, Western leaders seem hell bent on repeating the same mistakes of manipulating "elites", recruiting them into their spheres of influence. In theory, many Western actors stand for institution-building and due process; in practice, it is largely business as usual seeking policy preferences and objectives through communication with elites, sometimes with limited legitimacy.
Policy failure is obvious in Bahrain, where conflict resolution is managed through dialogue with elites in Manama and Riyadh. Similarly, the impasse in the Palestinian question can be put down to preference to deal with select politicians in the polarised polity. So instead of using existing legal UN frameworks as the basis for engaging with peace-making, reference is made to "client" leaders who speak and act, in the absence of legitimate mandate, on behalf of the occluded populace, the Arab "Orientals", often assumed to be silent, passive and in need of mentoring and guidance.
Obama's second term will not be a promenade in the White House given the onerous tasks awaiting him on the domestic front, especially in a Congress dominated by the Republicans. Even with a leaf from the books of Eisenhower, Carter and Clinton, the Middle East will prove more difficult to navigate if the moral compass of America is limited by the blind spots of security, oil and client-politicians.
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