Recommended: The Conservative Revolutionary

Walter Russell Mead has a brilliant analysis of the "Arab Spring" and our (feckless) foreign policy response to it over on the American Interest blog under the title The Conservative Revolutionary. It is pretty clear that Washington politicians and their advisers (Republicans and Democrats alike) haven't a clue how to respond to these uprisings or the brutal government suppression that accompany them. We bomb Libya but ignore Bahrain, we deplore the brutality in Syria but say nothing about the Army takeover of the revolution in Egypt. Clearly we have no coherent long-term plan or policy toward the Middle East -- we are just making it up as we go along.

For a nation that spends a lot of its time lecturing other nations about how they ought to become Democratic, we seem to be terribly naive about what it takes to build and sustain a democracy.