A decade ago, crowds flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the overthrow of the American-backed strongman of Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak. In Washington, President Barack Obama made a fateful decision, calling on him to step down.
The reaction of other Arab potentates was quick, Obama recalled in his recent memoirs.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates – a tiny country with a huge army built on American weapons and training – told the president that he no longer saw the United States as a reliable partner.
It was a “warning,” wrote Obama, that “the old order had no intention of giving up power without a fight.”
Ten years later, collisions between this old order and popular uprisings across the Middle East in 2011, which became known as the Arab Spring, left much of the region in smoking ruins.
The wars in Libya and Yemen reduced these countries to destroyed mosaics of rival militias. Autocrats cling to power in Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, erasing all signs of opposition. Tunisia, hailed as the only success of the uprisings, has struggled to reap the benefits of democracy by founding its economy.
The hope for a new era of freedom and democracy that has sprung up across the region has been largely destroyed. The United States proved to be an unreliable ally. And other powers that have intervened strongly to stem the uprisings and bend the region at will – Iran, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates – have only become more powerful.
“People now know very well that no one is going to help them, that they have to help themselves and that countries that used to seek change are part of the problem,” said Amr Darrag, who served as a minister in the democratically elected government that he ruled Egypt for just a year before being overthrown by the military in 2013. “The forces that are against change in our region are numerous and have many common interests that have allowed them to come together against any kind of positive change. “
The greatest hope for Washington and region intellectuals is that the Arab Spring at least gave people a taste for the possibility of democracy. And if the underlying inequality and oppression that led to the uprisings only worsened, the uprisings are likely to return, as happened recently in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq.
The spark that ignited the Arab Spring was a fruit vendor in a poor Tunisian city that simply couldn’t take it anymore after the police slapped him and confiscated his electronic scale. He burned down and his death crystallized frustrations with government officials from across the region, who ruled by force, enriched their cronies and left the masses mired in poverty, corruption and bad governance.
After Tunisian protesters forced the country’s longtime autocrat, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, into exile, demonstrations broke out in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. By early 2012, three other heads of state had been removed, but the dizzying sense of popular power did not last.
The elections in Egypt strengthened the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood until the military intervened to overthrow President Mohamed Morsi and seize power on their own.
In Libya, the United States and allied countries bombed Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces and supported the rebels. But the opposition has failed to come together, in part because regional rivals have supported rival factions, and the country remains divided.
In Bahrain, Saudi tanks helped to contain an uprising by the Shiite Muslim majority against the Sunni monarchy.
In Yemen, a longtime strongman left power, but later joined the rebels who took over the capital, starting a civil war and a bombing campaign by a Saudi-led coalition that sparked a terrible humanitarian crisis.
Syria, in many ways, represents the worst case scenario: a revolt that turned into a civil war that destroyed entire cities, opened the door to Islamic State and other jihadists, sent millions of refugees abroad and invited intervention by a number of international powers. After all, President Bashar al-Assad remains in power.
“Since the Arab Spring, everything has gotten worse,” said Mohamed Saleh, a Syrian writer from Homs. “What has changed is that we have more foreign forces controlling Syria. Syria is devastated and more divided. “
Those who participated in the uprisings remind them with a mixture of bitterness and nostalgia and cite different reasons for their failure: inconsistent support from the West, intervention by other powers, and the inability of protesters to make the transition to politics, challenge rooted elites and fix schisms in their societies.
“We were not mature enough, we didn’t know what conflict was, what democracy was, what was politics,” said Bashar Eltalhi, who provided technical support to Libyan rebels and the first transitional government and now works as a conflict analyst . “We thought we just needed to get rid of the boogeyman, but we didn’t realize that it had spread its magic on all of us.”
Many accused the United States of not doing enough to support the revolts for fear of harming their own interests.
In Egypt, the Obama administration refused to call the 2013 military coup a coup, preferring to safeguard relations with the Egyptian military, even after shooting hundreds of anti-group protesters. In Libya, the West’s involvement declined after el-Qaddafi’s death, contributing to the collapse of the planned political transition. In Syria, the United States has shifted its focus from supporting the opposition to fighting the Islamic State to, under President Trump, withdrawing most of its forces.
Other powers, often closer to the region and less concerned with democracy, rushed to fill the vacuum.
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates supported the monarchy in Bahrain and financed the Egyptian government, starting an admittedly more interventionist approach.
“We have come a long way since the 1970s, when we were the duckling that needed protection from America and permission from America,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist from the Emirates. “There is a certain level of confidence, which has led to being more assertive regionally and being more independent in relation to America and other powers.”
Former United States officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were shocked in 2014 when the Emirates bombed Libya’s capital, Tripoli, with American-made weapons and equipment, violating terms of sale and violating American policy. But when the United States complained, the Emirates backed off, irritated that the United States was not supporting the chosen strongman, one of the officials said.
A spokeswoman for the National Security Council declined to comment.
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates paid little attention to American officials before launching a military campaign in Yemen in 2015 and have since provided financial support and expanded their influence over the King of Jordan and the new government of Sudan.
In Syria, Iran transported militiamen to strengthen al-Assad’s forces, Russia sent its military to bomb rebel strongholds and Turkey transformed areas of the north into a de facto protectorate. The most active conversations about the country’s future are now between these three countries, while the West is on the sidelines and destruction haunts Syrians.
But many Arab Spring veterans argue that, with so much unfinished business in the uprisings, pro-democracy movements are bound to return.
“Anyone who says the Arab Spring has died does not know the history of the people’s struggle,” said Tawakkul Karman, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for his role in the Yemen uprising. “Our people’s dreams have not died and will not die.”
The region’s population is profoundly young; most of their governments have failed to guarantee economic security; and a whole generation remembers the thrill of taking to the streets and jumping in the photos of dictators.
In the past few years, Arab Spring-style movements against corruption and bad governance have driven out longtime autocrats in Algeria and Sudan. Similar protests have shaken Iraq and Lebanon, but for lack of a single despot on whom to focus their anger , failed to alter their complex sectarian political systems.
In the long run, low oil prices and growing populations can leave the Gulf states with less money for foreign intervention, and veteran revolutionaries can pass on the lessons of their failures to younger activists.
Tarek el-Menshawy, 39, who owns a machine shop in Cairo, looks at protests a decade ago as the best days of his life. He sadly remembers crying when he and thousands of others finally overcame the police and arrived at Tahrir Square.
The revolution may have failed, he said, but it still accomplished something powerful.
“The younger generations saw what happened,” he said. “It’s like a shark when they smell blood. Freedom is like that. We smell it once, so let’s keep trying. “
His friend, Ahmed Radwan, 33, said that if a revolt broke out against the current government, he would gladly protest again. But he is convinced that another uprising would be useless.
“We don’t have the tools,” he said. “They are much stronger.”
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and David D. Kirkpatrick from New York. Vivian Yee contributed reporting from Cairo and Hwaida Saad from Beirut.