Fifteen years after the Middle East’s largest pro-democracy movement, the West still has not learned that supporting autocracy is no longer sustainable.

The Arab Spring carries multiple meanings for the many millions of people across the Middle East and North Africa, let alone the world. The widespread calls for civil liberties and democracy across the region certainly were divisive, with some defining the uprisings as imperialist plots while others viewed them as a long-anticipated moment for freedom fighters and democrats who had long suffered under some of the most autocratic rulers of the 20th century. But what did this moment of national and regional upheaval truly mean for the region, its autocrats, and the people stuck under their boots, and what does that mean for the future?

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation in protest against the brutal Tunisian regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali unknowingly kicked off the region’s largest democracy wave since decolonization. Within a series of months, protests spread against autocratic regimes in Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, shocking a world long accustomed to and benefitting from repression in that part of the world. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak regime, for example, was long viewed as a bulwark against the Arab street and the forces of Arab and Islamic nationalism that, for many in the West, posed a threat to their regional interests—namely energy flows, Israeli security, and fighting violent extremism.

Yet, ironically enough, it was this very autocracy that proved to be the undoing of the Western-friendly equation underpinning assumptions about regional stability. As governments across the Middle East and North Africa tightened their police state models around unsustainable corruption, mismanagement, and political repression, the people of the region, particularly unemployed youth, started to question the systems repressing them for the benefit of foreign powers and a small circle of elites.

Thus, the rapid spread of revolutionary movements across the region in the early days of the Arab Spring resulted from the outdated and unsustainable structures of the past. Yet, tragically, those same structures proved resilient, including the Arab Gulf monarchies that ultimately drove counterrevolutionary forces against successful uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Indeed, the cruel reality of the Arab Spring period is that old rivalries and zero-sum geopolitical gamesmanship at the international and regional levels proved more powerful and resilient than any singular pro-democracy moment. In this vein, counterrevolutionary forces led by the Gulf monarchies dug deeper into bloc politics, competing with the pro-revolutionary actors of the region, namely Turkey and Qatar. Iran, meanwhile, expanded its influence in broken, war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq, and Yemen to advance its relative power in the shadow war with Israel and the United States.

That dynamic explains the overall failure of the Arab Spring to produce a real democratic moment for the Middle East and North Africa. In the quest to defeat the old, autocratic structures that long defined the region’s post-colonial era, pro-democracy movements fostered counterrevolutionary brutality directly synonymous with those structures. Worse, it hardened the geopolitical fault lines that produced and extended horrific violence across the region, raising fears of a real regional conflict between competing blocs while drawing international and global powers like the United States and Russia.

In these failures, however, are important lessons that have come to define the legacy of the Arab Spring. Most importantly, the period undeniably proved that notions of “autocratic stability” in the Middle East and North Africa were not only faulty but counterproductive. To be sure, this lesson is not necessarily a catch-all. There are plenty of contexts in which stability has been and should have been prioritized over vague notions of “democracy.” Take Syria under the interim government of President Ahmed al-Shara as an example: the man is no democrat in the Western sense, but he may be necessary to ensure Syria survives its shaky transition.

However, that nuance does not excuse the lesson itself. Over time, autocratic governing systems fail under the very pressures they create. An unaccountable state that deprives its people of basic civil liberties and participation in their country’s civic life, while simultaneously failing to provide the material conditions necessary to keep most of the population pliant, will buckle with time. An unlit powder keg is still a powder keg merely waiting for a spark, and arsonists are always eager to light a fire, let alone those brave individuals willing to fight for their most basic human rights with nothing but words and solidarity.

In this sense, the West appears to have only partially learned the lessons from the legacy and failures of the Arab Spring. The Gulf monarchies are ascendant. Their leaders understand the importance of improving their people’s material lives while leaning into the Western relationships that have protected their security since their founding. Short-term political considerations continue to define the West’s approach to the region, and these autocrats, especially those rich in energy resources and capital, are of particular concern. Any attempt to right-size this dynamic results in strategic hedging. China and Russia are eager to work with Gulf rulers without strings attached, and Western commentators are quick to sensationalize the real impact of this outcome.

It is this fear that at least partially drives imperial Western thinking about the societies of the region. When presented with the choice, officials in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin willingly opt for the path of least resistance, pursuing policies they believe will benefit their populations and, in turn, their political success and power. It is easier to pass an unsustainable problem off to the next generation, especially when the economic dividends—both public and increasingly personal—sweeten such deals, and accountability for those who supported the same policies in the past is nonexistent.

For these reasons, the people of the region suffer under the boot of autocracy. It is also for this reason that the Arab Spring is not yet complete, as the frustrations that fostered the uprisings remain amid the bombed-out structures of Aleppo and the blood-soaked concrete of Rabaa. Whether the prospects of a new wave of Arab Spring uprisings—not unlike those in Sudan, Iraq, and Lebanon in 2019—occur tomorrow or in a decade is less a question. They will come, just as uprisings in Syria in the 1980s and 2010s notoriously pulled at the same, unaddressed strings.

In a world increasingly capable of and willing to repress the street, the Arab Spring serves as a lesson. There is a better, people-driven path that considers the hopes, aspirations, and dignity of individuals and societies. This is not to say that societies can be remade or should be remade under nation-building projects, but rather to note that values can still be a part of state interests and their subsequent foreign policies in rightsizing relations along transactional lines with inherently dangerous and harmful states that still carry strategic weight. That starts by recognizing the painful lessons of the Arab Spring on this 15th anniversary.

About the Author: Alexander Langlois

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst, the senior editor at DAWN, and a contributing fellow at Defense Priorities. He is focused on the geopolitics of the Levant and the broader dynamics of West Asia. Langlois holds a Master of Arts degree in International Affairs from American University. He has written for various outlets, including The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Sada, the Atlantic Council’s MENASource, the Lowy Institute, the Gulf International Forum, the New Arab, the Nation, and Inkstick. Follow him on X: @langloisajl.

Image: Mehmet Ali Poyraz / Shutterstock.com.

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