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December 13th, 2024 | 2:31 PM ET

Moving Forward

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Posted: December 17th, 2015

By John McLaughlin

John McLaughlin is the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  He served as both Acting Director and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. McLaughlin served as a U.S. 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.

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