US Democracy Promotion in the Arab World: Beyond Interests vs. Ideals by Mieczysław P. Boduszyński (review)

With the possible exception of Tunisia, the countries that experienced the socalled Arab Spring have either resorted to authoritarianism or have gone through internal strife and destabilizing civil wars. The question that many scholars have been asking for several years now is whether the United States could have done more to aid the democratic forces in these countries or could have used the political and economic levers at its disposal to move these countries in a democratic direction.

Mieczysław Boduszyński tries to tackle these issues by explaining what these levers were and why they were used to some extent by former president Barack Obama (though not nearly enough as democracy advocates had hoped) and almost not at all by President Donald Trump, who has indulged many authoritarian leaders since he first came to office. Boduszyński, a former State Department official who was a participant in the Middle East policy process during the Arab Spring, does a commendable job not only in integrating the memoires of former US officials to tell a detailed narrative about these events and the US response but personally interviewing many officials as well as democracy advocates in both the US and in several Arab countries.

The value of the book is the inside look into the intricate policy process that many scholars tend to neglect. US policy-makers often try to balance so-called strategic interests with American ideals. More often than not the former trumps the latter, and that was certainly true of the US response to the Arab Spring—though Boduszyński shows how complex the balancing act really was.

Although he discusses the bureaucratic politics model that students of US foreign policy are familiar with, Boduszyński also emphasizes the role of the individual who sometimes transcends the institutions they lead. Revealingly, he writes of how policymakers come to crises with historical memories and how that affects their judgments. For example, when the Arab Spring broke out, the frame of reference for older officials was the Iranian Revolution, while for younger officials, especially the advisors in the Obama White House, it was the fall of communism and the transition of many Eastern European countries to democracy. Many of the older officials did not want a repeat of the Iran example under their watch, while the younger group saw an opportunity to be "on the right side of history" (p. 71) and tried to persuade Obama to strongly support protesters calling for regime change and democracy.

Another interesting and wellresearched section of the book deals with Obama and his conflicting policies toward the Arab Spring. Boduszyński shows that Obama, a realist who believed that US power should be used sparingly because it often backfires, was initially hesitant to embrace regime change in many of these countries, and yet, as a former community organizer, he saw the power and efficacy of mass protests embracing ideals. At times Obama could be eloquent about the US backing of these ideals, and yet he did not push for any major initiative like a Marshall Plan for the region (though perhaps that was unrealistic in an age of austerity) and pursued what Boduszyński says was a "tepid" response to the Arab Spring (p. 182). Moreover, in the case of Bahrain, Obama could condemn the crackdown on oppositionists and call for democratic reforms "while reaffirming the closeness of Washington's relationship with the al-Khalifa monarchy" (p. 182).

Although Boduszyński writes mostly as an analyst as opposed to a policy advocate, he seems to suggest that the US could have indeed done more on democracy promotion. He writes that the "hypothesis that the United States had no influence at these key moments is hard to accept because the Obama administration was often unwilling to meaningfully test whether it had its leverage" (p. 184). He then suggests that if the US had held up...