Moving Forward

By John McLaughlin

John E. McLaughlin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  He served as Acting Director of Central Intelligence from July to September 2004 and as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 2000 to July 2004. He was a US Army Officer in the 1960s, with service in Vietnam.

When the so-called Arab Spring burst upon the Middle East five years ago, Henry Kissinger remarked that this was only “scene one of act one of a five act play.”  How right he was.

Kissinger’s remark was a usefully sobering antidote to a brief moment of nearly unbounded euphoria.  Recall the broad reaction in early 2011 to events in Tunisia and Egypt in particular:  these initially peaceful revolutions were seen as the rebuttal to Al Qaeda’s advocacy of violence as the gateway to political change.  All the more so as these changes were arising spontaneously from within Arab populations, with no external stimulus, and were about universal values such as freedom, democracy, and rule of law.  The Arab world was awakening, reclaiming some of its enlightened past and rejecting autocracy.  It was a hopeful moment.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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