ABSTRACT
As the Arab uprisings spread throughout the Arab world and US friends and foes alike tumbled or fell, a surprised Obama administration seemed to muddle its way through rather than reacting with a clear strategic vision. Observers immediately explained this by the long-standing tension between ‘pursuing American “values” (US foreign policy idealism) and protecting American “interests” (foreign policy realism)’ (Atlas 2012). However, rather than posing values against interests, it is two normative preferences in the Middle East which are producing a tension in US foreign policy: a normative preference for a stable order which the US believes fosters the security of
Israel, the secured flow of energy to keep the global economy running, and the global fight against terrorism1 — and a normative preference for a democratic order. While the US foreign policy establishment has shown a propensity to believe that both preferences coincide in the long term (Ish-Shalom 2006), they frequently clash in the short term (see the introduction of the special issue on the democratization-stabilization dilemma). That the normative preference for a democratic order has entered US for-
eign policy in the Middle East is a relatively recent phenomenon. While the US had inserted human rights and democracy elements into its foreign policy toward South America and Eastern Europe already under the Carter and Reagan administrations, in the Middle East throughout the cold war and in its immediate aftermath, it sought to uphold a stable order which would guarantee its security and energy interests in the region, even if this came at the cost of bolstering autocracy. Indeed, it seems that the unprecedented moment of US dominance in the Middle East in the 1990s came at the cost of democracy in the whole region. Below graph with Freedom House data for the Middle East, the Gulf, and North Africa, while by no means showing causations, still indicates that it was during the US’ unipolar moment in the region that it lived through its most autocratic period since the 1970s.2
