Eighteen months ago, a sudden eruption of social and political protests across the Middle East took the world by storm. Despite widespread awareness that the mix of economic stagnation, sky-rocketing unemployment, demographic pressure, corrupt and inefficient government, and social and political repression represented a serious threat to the stability of the region few anticipated the magnitude and impact of the so-called Arab Spring.
This failure of imagination reveals the substantial limits of the dominant paradigm employed by the United States, and to a lesser extent its European counterparts, in assessing the quality and reliability of its allies.
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