By Hussein Aboubakr | July 23, 2021 | Published in Mosaic

“In 2021,” wrote Marc Lynch, the American political scientist who gave the Arab Spring its name, “there may be few beliefs more universally shared than that the Arab uprisings failed.” His statement sums up the conventional wisdom of observers in the West. And as someone who was not only present in Egypt during the uprising, but was among the throngs of young people in Cairo’s Tahrir square demanding change, I can hardly say that I look back on those days with anything but disappointment. Nor do the stories of other Arab lands caught up in the wave of revolutions invite more optimism. But simply to see the Arab Spring as having given way to an “Arab Winter” is to miss something crucial about what has happened to the Middle East over the past ten years.

The conventional story of the Arab Spring’s failure goes something like this: in 2010 and 2011, people across the Middle East took to the streets en masse, standing up to their despotic and corrupt rulers after decades of submission. Suddenly, there was hope for democracy, or at least some less authoritarian form of government. In most places, however, the protest movements either were smothered in their cradles or led to bloody civil wars. But most tragic of all is the case of Egypt, which held the first true democratic election in its history, only to see the winner removed by a military coup, and then replaced by an even more brutal version of the status quo ante. Hope for Arab democracy has been quashed, and the prospects for political reform in the Middle East are worse than ever.

Read the full article here

Walid Phares is a Middle East expert and pacesetter, often predicting trends and situations on the ground years before they occur. He is a Fox News Expert, advisor to the US Congress and the European Parliament and served as a senior advisor on national security foreign policy to presidential candidate Mitt Romney 2012.

Dr. Phares taught political science and Middle East studies at Florida Atlantic University between 1993 and 2004. Since 2006, he has taught Global Jihadi strategies at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Phares lectures to academic associations and on campuses nationwide and internationally, including at the US Intelligence University, Georgetown, Columbia, University of Chicago and Ecole Militaire of France in Paris. 

After having authored six books on Middle East politics and history in Arabic in the 1980s, Dr. Phares authored another five in English since the mid-1990s. His most important volumes were published after 9/11 starting with Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America, read and cited by many members of Congress and the European Parliament. Dr. Phares predicted the rise of jihadi urban networks and set forth strategies to counter them in the West and overseas. Media and colleagues alike rave about Phares's hallmark book, The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East, which predicted the Arab Spring a year in advance

Dr. Phares is a native of Beirut, Lebanon, and immigrated to the United States in 1990. He speaks fluent Arabic, French and English. Prior to moving stateside, Dr. Phares was a student union leader and lawyer and founded a social-democratic party, which he represented in several political coalitions. Dr. Phares holds a Ph.D. in international relations and strategic studies from the University of Miami, a Political Science Degree from St. Joseph University, a Law degree from the Lebanese University in Beirut and a Master in International Law from Universite Jean Moulin in Lyons, France.