What Happens When Arab Autocrats Are Left to Fend For Themselves? Turmoil Galore – OpEd

James M. Dorsey, Eurasia Review

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Excerpt:

[T]here is a degree of US disengagement but not out of weakness but out of strategic reinterpretation of US national interests. That reinterpretation reduces the importance of the Middle East to the United States with some exceptions like Israel and attributes significantly increased significance to Asia. It also involves a realization that support for autocratic regimes that are fighting for survival irrespective of the cost constitutes a failed policy, a policy that has fuelled anti-Americanism and militant interpretations of Islam.

In his interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama noted that the Saudi campaign, the single largest public diplomacy campaign in history, has begun for example to alter the tolerant character of Islam in Indonesia [;] witness the predicament of Ahmadis and Shiites and the conservative turn in public morals that Indonesian society is experiencing. ...