Not that he is aware of having failed: On the contrary, Berlusconi clung to power — petulantly, angrily — until the bitter end. He finally left office only because “eight traitors,” in his words, failed to support him during a vote last week, and he lost his parliamentary majority. Had that not happened, he surely would have carried on, even as the Italian financial system collapsed in a hail of fire and brimstone all around him.

I leave it to others to puzzle out what will happen to the Italian financial system next, and I don’t envy them. A couple of weeks ago, I heard a senior European central banker solemnly declare that the future of the entire continent might well depend upon whether and when his colleagues would once again begin to purchase Italian government bonds. It is bad enough that Greece is about to go down in flames. But Italy? The fourth-largest economy in Europe? The eighth-largest economyin the world?

Yet even if one looks backward instead of forward, the conclusion of Berlusconi’s political career doesn’t look much more cheerful. On the contrary: His long reign at the very top of Italian politics holds gloomy lessons for would-be revolutionaries everywhere.

For, as not many now remember, Berlusconi’s political career was the direct result of a very dramatic revolution, one that I was lucky enough to witness at an early stage. In 1993, I went to Milan to interview Luca Magni, an Italian businessman who ran a cleaning company. After years of paying bribes to secure contracts, Magni had decided a few months earlier that he’d had enough. “I just wanted to do business without worrying about it,” he told me. So he made a recording of a government official who asked him for money, passed the recording to a public prosecutor named Antonio Di Pietro — and thus set into motion a chain of investigations that eventually led to the arrest of hundreds of politicians and political appointees.

In due course, the whole Italian political hierarchy collapsed. Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Socialist Party, escaped to Tunisia and never came back. Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat leader and former prime minister, was investigated for mafia connections and never returned to public life. Their political parties vanished.

Into the vacuum stepped Silvio Berlusconi. Though it’s hard to believe now, at the time he seemed revolutionary, too. He talked about releasing Italians from the chains of bureaucracy, corruption and high taxes. He brought a whole new group of young people into politics, all dressed in cashmere sweaters. He named his political party Forza Italia — after the slogan of the national soccer team — and for a brief moment, that seemed fun. For an even briefer moment politics became chic, even among the northern Italian middle classes, who had always stayed away. In Milan, I was told in 1993, it was rude to ask a man which party he voted for, much worse than asking him how much money he made. Berlusconi was supposed to change all of that.

But Berlusconi, who had accumulated his wealth under the old regime, was incapable of changing himself, let alone his country. Some people grow more mature upon attaining political power. Some grow more arrogant. He fell into the latter camp. Instead of heralding the new era, he brought the revolution to a halt. Instead of making life easier for the Luca Magnis of Italy, he avoided unpopular reforms, accumulated even more state debt, spent much of his time with fellow billionaires (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin among them) and organized “bunga-bunga,” whatever that means exactly, in his palatial residences. He remained popular enough to be reelected, in part because the opposition was so weak — when the old Italian political class was eliminated, nothing else emerged to replace it — and in part because he represented the material “success” to which many modern Italians aspire. But now the bond markets have caught up with him, and the prosecutors won’t be far behind, or at least I hope not.

Which brings me back to the gloomy lesson of his career: Occupy Wall Street! Libyan rebels! Spanish Indignados! Be careful what you wish for: The elimination of your country’s political class will not necessarily result in a better-run state or a happier society. Instead, if you are not extremely careful, you might get the counterrevolution — you might get Berlusconi.

J isn’t a hedge-fund manager or a plutocrat, but he is a member of the American upper-middle class, a group which is now sociologically and economically very distinct from the lower-middle class, with different politics, different ambitions and different levels of optimism. Thirty years ago, this wasn’t the case. A worker in a Detroit car factory earned about the same as, say, a small-town dentist, and although they might have different taste in films or furniture, their purchasing power wasn’t radically different. Their children would have been able to play together without feeling as if they came from different planets.

Now they couldn’t. Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 per cent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating.

I would argue that the growing divisions within the American middle class are far more important than the gap between the very richest and everybody else. They are important because to be “middle class”, in America, has such positive connotations, and because most Americans think they belong in it. The middle class is the “heartland”, the middle class is the “backbone of the country”. In 1970, Time magazine described middle America as people who “sing the national anthem at football games – and mean it”.

“Middle America” also once implied the existence of a broad group of people who had similar values and a similar lifestyle. If you had a small suburban home, a car, a child at a state university, an annual holiday on a Michigan lake, you were part of it. But, at some point in the past 20 years, a family living at that level lost the sense that it was doing “well”, and probably struggled even to stay there. Now it seems you need a McMansion, children at private universities, two cars, a ski trip in the winter and a summer vacation in Europe in order to feel as if you are doing minimally “well”. You also need a decent retirement fund, since what the state pays is so risible, as well as an employer who can give you a generous health-care plan, since health care is so expensive.

I’m not going to argue about the economics of this shift in definition of “middle”, or the morality (of course, no one with a small suburban home and a car is “poor” by global standards). The point is that people’s perceptions have changed. Many who used to feel secure in “middle America” now feel, rightly or wrongly, left behind, and they don’t think they will ever catch up. Meanwhile, many of those who used to feel proud of coming from “middle America” now feel, like my friend, that they have little in common with their “heartland”. If this turns out to be a permanent change, the implications for American politics, even for Western politics, will be profound. For the past 50 years, Western democracy has flourished alongside the assumption of upward mobility: everyone could participate in the political system; everyone had a chance at improving his status; and everyone could hope, at least, that his children would live better than his parents had, in Britain, France and Germany as well as America. But if Americans are no longer “all in the same boat”, if some of them are now destined to live better than others, then will they continue to feel like political equals? If Britons, Frenchmen and Germans no longer have much in common with their countrymen, will they still want to take part in the same national debates? We don’t know yet – we’ve never lived without a “middle middle class” before – and we are about to find out.

And at least the Russian revolutionaries were operating within what had been a functioning society. By contrast, Libya’s late dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, has left an unprecedented, even weird, vacuum in his wake. Post-revolutionary Libya is truly a desert, not only in the geographic sense but in the political, economic, even psychological senses too.

Look, by contrast, at Libya’s post-revolutionary neighbors. Egypt has a sophisticated economy, a middle class, foreign investors and an enormous tourist industry, not to mention a long history of financial interactions with the rest of the world. Tunisia has a highly educated and articulate population, which has long been exposed to French media and political ideas. More than 90 percent of Tunisians voted in the country’s first free elections last weekend. Outside observers proclaimed the voting impeccably fair.

Libya, by contrast, has neither a sophisticated economy nor an articulate population, nor any political experience whatsoever. There were no political parties under Gaddafi, not even fake, government-controlled political parties. There were no media, nor even reliable information, to speak of. Libyan journalists were the most heavily controlled in the Arab world, hardly anyone has Internet access,and there is no tradition of investigative reporting.

During four decades in power, Gaddafi destroyed the army, the civil service and the educational system. The country produces nothing except oil, and none of the profits from that oil seem to have trickled down to anybody. Some 60 percent of the population works for the government, but they receive very low salaries — a few hundred dollars a month — in exchange. There is hardly any infrastructure, outside of a few roads. There is hardly any social life, since so many young people were too poor to marry. There wouldn’t be any public spaces to enjoy social life even if it existed: Trash is scattered along the undeveloped beaches, and old plastic bags blow back and forth across weed-clogged city parks.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and of course, in the absence of an army, militias may step into the breach: At the moment, some 27 of them, from cities all over Libya, have taken up residence in Tripoli compounds and spray-painted their names on the barricades. In the absence of regulatory bodies, newborn newspapers may well fall into the hands of business and political groups with foreign or old-regime connections too. When I met the deputy chairman of the TNC, Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, we discussed another “Russian” scenario: Newspapers start out enthusiastic and free, as they did in Moscow in the 1990s, but are gradually bought up by business conglomerates — until eventually they return to government control. The same fate could await new political parties.

And yet Libya’s unprecedented vacuum also offers unprecedented opportunities. One Libyan journalist — the editor of a brand-new magazine, which he has personally financed and staffed with volunteers — points out that none of his journalists ever learned to write regime propaganda, and all of them are therefore committed to telling “the truth.” The nonexistent economy and the absence of political institutions also means that there aren’t any entrenched interests that will set themselves against change, as they have done in Egypt. There aren’t even any well-organized Islamists, as there are in Tunisia.

On top of all that, Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa, and — depending on who is counting — some $250 billion in foreign currency reserves. Much of the money Gaddafi never spent on his people is now sitting in the bank. In fact, I can’t think of another group of revolutionaries, at any time in history, who found themselves in quite such a fortunate situation. Usually, revolutions are born out of national bankruptcy. The first task of a new regime is to fill the state’s coffers. The second task is to tear down the institutions of the old regime. Libya’s task — how to spend its money wisely, and how to build new institutions from scratch — is both easier than anyone else’s and harder at the same time. And no, I’m not going to predict what will happen next.

“We need to have a process.” (We need to have a process!)

“This meeting was called for a reason!” (This meeting was called for a reason!)

“We know that you are there!” (We know that you are there!)

“And we have solidarity with you.” (We have solidarity with you!)

Unintentionally, it sounds a lot like a scene from the Monty Python movie “Life of Brian,” the one in which Brian, who has been mistaken for the Messiah, shouts out at the crowd, “You are all individuals!” The crowd shouts back: “We are all individuals!”

To my American ear, the resemblance is reinforced by the fact that the speakers are British and thus sound as if they belong in a Monty Python movie anyway. But this isn’t unusual: Inevitably, the Occupy movements — also known in Europe as the indignados, after Spanish protests that started last spring — have taken on different national flavors in different places. The Occupy Tokyo marchers shouted slogans about nuclear power. The Occupy Sydney protests fizzled out because, as a spokesman regretfully admitted, “we don’t have the depth of crisis here in Australia.” In Rome, where radical politics has historically had a violent fringe, marches have already turned into riots and caused millions of euros worth of damage.

Of course these international protests do have a few things in common, both with one another and with the anti-globalization movement that preceded them. They are similar in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue Saint-Martin in Paris.

Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians. As I wrote at the time of the first Greek riots a few years ago, nobody much admires powerless leaders. Nobody much sees the point in voting for people who can’t stop another wave of economic pain rolling in from Beijing, Brussels or New York. If you’re upset about the austerity program being imposed on your country by indebted banks on the other side of the world, it doesn’t seem logical to complain to the mayor of Seville.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their borders. Although I still believe in globalization’s economic and spiritual benefits — along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade — globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

When I stepped outside, I could hear a congregation singing: A new church has been built next door. Around the corner, I could hear children in their classrooms, hard at work on a Saturday. Along the road to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, trees have been planted.

Development economists and aid mavens know very well the story of Rwanda’s remarkable recovery. But the country’s achievements may be less appreciated by the wider public. Seventeen years after more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were murdered in just a few months by their Hutu neighbors, Rwanda has 7 percent economic growth, near-universal health insurance and fierce anti-corruption laws. Kigali is remarkably clean and relatively safe. Some 40 percent of Rwandans own cellphones. National identity cards now identify people as “Rwandan,” not Hutu or Tutsi.

It is the ambition of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president — and former leader of the Tutsi exile army that conquered the country in the genocide’s wake — to go much further. While visiting one Rwandan government agency I accidentally picked up some notes left by previous visitors, an advisory team from Singapore. Their presence was no accident: Lee Kwan Yew’sbenign authoritarianism is widely admired here, and some of his methods are in evident use. The former Singaporean leader infamously banned chewing gum in his country. Kagame has banned plastic bags — they aren’t biodegradeable — and requires all Rwandans to wear shoes.

But there are limits to copying the Singaporean model. Rwanda is landlocked, and it has difficult neighbors. A truck leaving Kigali takes at least four days to reach Mombasa, Kenya, the nearest port. Worse, the driver will pay, according to one survey, $864 in bribes at 36 roadblocks along the way. Much though it might like to be an export-led African tiger, Rwanda’s geography prevents it.

Rwanda’s government has, as a result, set an ambitious goal: to become a “services hub” for central Africa or, in the local jargon, a “knowledge- and information-based economy.” Toward that end, the government has begun laying fiber-optic cable across the country and has been vigorously courting foreign investors (Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim was in town just a few days ago).

And here is where Rwanda’s ambitious economic plans run into Rwanda’s political reality. Though some opposition is legal, and though people in the capital speak openly about the country’s deficits, the Rwandan press is weak and journalists are downtrodden. Some have been murdered. Others are in jail. Many have fled the country. All are considered fair game for bullying, and not only by the government. One journalist showed me an e-mail he received from a local nongovernmental organization that wanted him to publish a photograph. Its conclusion: “Please post the picture online and if not, please give a clear explanation as to why not.”

Until now, Kagame and his ministers have argued — citing the track record in Singapore and elsewhere — that control of the press, of politics and of speech was essential to the preservation of what still seems, to them, a fragile peace. Their fear of destructive criticism — and of losing power — is not excusable, but it is understandable, given their history: The current political elite is largely composed of members of the Tutsi minority who with Kagame fought their way back into the country in 1994, where they found piles of corpses. Supporters of the old regime live across the border in Congo, or so current leaders believe, and still write angry denunciations of the regime from their exile.

And yet no government that prohibits the free circulation of information can create a “knowledge- and information-based economy.” Even leaving aside the ethics, nobody will invest in a “services hub” where people fear speaking the truth. Some of Rwanda’s leaders at the very highest levels know this and are pushing broad media reforms; I was in Rwanda with the Legatum Institute — a London-based nonpartisan group devoted to good governance, for which I am director of political studies — to learn about these changes.

The Rwandans still have a long way to go, as they themselves will acknowledge. But they may have no choice, for there is a larger point here: In recent years, it has become fashionable in some circles to speak of a “Beijing consensus,” a road to growth and development that eschews democracy, scorns Western models and favors authoritarianism, benign or otherwise. A few years back, Rwandans leapt onto this bandwagon too. It got them a clean capital, fast growth and low crime — quite far, in other words. But how much farther? The development economists and aid mavens often speak of the “bottlenecks” in infrastructure and energy supply that might block growth in Rwanda. Maybe it’s time to add “lack of free speech” to that list.

After Muammar Gaddafi and his ghastly children fled Tripoli, Libyans desecrated his statues and stamped on his posters. As it turned out, the Libyans really did hate Gaddafi enough to rise up, arm themselves and overthrow him. Gaddafi’s own elite units mostly melted away when the rebels advanced into Tripoli, and even the dictator’s tatty palaces (where did all that oil money go, one wonders) were abandoned by his personal guard. Backed by western airpower and special forces, the rebels entered many of these ramshackle structures unopposed.

The Libyans have a right to be proud, and we in the West have a right to feel relieved. This wasn’t Suez, in the end, and the most dire predictions have so far failed to come true. But neither was the Libyan expedition a great triumph for the North Atlantic alliance. In fact, anyone who has spent any time in Washington lately can’t help but be disturbed by the murmurs of complacency heard around London and in the British press over the past week. ‘The Atlantic alliance… remains the only credible multilateral structure for major interventions,’ writes my friend Matt d’Ancona, this magazine’s former editor. But if that’s true, then we are in serious trouble.

In case you’d forgotten: Nato was divided and uncertain about Libya from the start. Two of the alliance’s most important members, Germany and Turkey, bitterly opposed any intervention. The expression ‘dragged kicking and screaming’ is not inappropriately applied to the attitude of the American president either. When Barack Obama finally, reluctantly, agreed to participate in the operation, it was only to assist: Europe, he declared, must lead.

The president’s reluctance can’t be chalked up to his wishy-washy liberalism either. A third war, in a third Muslim country, was unpopular in Congress and the country. At a time of galloping budget deficits, no one felt excited about another expensive air operation. The president’s lack of enthusiasm had echoes across the political spectrum. Think about this: American politics is so partisan and so divided that a squabbling Congress almost allowed the country to default on its debts in August. Yet Republicans and Democrats of all kinds united in their dislike of the Libyan venture. In fact, if President Mitt Romney or President Rick Perry had been in charge, the American commitment to the operation would probably have been even more limited.

Now, in the wake of Gaddafi’s rapid exit from Tripoli, an equally bipartisan, equally varied, and equally united range of politicians, pundits and scholars have once again come together, this time to condemn Europe for its military failures in Libya. I cite the leftish, dovish, cappuccino-drinking New York Times: ‘It is reasonable to expect the wealthy nations of Europe to easily handle a limited mission in their own backyard that involved no commitment of ground troops. Reasonable, but, as it turned out, not realistic.’

Meanwhile, the rightish, hawkish, red-meat-eating Wall Street Journal has run a series of articles on European military weakness, including one on Britain entitled ‘Sun Setting on British Power.’ At the height of the conflict in June, the US Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, himself declared that ‘The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US once more to make up the difference.’

The statistics are grim. During the Cold War, Europe contributed a third of Nato’s military spending. Now the figure has sunk to one fifth. During the Kosovo campaign in 1999, Nato aircraft flew some 800 missions a day, using 1200 aircraft. In Libya, the alliance ‘struggled’ — Gates’s word — to launch 150 missions a day using 250 aircraft. Even that limited number was made possible only thanks to the last-minute arrival of American specialists in targeting and intelligence. Otherwise, the numbers would have been even lower.

Stories circulate about that shortage of munitions. According to one unverifiable report, the French were dropping ‘practice’ bombs — i.e. lumps of concrete — normally used only in training. Others were ‘borrowing’ ammunition, either from the Americans or from countries which weren’t involved. A good percentage of the Nato missions which flew over Libya dropped nothing at all, prompting one cynical (non-Nato) foreign minister to ask whether they contributed to anything except global warming.

Further decline of the European half of the alliance is not inevitable, but it would require a different kind of thinking all across the continent, not only about fighting but about weapons and training. Some of Europe’s armies have already begun to pool their resources, make joint purchases, and carry out joint exercises. Not every European country needs submarines, and some are happy to benefit from, say, joint ownership of the odd transport plane.

Unfortunately, the ideological barriers to intelligent military spending and deeper cooperation in Europe are almost as high, at least in some places, as the ideological barriers to an intelligent fiscal policy in America. British Eurosceptics recoil in horror from anything which sounds like a ‘European’ defence force, even if it makes economic and strategic sense, and even if the alternative is military irrelevance. The French defence industry still lobbies hard against any agreement which allows the French government to buy non-French weapons of any kind, in any quantity.

Not everyone is cutting back: China’s military spending is projected to grow by 142 per cent in the next five years. But Europeans — and yes, that includes the British — are planning further cuts, just as the United States is turning inwards, having finally grown weary of foreign ventures. If Nato is the only credible Western military structure, we’re in trouble. Because the next time we need Nato, we might discover it’s no longer really there.

In the wake of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, an organizing principle suddenly presented itself. Like the Cold War, the “war on terror,” as it instantly became known, clearly defined America’s friends, enemies and priorities. Like the Cold War, the war on terror appealed to both American idealism and American realism. We were fighting bad guys, but the destruction of al-Qaeda also lay clearly within the sphere of our national interests. The speed with which we adopted this paradigm was impressive, if somewhat alarming. At the time, I marveled at the neatness of this new New World Order and “how like an academic article everything suddenly appears to be.”

The events of Sept. 11 reverberated through American life, but nowhere more profoundly than in U.S. policy toward the outside world. Creaking and groaning, the supertanker that is the American foreign and defense establishment turned itself around as Americans prepared to face new enemies. We created a vast security bureaucracy, encompassing some 1,200 government organizations, 1,900 private companies and 854,000 people with security clearances, according to a Washington Post investigation last year. We launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We organized counterterrorism operations in such far-flung places as the Philippines and Yemen, and we changed the culture of our military. We sharpened our focus on al-Qaeda and imitators. We spent, according to one estimate, some $3 trillion.

And we were, in the terms defined by the war on terror, successful: Ten years after 9/11, al-Qaeda is in profound disarray. Osama bin Laden is dead. Fanatical Islam is on the decline. Our military remains the most sophisticated in the world. And yet, 10 years after 9/11, it’s clear that the “war on terror” was far too narrow a prism through which to see the planet. And the price we paid to fight it was far too high.

In our single-minded focus on Islamic fanaticism, we missed China’s transformation from a commercial power into an ambitious political power. We failed to appreciate the significance of economic growth in China’s neighborhood. When President George W. Bush traveled to Asia in late 2001, he spoke to his Malaysian and Indonesian interlocutors about their resident terrorist cells. His Chinese colleagues, meanwhile, talked business and trade.

We also missed, at least initially, the transformation of Russia from a weak and struggling partner into a sometimes hostile opponent. Through the lens of the war on terror, Vladimir Putin looked like an ally. As Russia’s president, he, too, was fighting terrorists. Though his battles in Chechnya were a different war against quite different terrorists (and not only against terrorists), for a brief period he convinced his American counterparts that his struggle and their struggle were more or less the same.

Thanks to the war on terror, we missed what might have been a historic deal on immigration with Mexico. Because Latin America was irrelevant to the war on terror, we lost interest in, and influence on, that region. The same goes for Africa, except for those countries that have al-Qaeda cells. In the Arab world, we aligned ourselves with authoritarian regimes we believed would help us fight Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that their authoritarianism was an inspiration to fanatical Islamists. If we are viewed with suspicion in Egypt and Tunisia, that is part of the reason.

Finally, we stopped investing in our infrastructure — think what $3 trillion could do for roads, research, education or even private investment, if part of that sum had simply been left in taxpayers’ pockets — and we missed the chance to rethink our national energy policy. After Sept. 11, the president could have declared an emergency and explained to the nation that wars would have to be fought and paid for — perhaps, appropriately, through a gasoline tax. He would have had enormous support. In 2001, I could fill my gas tank for about $20. At the time, I’d have been happy to make it $21 if it helped the Marines in Afghanistan. Instead, the president cut taxes and increased defense spending. We are only now paying the price.

Plenty of other mistakes have been made, abroad and at home, since Sept. 11. Plenty of people will use this anniversary to re-argue Iraq, Guantanamo or wasteful homeland security spending. But our worst mistake was one of omission. In making Islamic terrorism our central priority — at times our only priority — we ignored the economic, environmental and political concerns of the rest of the globe. Worse, we pushed aside our economic, environmental and political problems until they became too great to be ignored.

Let me repeat: The U-turn that American foreign policy made after Sept. 11 was not a failure. But under President Bush, we narrowed our horizons, stopped thinking in broader strategic terms and paid little attention to future competitors and domestic weaknesses. President Obama, dealt a bad hand to start, hasn’t had the energy, resources or willpower to do much better. Ten years on, could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage to the nation than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?

But then, that’s the problem with wars and revolutions: They have a way of diverging from the policy and confounding the planners. They continue even when they are supposed to be over. They spill over into other areas and lead to new conflicts. Even wars that end with solemn surrender ceremonies and elaborate peace treaties sometimes have unexpected afterlives. World War I begat World War II, World War II begat the Cold War, the Cold War begat the Korean War and so on.

The Libyan revolution needn’t end in civil war. But there is no guarantee that it won’t. Either way, our ability to influence the course of events is limited. We can aid the rebels, as we have been doing all along: In fact, the Libyan opposition has quietly received not only NATO air support but also French and British military training, as well as weapons and advice from elsewhere in Europe and the Persian Gulf, most notably Qatar. But we can’t fight their war for them, we can’t unify them by force, and we can’t write their new constitution. On the contrary, if we make ourselves too visible in Libya, with troops on the ground or too many advisers in dark glasses, we will instantly become another enemy. If we try to create their government for them, we risk immediately making it unpopular.

What we should do instead — to use a much-mocked phrase — is bravely, proudly and forthrightly lead from behind. When the NATO engagement started, I argued that Obama’s best weapon was silence: no false promises, no soaring rhetoric, no threats. Keep this their war, not ours. The result: The rebels who just marched into Tripoli and waved at Al-Jazeera’s cameras looked like a Libyan force, not a Western one — because they were. The images of them stomping on Gaddafi’s photograph looked a lot more authentic, and will play better in Libya and across the Arab world, than did the images of Marines pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003, an American flag draped over his head.

There was a price to pay for our silence. The absence of visible American leadership — indeed, the absence of any Western leadership — might have worked brilliantly for the Libyans, but it has been a disaster for the NATO alliance. It was no accident that then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates lashed out at NATO’s European members in June, at the height of this conflict: After only a month of forays, the alliance’s weaknesses had been on full display. European troops that joined the conflict ran out of arms and ammunition; most members that stayed out didn’t have arms and ammunition to lend them. The two most prominent interventionists, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, hardly spoke about Libya. There was no public support in the West for intervention because it had so few public advocates in the West. That’s not a good sign for the future. But then, that’s our problem, not Libya’s.

Fortunately for us, leading from behind in Libya is not merely the only option, it’s also the best option. This was their revolution, not ours. Now it is poised to become their transition, not ours. We can help and advise. We can point to the experience of others — in Iraq, Chile, Poland — who have also attempted the transition from dictatorship to democracy and who can offer lessons in what to do and what to avoid. We can keep expectations low and promises minimal. After all, we have a lot to learn about the Libyan rebels, their tribal divisions, their politics and their economics. And we have a lot of ammunition to replace back home.

Scan the comment pages of the British press, and you will find a wide range of explanations. Read the center-right Daily Telegraph, and you will learn that the riots were caused by a weak and cowardly police force, absent fathers, welfare dependency, multiculturalism and the tolerance of gangs in schools. Read the center-left Guardian and you will be informed that police brutality, social exclusion, cuts in welfare spending and the widening gap between rich and poor are to blame. Some are convinced that high levels of immigration are at fault. Others believe the problem lies in British intolerance of immigrants and minorities.

There is a reason for the discrepancy: The rioters themselves do not wave signs. They do not chant. They weren’t protesting any particular government policy, as were student demonstrators in London last winter. They have not sought publicity for their views, if they have any. They hide from cameras and dodge journalists. And thus have they become the inkblot in a kind of national Rorschach test: Everyone sees in them the political issue they care about most, whether it’s welfare dependency, budget cuts, the decline of public education or — my personal favorite — the rise of a vulgar and amoral public culture.

And yet it is their lack of politics that most clearly defines them. If the Egyptians in Tahrir Square wanted democracy and the anarchists in Athens wanted more government spending, the hooded men in British streets want 46-inch flat-screen HD televisions. They aren’t smashing the headquarters of the Tory Party; they are smashing clothing shops. Instead of using social media to create civil society or cyber-utopia, they are using social media to steal. Someone circulated a text message on Monday night, calling friends to central London for “Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff. Just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want!”

Aside from stealing, a lot of the rioters — maybe most of the rioters — were also out to have a good time. Don’t be fooled by the stiff-upper-lip cliches: From Wat Tyler’s medieval peasant rebels to the modern soccer hooligans, there is a time-honored tradition of smashing things for fun in Britain, and the groups that enjoy it have been around for a long time. It doesn’t take very many of them to do a lot of damage. As of Wednesday morning, police had arrested 768 people, according to the BBC, and charged 105 in connection with violence in the capital. Overnight, London was calm for the first time since riots began last week.

I’m not counting out the other possible explanations, many of which would be worth investigating even if these riots had never occurred. The welfare state really has left a generation of young people feeling both dependent on government handouts and entitled to more. Poor state education has left as many as a fifth of British teenagers functionally illiterate. The slow economy means many will never find jobs and thus will never integrate into the mainstream. The presence of the world’s oligarchs and billionaires in London means the city has an economic gap that is unusually wide for the developed world. The tabloid press thrives on envy of the rich and cult-worship of boorish celebrities. Traditional institutions — the school system, churches, even the BBC — long ago lost their ability to transmit older values. A spate of scandals has recently discredited the banks, Parliament, the media and the London police even further.

And yet — there was looting in London after the Great Fire of 1666 and, despite the mythology, there was looting in London during the Blitz. Go back and read Dickens: Criminals, both immigrant and “native” British, have taken advantage of opportunities to loot in London during more peaceful times, too. A peculiar confluence of circumstances — a mob angry about a police murder, a sudden bout of warm weather, an unprepared police force distracted by scandal and, yes, the astonishingly widespread availability of smartphones among the underprivileged — might have allowed them to do so again. Beware of broad political generalizations in the wake of these riots: We don’t know whether we have just witnessed a “new” phenomenon, or a more mobile and technically adept version of a very old one.

Aren’t we missing the point once again? Breivik was not, in fact, a killer of immigrants or Muslims. He was a killer of Norwegians. The obsessions that led him to madness and then to mass murderer were not merely racist. They also sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.

This particular form of obsession is not new. Nor is it confined to blond, white, racist Norwegians. Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” brutally murdered a pawnbroker in the name of a vaguely defined “freedom” that was not available in decadent, Czarist St. Petersburg. Since then, revolutionaries and madmen of all kinds, from Russian anarchists to the Irish Republican Army, have justified the murder of innocent people on the grounds that it would hasten the end of an illegitimate government and bring to power some theoretically more authentic regime.

In contemporary America, we also have people who are — and I am inventing this word — illegitimists: They believe that the president of the United States is illegitimately elected, or that the country is ruled by a cabal that is in turn controlled by some other sinister force or forces. In the past, left-wing illegitimists were quite common, and Marxism is a classic, paranoid version of this creed. The illegitimist Marxist argument goes like this: Bourgeois democracy is a sham; bourgeois politicians and the bourgeois newspapers are tools of shadowy financial interests. The entire system deserves to be overthrown — and if a few people die in the course of the revolution, it’s all for a good cause. Though not every Western Marxist advocated violence, this is certainly the kind of argument that motivated the Weathermen, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and other far-left American and European terrorists of the past.

There is also a right-wing version of this argument, one that has been honed to perfection by the novelist Charles McCarry (in “Lucky Bastard,” he imagines that the Clinton-like American president is a communist agent and his Hillary-like wife is his controller). More recently, right-wing illegitimism has taken the form of birtherism. The attempt to prove that Barack Obama isn’t American-born was, at base, an attempt to prove that he is illegitimate and that he therefore should be removed from power — somehow. Birtherism is linked to other forms of illegitimism, such as the belief that Obama is a Muslim, and is thus controlled by international jihadists, or the belief that he is “Kenyan” and thus motivated by anti-colonial hatred of white people in general and Americans in particular. It is not accidental that the one note of sympathy for Breivik in the U.S. media came from the birtherist and illegitimist Glenn Beck, who helpfully compared the young Norwegians murdered by Breivik to “Hitler youth.” Presumably if they are Hitler youth, then they deserved to die?

Democracy, as a political system, has clear disadvantages, many of which are on display in Washington this week. But democracy has one overwhelming advantage: If conducted according to a pre-arranged set of rules, and if all sides accept those rules, democratic elections produce legitimate political leaders. In addition to being insane, Breivik doesn’t accept the rules of democracy in Norway — and now we see the result. Let’s hope no Americans ever follow his example.

The American left is revelling in Rupert Murdoch’s British troubles – and it’s America that has the power to really hurt him

Let’s start, first, with the bare facts: a British newspaper has been found to have broken British law. The proprietor has closed the paper and apologised profusely. Some British policemen have resigned. Some British journalists have been arrested.

While all of this is happening, wars are being fought in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. The baseball season is progressing. Goldman Sachs has reported a disappointing $1 billion profit. The US Congress is wrangling over the national debt and, as a result, the American government may be about to default. And yet the story we all want to talk about here in Washington this week is the story of the British paper breaking British law. About Rupert Murdoch giving evidence to a House of Commons committee. And, of course, about Wendi Murdoch and her astonishing right hook.

How to explain it? The News International meltdown has been on the front pages of America’s most prestigious newspapers every day since it began. It has led the evening news, dominated the blogs, come up on every chat show and in many private conversations. I went to see a friend about the prospects for Egyptian democracy, and he wound up quizzing me closely about the prospects of a Murdoch resignation. Another friend keeps me up to date with gossip about the high-powered Washington law firms (there are several) that Murdoch has consulted to prepare his potential defence.

This interest is not idle: it is political. In the suburbs of Washington and on the island of Manhattan there are many, many people who blame Murdoch for the rightward shift of the American media, for tabloidising television, for lowering the tone of public debate, for bringing a British note of viciousness into a once-civilised public debate. As I’ve written before, Murdoch’s Fox News channel plays much the same role in America that the Sun plays in the UK: it is louder, brasher, sometimes less accurate, often more entertaining and definitely more right-wing than its traditional rivals.

Indeed, Fox News has gone further than the Sun. Its commentators pushed the ‘Obama wasn’t born American’ and ‘Obama is a Muslim’ stories as long as they could; its editors hired Sarah Palin. Until recently, it also employed the notorious Glenn Beck, who used his television time to denounce the President as a socialist, a Marxist and a fascist, sometimes all at once and sometimes on alternate days. Fox News is often held responsible for the growth of the Tea Party movement, the polarisation of Congress and thus the debt negotiation that we are ignoring to talk about Murdoch.

But if the liberal establishment’s interest in News International is largely political, it is also deeply personal. To a degree unusual even in the narcissistic worlds of American politics and media, Murdoch has sought not just to compete with his opponents, but to name, attack and destroy them. When he took over the Wall Street Journal in 2007, he told a meeting of its executives and its editors that he wanted to ‘really cripple the New York Times’. Last year, he started offering heavy discounts to advertisers to lure them from the NYT. Both Murdoch and Robert Thomson, who came from London to run the Journal, have attacked Arthur Sulzberger, the NYT’s publisher, by name, in print.

If New York Times journalists believe themselves to be locked in an existential battle with Murdoch, in other words, that may be because Murdoch repeatedly told them so. And if the Democratic political establishment believes him to be a mortal threat, that might be because News Corp gave a million dollars to the Republican party just before last year’s mid-term elections. Murdoch has never seemed to mind acquiring enemies. Now he has plenty.

As in all the best tragedies, hubris has now been followed by nemesis — and by a predictable thirst for revenge. Not by accident did the New York Times reinvestigate the hacking story last year, or seek out a former News of the World staffer who could testify that it was more widespread than many believe. It still has multiple journalists assigned to the story. Not by accident have Congressional Democrats called for an investigation of Murdoch’s possible violation of American laws against bribing foreign officials. As the Wall Street Journal itself editorialised, ‘the Schadenfreude is so thick you can’t cut it with a chainsaw’.

And News Corp is vulnerable, in America, in ways that News International in Britain is not. For one, it is an American company and, even after a rally this week, its stock is suffering: a shareholder revolt may be on the way. One group of shareholders has already sued the company for its purchase of a television company owned by Elisabeth Murdoch, and has been seeking to block her appointment to the board of directors. It has now tacked more charges onto its suit, declaring that it wants to ‘put an end to Rupert Murdoch’s use of company assets to serve personal and family agendas’. This group and its lawyers may also be politically motivated — they have trade union links — but that only gives them more incentive to join the mob. A Bloomberg news analysis now suggests that News Corp would be worth 50 per cent more if the Murdoch family resigned from its board. How long before others on Wall Street start calling for him to resign as well?

Even if Rupert were to resign, the family’s American problems might not be over. There are signs that some of his children have become uncomfortable with Fox News as it has swung away from the centre-right, where it began, and into nuttier regions. Last year Matthew Freud, husband of Elisabeth Murdoch, declared himself ‘ashamed’ of the channel’s top manager, Roger Ailes, and ‘by no means alone within the family or the company’ in being so. News Corp immediately issued a press release distancing the company and Rupert Murdoch from those sentiments. Elisabeth Murdoch wrote an apology to Ailes. But the suspicion remains that she was not privately so very sorry. She is known to have supported Obama’s campaign, and even held a fundraiser for him in 2008. If that was sincere support, and not merely a cynical attempt to keep the family in the good graces of the White House (not impossible, given the family) then she can’t be very happy about some of Fox’s more wild-eyed contributions to the American political debate.

So would Rupert’s resignation lead to a Murdoch family battle? It might. Could the Murdoch family then lose control of News Corp altogether? Not impossible.

Right now, only public ignorance protects Murdoch from the fury of his enemies. Here is the greatest difference between Murdoch’s position in Britain and his place in America: his name doesn’t have much resonance. Fox viewers largely don’t know or care that their favourite channel is owned by an Australian-born mogul who also runs newspapers in Britain.

In the coming days, Murdoch’s many American enemies will do their best to make him more famous. The US Justice Department and the FBI are investigating claims that News of the World journalists hacked phones of 9/11 victims. The New York Times and congressional Democrats appear to be focused on this same story. They know the impact that the Milly Dowler story had in Britain, and they are betting that a similar scoop could touch off a similar reaction in the US. I am reliably informed that Ed Miliband’s team has been in touch with some of its friends in the Democratic party to discuss tactics on these matters. I would not be surprised to learn that the New York Times is in touch with the Guardian on these matters as well.

If any sliver of the 9/11 story is true, all bets are off. Imagine the weeping widows, the angry mothers, the protestors outside News Corp office, the angry letters. Imagine the politicians who will rush to the television studios. The photographs alone could force Republican politicians to denounce the foreign-born mogul who has quietly bought up so much of the American media market, and who has, they will note, received so little American scrutiny. This may be a British story. But there many powerful people who are dead keen to Americanise it.

American newspapers have featured the News International meltdown on front pages since the story broke. American websites have posted every new development, as it breaks.

Gawker.com cheerfully writes that News International is “besieged by a strange and unfamiliar phenomenon called ‘bad publicity that can’t just be ignored’”.

Slate.com re-imagines Rupert Murdoch as Voldemort, speculating that he would turn the Daily Prophet into a tabloid promoting “Sunday sensation and sleaze”.

But nobody is having as much fun as the New York Times. In fact, given that this is essentially a story about British journalists breaking British law on behalf of a British newspaper that nobody in the US ever reads, the NYT has thrown extraordinary resources at it.

Several journalists – a Pulitzer prize-winning ex-Baghdad correspondent among them – are producing acres of newsprint detailing the impact of the story on British politics, on News Corp’s stock price, on London police.

No doubt the NYT is motivated by its ever-earnest search for “all the news that’s fit to print”. But there are other things going on here, too.

Murdoch is more than just another proprietor: he’s a bitter enemy. He owns the Wall Street Journal, the NYT’s main upmarket rival. He owns the New York Post, its main downmarket rival.

More to the point, Murdoch owns Fox News, the enormously profitable television station which is the NYT’s main ideological rival.

For those Daily Telegraph readers who don’t follow these things, let me draw an analogy: Fox News is to American mainstream media what the Sun is to the British mainstream media. It’s louder, more unreliable, sometimes more entertaining and very much more Right-wing. Fox is the spiritual home of the Tea Party movement – it employs Sarah Palin – and is deeply unpopular among the people who read and write for the NYT.

Trouble for Mr Murdoch is good news for the American liberal establishment, in other words – and the liberal establishment is beginning to scent blood.

Congressional investigations loom: Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat who chairs the Senate commerce committee, has declared that if Murdoch tabloids hacked the phones of 9/11 victims or any other Americans, “the consequences will be severe”.

Others in Congress point out that News Corp’s headquarters is in the US: if the company’s British employees paid policemen for information, that may violate American anti-bribery laws, even if the payments were made in London.

Stories that British tabloids tried to bribe New York policemen are already in circulation, and if those are true, the consequences could be even worse.

From Murdoch’s point of view, this is a terrible moment to attract political attention. He is not on the cusp of a major acquisition in America, as he was, until Wednesday, in Britain. But the scandal is awkwardly timed in other ways.

The newspaper market here, as everywhere, is in flux. The Wall Street Journal now struggles to achieve the profits which it once made so effortlessly.

The Journal’s main asset is its reputation for stodgy neutrality, at least in its news-gathering. If this scandal taints the Journal in any way, business readers are not short of other sources of information.

More importantly, America is about to enter the presidential election season, a period in our political calendar when anything and everything becomes fodder for partisan politics.

Should it turn out, for example, that the Sun or the News of the World really did hack the phones of the relatives of 9/11 victims, then all bets are off.

There could be advertiser boycotts of Fox News. Republican politicians could be forced to declare that they will no longer appear on the station.

It’s not a likely scenario – Fox is too important to the Republican Party – but it can’t be excluded. American politicians are as sensitive to public outrage as their British counterparts.

In the end, though, it is not Murdoch’s American properties that are most threatened by this scandal, it is his control of his publicly owned company.

News Corp’s stock is in freefall: a massive American shareholder revolt may not be far off. One group of shareholders has sued the company in a Delaware court, arguing that the company board “provides no effective review or oversight”.

The same group was already trying to sue over the purchase of a television company owned by Elisabeth Murdoch, and has been seeking to block her appointment to the board of directors.

The group’s lawyers have declared they want to “put an end to Rupert Murdoch’s use of company assets to serve personal and family agendas, without regard for public shareholders”.

Words such as “nepotism” and “cronyism” are in the air. As are “corruption” and “mismanagement”. They will be given extra weight if this story takes on any deeper political significance.

Shareholders and their lawyers are as likely to be members of the liberal establishment as anyone else: in America, the world’s most litigious country, they are unlikely to keep their views to themselves.

As a result, News Corp’s American properties will survive this scandal – but the Murdoch family’s control of News Corp may not.

Just another British tabloid scandal
By Anne Applebaum, Published: July 11
“It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. . . . In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

I am not the first person to quote the opening lines of “Decline of the English Murder” in recent days, and no wonder: George Orwell, who composed that droll little essay in 1946, placed the now-defunct News of the World in its historical and cultural context as no one else could. Orwell’s mid-20th-century British tabloid reader first eats a lunch of “roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding.” Then he settles down to drink tea and read scandalous stories, preferably involving the “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch,” a “strong Temperance advocate” or someone equally respectable. Britons spent many Sunday afternoons that way for decades before Orwell wrote those words. They have gone on doing so ever since.
Over the next few days, many pundits will lament the decline of the press, the rise of sensationalism and the rampant commercialism that led News of the World reporters to hack into the telephone voice-mail accounts of murdered schoolgirls, divorcing celebrities and grieving parents. But in truth, there is nothing new about any of this in Britain. Although the technology has changed, the practices in question — paying the police for stories; the use of subterfuge to obtain personal information; the persecution of celebrities, politicians or victims of violence — are, in the British tabloid world, very old. Certainly they predate Orwell.
Until now, no one has been especially shocked by them, either. I worked for British newspapers in the early 1990s and remember very clearly the lack of surprise when transcripts of private telephone conversations between Diana, the princess of Wales, and her lover were made public, followed by transcripts of private telephone conversations between the prince of Wales and his lover. Nobody ever quite got to the bottom of the stories. Some versions said that they came from ham radio operators, who picked them up by accident. Other versions said they came from MI5, Britain’s internal security service.
Either way, they wound up in print, in tabloids that surely paid somebody for them. Either way, the recordings were illegal. But few cared at the time. The prince and princess of Wales were rich and famous, the public enjoyed watching them squirm, so why should they be allowed to have private conversations?
Few seemed especially bothered by police collusion with tabloid reporters. In the early 1990s, British criminal detectives searched the house of an acquaintance of mine. They confiscated documents as well as private photographs. Later, a few of those photographs appeared in the press, even though they had no relevance to the case at hand. But my acquaintance was a well-connected person on his way to jail. Why should he be allowed to control his wife’s private pictures?
In its essence, this scandal is no different. Although one London journalist told me last week that an “important line was crossed” when the News of the World accessed the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a murdered teenager, I just don’t see why. It’s true that some of Dowler’s voice mail was deleted, but once you’ve established the practice of hacking phones — and some 4,000 appear to have been hacked by the News of the World — this surely must seem, to the hackers, like a very minor additional transgression. After all, Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who hacked Dowler’s telephone, acted with the same motives as the spooks who recorded Charles and Camilla, or the police officers who search houses, looking for private pictures. All were seeking information that they intended to sell. And all knew very well that there would be plenty of willing buyers, whether at News of the World, the Sun, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail — or even at the grander offices of “upmarket” newspapers, many of which (we may soon discover) may also have been eager purchasers of illegally obtained information.
And yet — they were in the market because they knew there was demand. Here is the bottom line: British newspapers pay the police for scandal because the British newspaper-reading public has such an enormous appetite for scandal — especially scandals that bring down the rich and respectable. Here is the irony: The downfall of News of the World fits this narrative beautifully. And here is a prediction: The public apologies of the paper’s corporate owner, Rupert Murdoch, and the public humiliation of News International’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, are going to please the British newspaper-reading public more than anything else it has read in a very, very long time.

But then, it has been a very long time since Gorbachev actually had an aura of authority. In fact, everything about his garish birthday party screamed “B-list celebrity.” Stone hasn’t starred in a hit movie for a good while; neither has Kevin Spacey, who co-hosted the event alongside her. Also in attendance were Goldie Hawn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ted Turner, Shirley Bassey, and, I’m sorry to say, Lech Walesa. The gala was ostensibly a fundraiser for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, which helps raise money for the care of children with cancer. But mostly the evening served to underline the strangeness of Gorbachev’s fate. Here was the man who had launched glasnost and perestroika, who had presided over the dismantling of the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself, one of the founding statesmen of modern Russia — and yet his birthday gala was held in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, among people who hardly knew him.

This was not an accident: Twenty years after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia is ambivalent, at best, about Gorbachev. Far from being hailed as a hero, he is mostly remembered as a disastrous leader, if he is remembered at all. Yes, he launched a new era of openness with previously unthinkable freedoms in the 1980s, but in Russia he is also held responsible for the economic collapse of the 1990s. Most Russians don’t thank him for ending the Soviet empire either. On the contrary, the current Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has described the dismantling of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. An opinion poll released in March, at the time of his birthday, showed that some 20 percent of Russians feel actively hostile toward Gorbachev, 47 percent of Russians “don’t care about him at all,” and only 5 percent admire him. And this was an improvement: Another poll, in 2005, found active hostility toward him in 45 percent of Russians. The word “perestroika” in Russia today has almost purely negative connotations.

In London and Washington, Gorbachev’s reputation is of course more positive. He is regarded with affection — he was invited to Ronald Reagan’s funeral and to George H.W. Bush’s own 80th birthday party — and frequently hailed as a “symbol” of peace and the Cold War’s welcome end. But he tends to be paid rather bland and even inappropriate compliments. At his birthday party, Paul Anka sang a duet with a Soviet-era rock musician. The chorus: “One day we’ll recall, he was changing the world for us all.” Stone then lauded him with a rhetorical question: “Where would Russia be if it weren’t reaping the benefits of a free democracy?” I wish I’d been there to see the embarrassment on the faces of the spectators at the Royal Albert Hall — for Russia has not actually reaped the benefits of free democracy, as every Russian in the room knew perfectly well. Even Gorbachev himself recently described Russian democracy as a sham: “We have institutions, but they don’t work. We have laws, but they must be enforced.”

Of course, Gorbachev is not to blame for the absence of political transparency in today’s Kremlin, the weakness of political parties, the return of the former KGB as a source of influence and power, or the violence that Russian authorities intermittently use against dissenters of all kinds. The true causes of the 1990s economic collapse — low oil prices, 70 years of bad economic policy, and the rapacious greed of the communist-educated Russian elite — were not his doing either. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, bears far more responsibility for Russia’s corrupt economy, and Putin is surely more to blame for Russia’s stagnant politics.

In fact, Gorbachev did not intend for things to end up the way they did. But then, Gorbachev never set out to become one of the founding fathers of modern Russia either. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary; his intention, when he became leader of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, was to revitalize the Soviet Union, not undo it. He knew that the system was stagnant. But he didn’t understand why. Instead of abolishing central planning or calling for price reform, he announced a drastic anti-alcohol campaign: Perhaps if the workers drank less, they would produce more. Two months after taking power, he put restrictions on the sale of alcohol, raised the drinking age, and ordered cuts in production. The result: enormous losses to the Soviet budget and dramatic shortages of products, such as sugar, that people began using to brew vodka illegally at home.

Only after this campaign failed — and only after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster brought home to him the real dangers of secrecy in an advanced industrial society — did Gorbachev make his second attempt at reform. Like the anti-alcohol campaign, glasnost, or openness, was originally meant to promote economic efficiency. Open discussion of the Soviet Union’s problems would, Gorbachev believed, strengthen communism. He certainly never intended his policy to change the USSR’s economic system in any profound way. On the contrary, not long after taking power, he told a group of party economists, “Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers, but about the ship, and the ship is socialism.”

Of course, Gorbachev later wound up changing his ideas, in economics and many other areas. Indeed, this pattern would repeat itself many times. Determined to save central planning, he told people to talk openly about it — as a result of which they concluded that it didn’t work. Determined to save communism, he let people criticize it — as a result of which they decided they wanted capitalism. Determined to save the Soviet empire, he gave Eastern Europeans more freedom — which they used to wriggle out of the empire’s grasp as quickly as possible. He never understood the depth of cynicism in his own country or the depth of anti-communism in the Soviet satellite states. He never understood how rotten the central bureaucracies had become or how amoral the bureaucrats. He always seemed surprised by the consequences of his actions. In the end he wound up racing to catch up with history, rather than making it himself.

In fact, all of Gorbachev’s most significant and most radical decisions were the ones he did not make. He did not order the East Germans to shoot at people crossing the Berlin Wall. He did not launch a war to prevent the defection of the Baltic states. He did not stop the breakup of the Soviet Union or prevent Yeltsin’s rise to power. The end of communism certainly could have been far bloodier, and if someone else had been in charge it might have been. For his refusal to use violence, Gorbachev deserves Anka’s corny serenade.

But because he did not understand what was happening, Gorbachev also did not prepare his compatriots for major political and economic change. He did not help design democratic institutions, and he did not lay the foundations for an orderly economic reform. Instead, he tried to hold on to power until the very last moment — to preserve the Soviet Union until it was too late. As a result, he did not politically survive its collapse. Since leaving office he has tried three times to found new political parties. All have flopped.

Timing is everything in politics, as we are learning once again this year with the political upheavals in the Middle East. If Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had called for free elections a year ago, he would be remembered as a magnanimous statesman. If Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi had graciously abdicated in favor of his son Saif al-Islam, he would right now be the toast of every boardroom in Europe. If Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had only started planning his retirement a little earlier, he’d be living quietly in a suburb of Tunis, not evading an Interpol arrest warrant in Saudi Arabia.

By the same token, if Gorbachev had carefully planned the dismantling of the Soviet Union from 1988, instead of angrily accepting it only after the fact in 1991, his birthday this year might have been celebrated by grateful Russians, instead of American actresses mouthing platitudes. As we will also learn in the Middle East, an orderly transition from dictatorship to democracy has two crucial elements: an elite willing to hand over power, and an alternative elite organized enough to accept it. Thanks partly to the reluctant and shambolic nature of Gorbachev’s final years in power, Russia had neither.

It may well be that he could act no differently. Gorbachev knew nothing of real democracy, and even less of free market economics. Brought up and educated in Soviet culture, he was simply unable to think his way out of that system. He didn’t prevent change, and he didn’t shoot the people who finally made change happen. But at such a historic moment, ignorance is no excuse.

In Tunisia and Egypt, still waiting on real change
By Anne Applebaum, Published: June 30
TUNIS
Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, was extremely cheerful when we met for lunch recently. In a deliciously cool restaurant on a very hot day, he regaled me with stories of what happened after our last lunch, in February 2007. Following that meeting, I had written a column in which I quoted him asking me, in effect, why Americans did not promote democracy in Tunisia.
“You have no idea what trouble that caused me,” he said, laughing. After the column was published, Trifi was denounced in Tunisia’s undemocratic parliament, on the grounds that he was “advocating an American invasion of Tunisia in the American press.” Horrified, I told him that I hadn’t written that at all. He waved away my apologies: “Never mind, they accused me of far worse things. And now it doesn’t matter. Write about me anything you want!”
Trifi’s good humor is a sign of the times in North Africa: In Tunis, as in Cairo, you really can write anything you want. You can also say anything you want and talk to anyone you want. Strangers encounter one another at public meetings and discover they have much in common. Both Tunisia and Egypt now boast several dozen political parties. They hold meetings, form coalitions and break up on an almost daily basis.
This is a profound change. It is also the only change. Here is the strange thing about post-revolutionary Tunisia: Almost everything is still the same. The caretaker government, charged with running the country until elections can be held, contains elder statesmen who have been around for decades. The police are less omnipresent, but they are still there. Although former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali is holed up in Saudi Arabia — he and his wife were convicted in absentia of embezzlement last week — most of his bureaucrats and apparatchiks still have their jobs. The economy is untouched.
Egypt is no different. In Cairo, for the first time in decades, people can talk, argue and disagree vehemently. But the military government still runs the country. Many of the same people still run the same ministries as they did under the old regime. One of the top researchers at the think tank Freedom House told me that by their reckoning, most Egyptian institutions were no more democratic or open now than they were six months ago. At another lunch, I asked four Egyptian women if they thought the behavior of the security police had changed for the better. One said yes. One said no. The other two shrugged: It was hard to say.
Like Trifi, my Egyptian lunch companions were also cheerful, even euphoric, about what had been achieved. But for how long will people consider free speech and free association “enough”? At what point will they want more? There is an argument for taking things slowly: The Egyptian and Tunisian political classes were as surprised by their revolutions as anyone else. Many discussions — about the constitution, the legal system, the economy — have yet to be held, and they will take time. There are no electoral laws, no electoral rolls. As yet there is no legitimate government in either country and thus no clear mandate for reform.
But the longer it takes for real change — new leaders, a new economic order — to occur, the greater the chance of disappointment, discontent and even counterrevolution: Nobody ever joins a street uprising to resume business as usual. On Tuesday night, some 2,000 people were already back in Tahrir Square in Cairo, battling with the police, calling for more radical change.
There are things that the caretaker regimes could do. This could be the moment to end the damaging and wasteful subsidy system in Egypt, for example, and to replace it with support for poor families, as Brazil has done. This is also a good time to begin more systematic debate about corruption and the past. The media and the rumor mill circulate gossip about Ben Ali and his family in Tunisia, but as time passes, it will be harder to deliver justice for those badly treated by the previous regime.
For all of those reasons, Egypt and Tunisia should try to hold elections as quickly as possible, although many of the democratic forces in both countries would like to delay. They want the nascent parties to have more time to establish themselves, they want the electoral laws to be carefully written, they want everyone to have more time to argue. But an imperfect legislature is better than none: Poland’s first post-Communist parliament in 1989 was only partially freely elected, and it even contained members of the old regime. The government it produced was also a compromise, and it too contained members of the old regime. Nevertheless, it looked, acted and felt radically different, and quickly earned its legitimacy. Talk, debate, argument, conversation: Now that they have those things, Egyptians and Tunisians won’t easily give them away. But they must lead somewhere, soon, or many will begin to question where they are leading.

The New World in Dubai
By Anne Applebaum, Published: June 21
DUBAI
Foreigners visiting New York or Chicago in the 19th century often came away with conflicting feelings. Some found American cities ugly by comparison to their European counterparts: They seemed vulgar, blatantly commercial, lacking in taste. The natives had higher living standards but they were crude, and the ethnic mix — German, Irish, Italian, Jewish — was terrifying.
A few sensed that there might be something in this new civilization worth admiring. “It is an absorbing thing to watch the process of world-making, both the formation of the natural and the conventional world,” an English traveler, Harriet Martineau, wrote in 1837: “I witnessed both in America; and when I look back upon it now, it seems as if I had been in another planet.”
I thought about those old visions of urban America while strolling not long ago through the Marina, a neighborhood in “new” Dubai (as opposed to “old” Dubai, mostly constructed in the 1970s). The architects were hired in 1999, and the first phase was finished in 2004; soon, the Marina will contain 120,000 people, along with hotels, restaurants, yacht moorings, shopping malls and canals, meant to remind visitors of Venice. It might go bankrupt — it has once already; Dubai is plagued by real estate bubbles — but dozens of brand-new skyscrapers, some still with their scaffolding around them, are nevertheless pushing upward around the Persian Gulf.
The Marina, to a jaded American eye, is incurably vulgar. So is the rest of the city. There is almost no evidence of history or local culture. International brand names, from Applebees to Rolex, are plastered everywhere. Everything is imported, from the raw fish at Nobu to the coffee at Starbucks. In Abu Dhabi, the emirate down the road, they’ve bought the names “Louvre” and “Guggenheim” and are constructing museums to match. I am instinctively appalled — how can you buy the Louvre? — but perhaps visiting Europeans once felt the same way about Henry Frick’s New York mansion and the Old Masters within it.
The architecture is ersatz, too. Sometimes there are local elements — the odd Arabian Nights turret, a fake souk — but the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, distinctly resembles Chicago’s Willis Tower (which also used to be the tallest building in the world). This is no accident: Both buildings were designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, also from Chicago. If the fountains around the Burj Khalifa (illuminated by 6,600 lights at night) seem like something out of Las Vegas, that’s no accident either: They were designed by the same company that built the fountains at the Bellagio hotel and casino.
Just as some Europeans were offended by 19th-century America, I was stunned by the wealth of Dubai’s inhabitants and visitors: Someone must be buying all those Rolexes and staying in the executive suites at the Armani Hotel. I am also intrigued by the ethnic mix. Indian, Nigerian, Japanese, British, Russian, Filipino and Australian sunbathers mix with the occasional Emirati in a white headdress on the Marina’s beaches. Women in bikinis walk by women in burqas. Everyone talks on cellphones.
Yet this apparently harmonious, multiethnic society has a dark side. Occasionally, the invisible Arab police state arrests a tourist for an alleged indecent gesture or deports somebody without explanation. Nobody protests, because almost nobody “lives” in Dubai, in the sense that a 19th-century immigrant actually lived in New York. Less than 20 percent of Dubai’s 1.7 million inhabitants are citizens: The rest are ex-pat bankers and traders — there is no income tax in Dubai — or low-wage laborers, mostly from South Asia, some of whom live like indentured servants.
No wonder they aren’t bothered by the vulgarity of the place: They’re probably going to move somewhere else next year anyway. And a transient population isn’t likely to launch a movement for democracy or political rights. If they protest, they risk expulsion. The natives aren’t excited about the prospect of majority rule either, since the majority is foreign. That’s why you’ve heard nothing about Dubai since the start of the Arab Spring.
Similarly to 19th-century Europeans’ thoughts about America, I resist the idea that Dubai heralds the civilization of the future. But I have to concede that in some senses it might. Not only Singapore and Hong Kong but parts of central London, now populated by transient bankers and their semi-legal Filipino servants, have more in common with Dubai than with their own hinterlands, even if the architecture is different. I can also see how Dubai, which is clean, law-abiding and well-run, might seem like a haven if one were coming from a messy, violent society such as Pakistan or even Russia.
To me it seems stultifying, as well as strange: Like Harriet Martineau, I feel as if I had been in another planet. Yet there have always been people who dream of escaping their culture, who long to forget their history and who are content to live without the past. Now, in Dubai, they can.

To make matters worse, a few genuinely crazy or eccentric politicians always join the campaign in its early stages, which makes the others seem less serious by association. This year, the “real” candidates have had to contend with Donald Trump on the one hand and Sarah Palin on the other. President Obama personally dispensed with Trump by calling him a “carnival barker”, a tactic that worked because it was true. Palin will be more difficult to shoo away. Her enigmatic appearances in places where she is guaranteed lots of attention, such as motorcycle rallies, make the rest of the candidates seem dull and earnest. While they bang on about the deficit and terrorism, she gets to ride around on a Harley-Davidson, waving the American flag, and lobbying to visit Margaret Thatcher.

But at some point in the first half of next year, all of this will abruptly come to an end. The Republican Party will select its candidate, and that person will overnight acquire stature, money, enthusiastic supporters and television time. He or she will have several opportunities to share a podium with the President. He or she will appear frequently before cheering crowds. At that point the contest will be real. But even then – with the full backing of the Republican Party, the conservative blogosphere and Fox News – will any of those who have so far declared (or half-declared) their candidacy have the qualities needed to beat President Obama?

In fact, some of them do, at least at the moment. Mitt Romney, an accomplished governor, sounds good on economics. Tim Pawlenty, another accomplished governor, has the gravitas required of a commander-in-chief. Jon Huntsman, ambassador to China (and a former governor too) ought to have bipartisan appeal. Ron Paul has conviction, and Sarah Palin definitely has the knack of getting people to talk about her.

Despite recent news coverage, they are not all unserious or insubstantial. Nevertheless, they must now square the same circle: to triumph in the party’s primary election, a candidate must appeal to the ideological Republicans who actually vote in primary elections – and this year they are more radical than ever. But to triumph in the presidential election, a candidate must appeal to the great, wishy-washy mass of swing voters and centrists – most of whom dislike radical language, especially during a recession.

This combination of hurdles will probably trip up Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who declared his candidacy back in May and is running on a platform of classic isolationism (“end all wars”) and radical libertarianism (“return to the gold standard”), sometimes couched in the language of evangelical Christianity (“true liberties come from our Creator”). Given the mood of the Republican Party this year, this will get him quite far. But although the “end all wars” rhetoric might inspire some on the Left, it’s hard to see how, as a package, Paul captures the imagination of the American mainstream.

Mitt Romney, at the moment the front-runner, is in some ways Paul’s polar opposite, and thus has the opposite problem. Paul is from liberty-loving Texas; Romney is a former governor of Massachusetts, probably the most liberal state in the nation. Paul wants to dismantle government; Romney created a Massachusetts state health-care plan, one that bears a remarkable resemblance to President Obama’s federal health-care plan. All of which ought to make Romney a powerful centrist challenger to an even more liberal president. Yet in order to secure the Republican nomination, Romney is going to have to try to sound like Paul. He has already begun to repudiate some of his past decisions and positions. He is trying to prove that he wasn’t really all that moderate when governor of Massachusetts, that his health-care plan wasn’t really all that liberal, and that in fact he really has a lot in common with Christian evangelicals. So why, then, should disgruntled Democrats vote for him next year?

If they are moderates, Republicans like Pawlenty (governor of Minnesota, another liberal state) and Huntsman will have to spend the next year proving to the Republican Party that they are not Republican In Name Only – RINOs, in the slang of the moment. Both are already in trouble because “compromising” photographs of them actually shaking hands with the President are in circulation. But if they are radicals or eccentrics, Republicans such as Paul, Palin and Newt Gingrich will have to spend the rest of the campaign proving to the rest of the country that they are not crazy. Neither scenario is a formula for an easy campaign, a short primary, and a romp to victory in 2012.

As I’ve said, at some point next spring, a leader will emerge from this pack and the calculus will change. But will the figure who emerges, bloodied by assault from the Right and the Left, still have the stamina to win? Perhaps this year the circle is too hard to square.

Of course there are differences. The royal wedding was planned down to the last millisecond, whereas the demonstrators who poured into the streets of New York and Washington after President Obama’s announcement appeared spontaneously. The first seem to have arrived from George Washington University, which is not far from the White House. Students were awake, studying for final exams, when they heard the news and rushed down the street. Others saw them on television or on Facebook and rapidly followed suit.

That crowd was, in other words, a flash mob – or, in the more precise words of a talk show hostess standing beside the White House at midnight, a “bipartisan flash mob”. And in the word “bipartisan” you have the key to the political significance of the whole event.

Think back, if you can, to the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center: for many weeks, the citizens of the United States – Democrats, Republicans, independents – were unified in sorrow, patriotism and anger. That sense of unity persisted for a long time: It was enough to guarantee Congressional, media and political support for the invasion of Afghanistan, as well as for the invasion of Iraq. It convinced many young people, of all social classes, to join the military. It probably explains why George W Bush was re-elected in 2004.

Obama tried to revive that sense of unity in 2008: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” he once famously declared. But it didn’t work. The wars, the financial crisis and the subsequent recession had chipped away at our non-partisan, post-September 11 patriotism until there was practically nothing left of it. The Democrats came to loathe the Iraq war. The Republicans came to loathe the war’s opponents.

Far from unifying in the wake of Obama’s election, the parties split apart further and the public became polarised, thanks in part to a new breed of fanatical talk-show hosts, bloggers and political celebrities who realised that they could make money, attract viewers and possibly win votes with extremist and even outrageous rhetoric. Led by Sarah Palin, they began to compete with one another and soon ceased merely to criticise the president: instead, they set out to prove that he was illegitimate – that he was not even American.

Weirdly, this surge of political nastiness hit its absurd peak only last week, when President Obama finally felt compelled to release the original, long-form version of his birth certificate, proving he had in fact been born in Hawaii, not in Kenya. He had already provided a notarised copy, newspaper reports from the time, and the testimony of people who knew his mother. But that was not good enough for (depending on which polls you believe) up to 25 per cent of Americans, and a much larger percentage of Republicans.

In the wake of this operation, they’ll have to think twice. After all, George W Bush – a cowboy-boot wearing, slang-talking, wood-chopping American – called for the US to haul in bin Laden, “dead or alive”. But Barack Obama – whose middle name is “Hussein”, whose surname rhymes with “Osama”, and who definitely does not come from Texas – is the one who actually did it.

More to the point, the nature of the operation speaks well of him. He has been part of the planning for months. He personally authorised the special forces operation a few days ago. We don’t know all the details yet, but according to the official version of events, the raid took some 40 minutes, few civilians were injured and no Americans were killed. In other words, the whole thing appears to have been handled with efficiency and competence of a kind we no longer automatically expect from Americans.

Amidst the celebrations which will follow, some of the “birthers” will be surely be forced to concede that Obama must really be American after all. Even his more mainstream critics might feel more warmly about him. Both Liberal America and Conservative America will be equally pleased to hear the announcement, after all: Osama bin Laden is one of the few things we all agree about. Briefly, if only for a day or two, we will feel like the United States of America once again.

Briefly, we’ll also feel like winners. As the British well know, it’s no fun to be told constantly that your nation is in decline, that your economy is sinking and that your leadership of the world is in jeopardy. Every once in a while, it’s nice to hear that your president achieved something concrete, that your armed forces are efficient, and that your security services aren’t as clueless as they seem. Besides, it’s much more fun to celebrate in front of the White House or Ground Zero than to sit at home and watch the price of oil rise.

Unfortunately for the president, this wave of enthusiasm comes too early to affect his political prospects directly: November 2012, the next election day, is still far away, and by the time it rolls around, Osama bin Laden will belong to the distant political past, overshadowed by other crises, maybe even other terrorist events or military disasters. Nevertheless, the timing of this announcement comes at a critical stage in the American political cycle. Very soon, those Republicans who intend to challenge Mr Obama will have to announce their candidacies and launch serious campaigns. The first primary elections will be held next February, nine months from now, which doesn’t leave much time for polling and fund-raising.

At the moment, the field is notably weak: Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, a couple of uninspiring governors; Rick Santorum, a recently defeated ex-Senator; Newt Gingrich, a long-ago retired Congressman, and Michelle Bachmann, a Tea Partying congresswoman. There are also a host of cranks, as usual, among them Donald Trump and a pizza magnate named Herman Cain. In the burst of enthusiasm which will follow the bin Laden announcement, this weak field might well get weaker. If it seems like the president might become popular again, skittish potential candidates will think twice about throwing their hats into the ring. And if they don’t make the decision quickly, it will be too late.

The timing matters in another way, too: The tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is this year. On that day, it will be impossible to avoid asking what has been achieved – and what has not been achieved – in the decade since al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the lists which will be composed, there will be many failures – alongside one singular, notable success. That will be Obama’s success – and the “anti-war” Democrats’ success as well.

More to the point, open competition between Medvedev and Putin would defy everything we think we know about the two. Until now, their relationship has been best defined by this Moscow anecdote: “There are two factions in the Russian elite, the Medvedev faction and the Putin faction – but Medvedev doesn’t know to which faction he belongs.”

That’s meant to be a joke – but not many find it funny. Like so many Russian jokes, it simply mirrors a very weird reality. Ever since he became a candidate for president in 2008, Medvedev’s role has been unclear. Putin appointed Medvedev to the presidency after deciding, in accordance with the constitution, not to run for a third consecutive term himself (though it seems he is eligible to run again now). Medvedev’s presidential campaign was a farce. He made but a single public appearance; his only genuine opponent was barred from running; the media was so biased in his favour that most election observers refused to monitor the campaign at all.

Since his election, Medvedev has played a distinctly subservient role. Those who meet both men together have said that Putin dominates the conversation, while Medvedev literally carries his briefcase. At key moments – during the Russian invasion of Georgia, for example – Putin has appeared on television to address the nation, while Medvedev has remained deep in the background.

Even when Medvedev appeared to contradict Putin, most observers assumed that this, too, was part of his role: he was thought to be a Potemkin leader, a “democrat” who would change nothing but whose presence would reassure those who wanted a more open or more economically liberal Russia.

Still, Medvedev has held meetings with some of the Kremlin’s bravest and often persecuted opponents, including the editors of Novaya Gazeta, the one newspaper that openly criticises the establishment and reports on corruption. He has praised Ekho Moskvy, the most independent radio station in the capital. He has even declared that “Stalin will not be forgiven for anything”, which directly contradicts the rehabilitation that began under Putin. But many in Moscow assumed that this, too, was mere window-dressing, a gesture designed to prevent foreign investors from being scared off by a Russian state that has, in practice, become more authoritarian, more unpredictable and more arbitrary – if not exactly Stalinist – during the three years of Medvedev’s presidency.

Yet along the way, it seems that something else has happened: whether he meant to do so or not, Medvedev really has become a spokesman, or at least a symbol, for an important part of the Russian elite. Of course, the modern dissidents – the democracy activists, the crusading journalists – want him to succeed. But a portion of the wealthy business class has also now become dissatisfied with the status quo. The ambitious fear that their path upwards will be blocked by complacent bureaucrats. The successful fear that their children will have no chance in the corrupt educational system. The rich fear their money will be confiscated: anxious oligarchs have sent almost £13  billion abroad in the first quarter of this year alone.

Others are pulling up stakes themselves. Until recently, many wealthy Russians sent their wives and children to live in the UK, on the grounds that they would be better educated – and better protected from kidnappers and thieves. Some now speak of following their families to London. Many were spooked by the unexpectedly harsh conclusion to the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil billionaire, who received a 14-year jail sentence because he refused to pay proper financial and political homage to Putin.

I cannot give you any numbers, but in recent months, parts of the Russian establishment may have begun to hope that Medvedev will at least cease to be a puppet president, and instead become a real leader. Perhaps he has been emboldened by their desire. That would explain why he criticised Putin openly at the beginning of the Libya campaign: when the prime minister called the bombardment of Gaddafi’s troops a “crusade”, the president said the word was “unacceptable”. It may also explain why Medvedev has proposed changing the law to make corporations more transparent – and why he has forced Igor Sechin, one of Putin’s henchmen, to resign from the board of Rosneft, the oil giant that is trying to go into partnership with BP.

Or it might not explain anything at all. The Moscow Times yesterday quoted a political analyst who called this latest round of sparring “a smokescreen of massive proportions”: all of this, he claimed, was yet another game designed to prevent further capital flight and to reassure nervous foreign investors.

In the strange world of Russian politics, no one can confirm or deny that kind of statement, because the rules of Russian politics are unwritten – and there are no conventions or precedents to follow. No one understands the true relationship between Putin and Medvedev, possibly not even the two men themselves. And until the next presidential election is over, no one can predict who will stand, or how it will be conducted – let alone who will win.

We Americans have a long tradition of declaring war in the run-up to election campaigns: Hollywood once mocked this habit in “Wag the Dog,” a movie starring Robert De Niro as a political consultant who covers up a presidential sex scandal and wins an election by launching a fake war in Albania. In this real-life Francophone sequel, there is no sex scandal: The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is unpopular because of government corruption, because the French economy is weaker than it was supposed to be, because he and his now former foreign minister chose the wrong side in Tunisia, and because he’s erratic and unpredictable. Nor is the war a fake: The no-fly zone in Libya is real, as is a bombing campaign designed to aid the Libyan rebels.

No sly consultant lurks in the wings, either. Au contraire: The man who introduced Sarkozy to the Benghazi rebels is none other than Bernard-Henri Levy, a pop philosopher so French that I can’t think of an American equivalent. We just don’t have philosophers who wear their shirts unbuttoned, marry blond actresses and take sides, enthusiastically, in wars in Bangladesh, Angola, Rwanda, Bosnia and beyond. By siding with Levy’s emotional plea for humanitarian intervention — a decision that surprised even his foreign minister — Sarkozy clearly thinks he might share some of the philosopher’s glamour.

Sarkozy also hopes the Libyan adventure will make him popular, too. Nobody finds this suprising. At a conference in Brussels over the weekend, I watched a French participant boast of France’s leading role in the Libyan air campaign; a minute later, he heartily agreed that the war was a ploy to help Sarkozy get reelected. The two emotions — pride in French leadership and cynicism about Sarkozy’s real motives — were not, it seems, mutually exclusive.

Some elements of this story are familiar. France has long resented not just America’s leadership of the world but America’s status as democracy in chief: The French reckon that they had as much to do with inventing liberte, egalite et fraternite as we did, and they want a share of the credit. But this president’s willingness to take real risks in order to play a role — any role, at any cost — in the interests of the glory of France and himself are unprecedented. Charles de Gaulle defied NATO at a time when France was safe beneath the American nuclear umbrella. Sarkozy’s enthusiasm for a war whose outcome he cannot predict comes at a time when NATO is divided and the European Union — the centerpiece of France’s foreign policy since its creation — has never been weaker.

In the interests of what remains of alliance solidarity, no NATO members vetoed the Libyan operation, which was thrust upon the organization by President Obama. But Germany and Turkey — two historical pillars of the alliance — vehemently and publicly objected. A host of others are quietly fuming. According to one insider’s account, Sarkozy agreed to put the operation under a NATO flag only after the White House threatened to withdraw completely. He had apparently assumed that the U.S. military would continue to underwrite an intervention he led.

The European Union emerges looking even worse. Had Sarkozy’s primary aim been to expose the weakness and incoherence of European foreign policy, he could not have done so any more effectively. Europe’s “foreign minister,” Catherine Ashton, has been sidelined. Europe’s institutions have played no part. An editorial in (pro-European) Le Monde put it best: The Libyan affair “demonstrates the immaturity of European security and defense policy, the poverty of the political debate and the inadequacy of personnel.” No one thinks Europe is going to emerge from this affair any stronger, even if the French president does.

Napoleon — Sarkozy’s antecedent in so many ways — once said that “luck” is the most important quality in a general, and Sarkozy might get lucky in Libya. The rebels might win. His popularity might be restored. The results of this weekend’s local elections in France don’t point in that direction — not only did the socialists win big, the anti-European, anti-immigration National Front did very well, too — but the president might as well keep rolling the dice: At this point, it’s double down or quit.

As I write, the ultimate goals and even the composition of this brand-new, ad hoc international grouping are still unclear. But the circumstances it reflects are perfectly clear. The United States of America is still prepared to join the rest of what we used to call ‘the West’ in policing the world, especially where the aims are entirely ‘humanitarian’ and no one will be sending ground troops. We’ll even lend you our logistics, communications and satellite data which are, quite frankly, a lot better than yours. But we aren’t in charge, at least in public. And we aren’t going to stick around very long either, and I hope you know it.

Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, this ambivalence does not simply reflect the nature of our current president. For all I know, Barack Obama may very well be indecisive, pathologically pacifist and uncomfortable with American power. He might even subconsciously harbour anti-imperialist and anti-British sentiments, inherited from the Kenyan father he scarcely knew, as some bloggers (who obviously know him better than the rest of us) have declared. But if that is the case, then maybe a lot of Americans have Kenyan fathers they scarcely knew as well.

There are plenty of people in Washington who do want the Obama administration to stop Gaddafi. From the liberal interventionists — Bill Clinton, John Kerry — to the familiar voices on the right — John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Newt Gingrich — a small flock of writers and politicians did indeed urge him to intervene. But since the bombing campaign began, we haven’t heard a unified chorus of support for ‘our troops’, as we did following air strikes in Serbia, Afghanistan, and even Iraq. There have been no bipartisan cheers for the Commander in Chief either.

In fact, both political parties are deeply divided, and not in any predictable or obvious way. Some Democrats who supported the war in Iraq are now against the bombing of Libya and vice versa. The Republicans are all over the map. Richard Lugar, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee — and the living embodiment of the words ‘moderate’ and ‘centrist’ — is openly sceptical. The Tea Partiers are loudly critical. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, is sitting on the fence, torn between America’s ‘moral obligation’ to help the oppressed and what he’s called the president’s failure to ‘define for the American people, the Congress and our troops what the mission in Libya is’.

Perhaps because they suspect this ambivalence is shared by both the public and the military, the administration isn’t sounding much more enthusiastic. The president himself has been AWOL all week in South America, which is probably just as well: if he doesn’t say anything, everyone’s expectations will remain low. The Secretary of State has let it be known that she favoured intervention, but has nevertheless stated that the US ‘will not lead’. The defence secretary, who publicly complained about the hazards of no-fly zones just last week, has reassuringly declared that the United States will be handing military control of the mission over to Nato ‘in a matter of days’.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem: this isn’t a Nato mission — and if it becomes one, it will be over the angry protests of Germany, Turkey and a clutch of others. But although some have called this Libyan campaign a return to the Clinton era — a time when Americans enthusiastically led idealistic excursions into Bosnia and Somalia — this isn’t the 1990s either.

In fact, there is an earlier precedent here, one which might be more relevant. Think about it: America is in a grumpy, isolationist mood. France and Britain are waving their sabres. The European Union and Nato are, so far, nowhere to be seen — it’s as if they didn’t exist. In its essence, this is an Anglo-French mission, with a few others trailing along behind and some fluctuating but unreliable international support. The only precedent I can think of is… Suez. Or maybe the Crimean war.

Not many multilateral, European expedition forces have operated in recent decades, and it’s not going to be easy to make this one work. For years now, a large contingent of Europeans has complained about the clumsiness and pushiness of American global leadership. At the same time, an equally large contingent of Europeans have prevented the formation of an alternative. Years of diplomacy, debate and endless national referendums designed to create a European foreign policy mechanism culminated, a couple of years ago, in the selection of two little-known and anyway powerless figureheads as Europe’s ‘president’ and ‘foreign minister’. Attempts to launch even embryonic European defence forces have been stymied by lack of seriousness, lack of money, and a good dose of British scorn. Some people don’t want a European defence organisation inside the EU. Some don’t want one outside the EU. Nobody has seriously contemplated a real overhaul of Nato, or tried to imagine giving it a European arm.

As a result, neither Cameron, Sarkozy or anyone else yet has any plan for how the world — and the West — is going to operate without the clumsy and pushy yet forceful and enthusiastic American leadership which their predecessors have been grudgingly following since 1945. Nobody knows what a European military operation is supposedly to look like any more either, let alone an Anglo-French military operation. But we are about to find out: the opportunity to lead one has just been handed to the leaders of Britain and France, for the first time since 1956.

It is said that Napoleon, when asked what quality he most admired in generals, replied that there was only one: ‘Luck’. Maybe Cameron and Sarkozy (Napoleon’s true heir in so many ways) will get lucky, and Colonel Gaddafi’s forces will crumble as the Taleban’s once did, under the shock of a powerful bombing campaign. But if that doesn’t happen, the French and British leaders are about to be tested in unexpected ways. Can they make rapid military decisions together? Can they co-ordinate their diplomacy?

Most of all, can they keep this up without the active support of the Americans? President Obama has been very clear about his intentions. ‘It is not going to be our planes maintaining the no-fly zone,’ said Obama in El Salvador. ‘It is not going to be our ships that are going to be enforcing the arms embargo.’ If he sticks to that, there had better be some British planes and French ships to replace them. If not, this story, which is starting to sound like Suez, might end up like Suez too.

Thanks to these strengths, Japan will eventually recover. But at least one Japanese nuclear power complex will not. As I write, three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station appear to have lost their cooling capacity. Engineers are flooding the plant with seawater — effectively destroying it — and then letting off radioactive steam. There have been two explosions. The situation may worsen in the coming hours.

Yet Japan’s nuclear power stations were designed with the same care and precision as everything else in the country. More to the point, as the only country in the world to have experienced true nuclear catastrophe, Japan had an incentive to build well, as well as the capability, laws and regulations to do so. Which leads to an unavoidable question: If the competent and technologically brilliant Japanese can’t build a completely safe reactor, who can?

It can — and will — be argued that the Japanese situation is extraordinary. Few countries are as vulnerable to natural catastrophe as Japan, and the scale of this earthquake is unprecedented. But there are other kinds of extraordinary situations and unprecedented circumstances. In an attempt to counter the latest worst-possible scenarios, a Franco-German company began constructing a super-safe, “next-generation” nuclear reactor in Finland several years ago. The plant was designed to withstand the impact of an airplane — a post-Sept. 11 concern — and includes a chamber allegedly able to contain a core meltdown. But it was also meant to cost $4 billion and to be completed in 2009. Instead, after numerous setbacks, it is still unfinished — and may now cost $6 billion or more.

Ironically, the Finnish plant was meant to launch the renaissance of the nuclear power industry in Europe — an industry that has, of late, enjoyed a renaissance around the world, thanks almost entirely to fears of climate change. Nuclear plants emit no carbon. As a result, nuclear plants, after a long, post-Chernobyl lull, have became fashionable again. Some 62 nuclear reactors are under construction at the moment, according to the World Nuclear Association; a further 158 are being planned and 324 others have been proposed.

Increasingly, nuclear power is also promoted because it safe. Which it is — except, of course, when it is not. Chances of a major disaster are tiny, one in a hundred million. But in the event of a statistically improbable major disaster, the damage could include, say, the destruction of a city or the poisoning of a country. The cost of such a potential catastrophe is partly reflected in the price of plant construction, and it partly explains the cost overruns in Finland: Nobody can risk the tiniest flaw in the concrete or the most minimal reduction in the quality of the steel.

But as we are about to learn in Japan, the true costs of nuclear power are never reflected even in the very high price of plant construction. Inevitably, the enormous costs of nuclear waste disposal fall to taxpayers, not the nuclear industry. The costs of cleanup, even in the wake of a relatively small accident, are eventually borne by government, too. Health-care costs will also be paid by society at large, one way or another. If there is true nuclear catastrophe in Japan, the entire world will pay the price.

I hope that this will never, ever happen. I feel nothing but admiration for the Japanese nuclear engineers who have been battling catastrophe for several days. If anyone can prevent a disaster, the Japanese can do it. But I also hope that a near-miss prompts people around the world to think twice about the true “price” of nuclear energy, and that it stops the nuclear renaissance dead in its tracks.

If you don’t believe me, imagine the opposite scenario. Imagine that President Obama had spent the past few weeks denouncing Moammar Gaddafi, using the soaring rhetoric he has deployed in the past. Imagine that he had compared Gaddafi to Hitler — which is certainly possible, given that past American statesmen compared Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler — or that he had spoken darkly of the menace the Libyan regime presents to the free world. Imagine that he had evoked the language of the U.S. Constitution and called for nothing short of democracy for Libya, too.

Had he done all of that, there would certainly be fewer European members of the “coalition of the willing” that has formed, tentatively, to prevent Gaddafi from entering Benghazi: I can’t see the French or the Spanish falling in behind an aggressive-sounding American campaign. There would probably be no Arab coalition members either: In fact, almost as soon as American planes appeared in the skies over North Africa (and pictures of the consequent damage began to appear on al-Jazeera), the Arab League announced it might withdraw its endorsement of the no-fly zone. Mystifyingly, its secretary general seemed shocked that bombing campaigns lead to civilian casualties.

Enthusiasm and soaring rhetoric would also now lock the United States and its allies into an implied set of promises. If we’d compared Gaddafi to Hitler we’d have to eliminate him. If democracy were the only solution in Libya, we’d have to stay in Libya until it was democratic. If Obama had been talking about nothing else for the past three weeks, his entire presidency would be on the line. In those circumstances, the Arab League’s withdrawal of support could be interpreted only as a personal affront to Obama.

Because the bombardment of Libya has begun and the no-fly zone is in place, there is no point now in arguing the case for or against intervention. We have intervened, and, for better or for worse, we will now be partly responsible for the outcome — and one of the ways in which we can promote a better outcome is to make sure we keep expectations low.

In fact, we may be about to encounter a situation that a senior U.S. military officer recently described as the “what then?” problem. If we are lucky, Gaddafi’s forces will crumble after a few days of air bombardment, just as the Taliban once did. But if that doesn’t happen — what then? We have promised not to send ground troops. But if air power is insufficient to stop Gaddafi — what then? We are involved in Libya to “protect civilians,” something that is going to be very difficult to do if, say, Gaddafi starts slaughtering people in those parts of the country he already occupies. What then?

Should the worst-case scenario unfold, the American president must not offer false promises or make commitments he cannot possibly hope to fulfill. Some have criticized him for embarking on his planned trip to South America this week, but they’re wrong to do so. Whether accidental or planned, cynical or cowardly, Obama should maintain his silence, continue his trip, keep expectations low and offer no encouragement to anyone who expects us to go in, gung-ho for democracy, and win the war.

He declared – surprise! – that the US “strongly supports the universal rights of the Libyan people.” He said he had “instructed his administration to prepare the full range of options that we have to respond to this crisis.” And then he concluded: “The change that is taking place across the region is being driven by the people of the region. This change doesn’t represent the work of the United States or any foreign power.”

That last sentence contains the key to the president’s thinking. Odd though it sounds, the debate inside the administration isn’t merely about whether to intervene in Libya: it’s about how America can help defeat Gadaffi without doing any collateral damage – and without stigmatising the Libyan rebels as American puppets. At least some of the Libyan rebels haven’t wanted to be stigmatised as American puppets either: the slogan “No foreign intervention: Libyan people can manage it alone” now has its own Facebook page. To put it differently, nobody wants the citizens of Tripoli to rally to the dictator’s cause because the Yankees are coming.

So far, the administration’s answer has been to let others lead. The US has gladly let France and Britain present the proposed no-fly zone to the UN security council. President Obama has been content to see Nicolas Sarkozy become the first to recognize the Benghazi revolutionary council. He’s no doubt delighted to hear David Cameron sounding more robust than himself. And – although nobody has said so openly – the US intelligence community was surely relieved that a British MI6 team, not the CIA, bungled the first attempt to contact the rebels on the ground.

Obama’s advisers, spokesman and off-the-record briefers are all saying that this passivity is not a sign of weakness, but rather a deliberate strategy. It’s not that he’s slowly being “brought round” by Cameron or Sarkozy, it’s that he actually wants them to be seen doing most of the talking. “This is the Obama conception of the US role in the world – to work through multilateral organisations and bilateral relationships,” one of them told the Washington Post on Thursday.

The trouble is that this isn’t a very new or original conception of America’s role in the world. In fact, it was also Bill Clinton’s conception of its role in the world, at least before he wound up bombing Belgrade because he couldn’t get any bilateral or multilateral organisations to do it with him. It also contains an important flaw: for much of the past two decades, it’s proved impossible to get the United Nations to sign on to any international action – military, humanitarian, financial or economic – because the leaders of Russia and China, fearing the day when their own peoples may rise up against them, will veto or undermine almost anything that looks too much like intervention, whether sanctions on Iran or a no-fly zone in Sudan. Neither the president nor his defence secretary has shown much interest in Nato up until now either, generally treating the alliance as a boring obligation. In fact, the time for Nato to discuss possible reactions to a violent revolution in the Arab world was last month or last year.

In practice, there is no obvious multilateral forum through which Obama can act to tackle the crisis in Libya. Until this week, Washington was hoping the Libyan rebels might win by themselves. But now Gaddafi’s troops are advancing, he has more weapons, more mercenaries, and apparently a lot of cash. A Gaddafi victory, culminating in a slaughter, would be a disaster for Libya, and would set a disastrous precedent in the Arab world and beyond. Other tyrants will conclude that Mubarak and Ben Ali were wrong, that the way to stay in power is to be even more brutal and kill even more people. Here is the irony: a Gaddafi victory would also be disastrous for Obama. Libyan rebels will accuse him of colluding with Gaddafi. Domestic opponents will accuse him of weakness.

In the next few days, Obama will have to decide whether to enforce a no-fly zone or – and this may be the more likely solution – to offer food, weapons and political support to the rebels, probably in conjunction not with the UN but with an ad hoc “coalition of the willing”, as George W. Bush would have put it. There are heavy costs to saying yes, and heavy costs to saying no. Either way, Obama is about to learn a lesson: because of America’s size and military power, the American president does not have the option to remain neutral indefinitely, to let others lead or to offer mere moral encouragement – even though those are the policies this president would prefer.

But outside America’s borders, all is silent. Certainly nobody in the Arab world is clamoring for American military intervention, or indeed any American intervention: Egyptian democrats are even wary of taking our development money. (“Help from America can be misunderstood,” one would-be Egyptian politician delicately explained to The Post a few days ago.)

Nobody in Asia and nobody in Europe is calling for the Marines to be sent back to the shores of Tripoli either. The French, feeling guilty for having failed to support (or even foresee) the revolution in Tunisia, have sent humanitarian aid to Benghazi — but have simultaneously argued against military involvement. The British have already bungled their first solo attempt to see what could be done. On Saturday, a British special forces team and an MI6 intelligence officer touched down near Benghazi, intending simply to make contact with the rebels. They were promptly arrested, handcuffed, interrogated and sent out of the country. The last thing the rebels want, apparently, is the stigma of contact with foreigners.

Why the Arab anxiety about American and Western help? Why the reluctance among our allies? The answer can be summed up in a single word: Iraq. Far from setting “an example for the entire region,” as Krauthammer put it, Iraq serves as a dire warning: Beware, for this could be the fate of your country. When the U.S. Army entered Iraq, we knew nothing about the Iraqi opposition, except what we’d heard from a couple of exiles. Our soldiers didn’t speak Arabic and hadn’t been told what to do once they got to Baghdad. Chaos followed incompetence, which begat violence: Tens of thousands of people died in an eight-year civil war. Although a fragile democracy has emerged, this isn’t an example anyone, anywhere, wants to follow.

It’s not hard to understand why Libyans and others might fear a repeat performance. In truth, the time to contact the Libyan opposition was a year ago — or five years ago — back when Tony Blair was shaking hands with Moammar Gaddafi inside desert tents and Western oil companies were going in to do business. But the British didn’t. We didn’t either. Now we don’t even know who they are. Various colonels have emerged as “spokesmen” for the rebels — but for all of the rebels? Or just some of the rebels? News reports cite “secondhand reports through rebel networks” as sources; in other words, somebody told somebody else what’s going on. As the failed British escapade shows, the spies don’t know any better.

We should enforce sanctions in Libya, offer humanitarian aid and put in place a no-fly zone, to be activated if the rebels really begin to lose. But at the moment, even if our military had unlimited funding — which it doesn’t — the Pentagon is not equipped to launch democracy in Libya. That is a job for our underfunded international radio networks, especially the ones that broadcast in Arabic; for independent institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy; for groups that train judges and journalists. Unfortunately, we don’t have the contacts such groups need. We should start making them now.

It’s nice to be on the right side of history, and I’m not surprised that George W. Bush’s remaining supporters now feel good about the “freedom agenda” he sometimes advocated and sometimes forgot while in office. But being right, even morally right, isn’t everything. It is also important to be competent, to be consistent, and to be knowledgeable. It’s important for your soldiers and diplomats to speak the language of the people you want to influence. It’s important to understand the ethnic and tribal divisions of the place you hope to assist. Let’s not repeat past mistakes: Before sending in the 101st Airborne, we should find out what people on the ground want and need. Because right now, I don’t hear them clamoring for us to come. They are afraid of what American “assistance” might do to their country.

Photographs of his British friends and business partners cluster in a circle around him: Nat Rothschild, scion of the banking family, who gave a party for Saif when he completed his PhD on “civil society” and “global governance” at the London School of Economics; Sir Howard Davies, director of the LSE and one of Tony Blair’s economic envoys to Libya; Lord Peter Mandelson, a former Blair adviser, cabinet minister and European commissioner, who now advises “companies hoping to expand markets overseas”; Prince Andrew, who promotes British trade abroad; and, last but not least, Blair himself.

Saif was popular: He went to parties in St. James’s Palace and sailed in yachts off Corfu. He was also rich. Thanks to his contacts, he became the conduit through which British companies invested in Libya — and through which the Libyan Investment Authority invested in British companies. At least that was what he was doing until last week, when he appeared on Libyan television vowing that his father’s bloody regime would fight “to the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.” Suddenly, the acceptable face of Libyan tyranny became unacceptable: Underneath that Western-educated veneer, it seems there lurks a ranting psychopath.

Saif was not the only dubious character to inhabit the space where money meets politics in London, the city that has become the true capital of global capitalism. Any list of, say, people with whom Prince Andrew has recently dined will reveal dozens of similarly polished thugs: more Libyans, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and of course, the ubiquitous Saudis.

Money, even foreign money (and particularly that Saudi money) has always been able to buy access to Western statesmen. But in the past decade or so, the proportions have subtly shifted. The democratic West has become relatively poorer, while a clutch of undemocratic “emerging” markets have become richer. To put it more bluntly, Western politicians, ex-politicians and even aristocrats have become much, much poorer than the very, very rich businessmen emerging from the oil-and-gas states of central Asia, eastern Europe and the Middle East. Twenty years ago, no retired British or German statesman would have looked outside his country for employment. Nowadays, Blair advises the governments of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, among others; former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder collects a paycheck from Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth.

True, there is legitimate argument for maintaining contacts with dictators: Blair helped persuade Moammar Gaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, and in the past 10 days he has twice called the dictator and asked him to stop shooting his people. It hasn’t helped, of course, but it can’t hurt to try.

But there is no justification for taking dictators’ money or befriending their offspring, especially not while simultaneously playing politics with their parents. This is not just a British problem, either. Frank Wisner, the U.S. envoy President Obama sent to negotiate with Hosni Mubarak in the early days of the Egyptian revolution, also works for Patton Boggs, a law firm that has worked for the Egyptian government. The administration was reportedly angry when he unexpectedly opined that Mubarak “must stay,” just a few days before Mubarak fled Cairo — but should anyone have been surprised?

Meanwhile Michele Alliot-Marie has just lost her job as France’s foreign minister because she went on holiday in Tunisia during the revolution, hitched a few rides on a private plane belonging to a friend of the Tunisian president and helped her father do a business deal there, too. When she got back, she tactfully suggested that the French help their friends in the Tunisian police put down the riots.

Fingers crossed Alliot-Marie’s departure is the first of many: If Western governments want to have any credibility in the post-

revolutionary Arab world, they need to stop hiring people, even as “envoys,” who are already in the pay of current or former Arab dictators. Blair should resign immediately from his informal negotiators’ role in the Middle East; Prince Andrew should be told to stay home. The Wisners of the world should be sent back into retirement. Finally, for good measure, the legions of former public officials now in the pay of Chinese, Russian or Saudi businessmen should be kept far away from their previous places of employment, just in case. Come the revolution, you can be sure they will turn out to have embarrassing friends, too.

That could be the first paragraph from a future history of the Arab revolutions of 2011. In fact, it comes from the introduction to a book about the European revolutions of 1848. In the past few weeks, quite a lot of people – myself included – have drawn parallels between the crowds in Tunis, Benghazi, Tripoli and Cairo and the crowds in Prague and Berlin two decades ago. But there is one major difference. The street revolutions that ended communism followed similar patterns because they followed in the wake of a single political event: the abrupt withdrawal of Soviet support for the local dictator. The Arab revolutions, by contrast, are the product of multiple changes – economic, technological, demographic – and have taken on a distinctly different flavor and meaning in each country. In that sense, they resemble 1848 far more than 1989.

Though inspired very generally by the ideas of liberal nationalism and democracy, the mostly middle-class demonstrators of 1848 had, like their Arab contemporaries, different goals in different countries. In Hungary, they demanded independence from Austria’s Habsburg rulers. In what is now Germany, they aimed to unify the German-speaking peoples into a single state. In France, they wanted to overthrow the monarchy (again). In some countries, revolution led to pitched battles between ethnic groups. Others were brought to a halt by outside intervention.

Most of the 1848 rebellions failed. The Hungarians did kick the Austrians out, but only briefly. Germany failed to unite. The French created a republic that collapsed a few years later. Constitutions were written and discarded. Monarchs were toppled and restored. The historian A.J.P. Taylor called 1848 a moment when “history reached a turning point and failed to turn.”

And yet in the longer run, the ideas discussed in 1848 did seep into the culture, and some of the revolutionary plans were eventually realized. By the end of the 19th century, Chancellor Bismarck had indeed united Germany, and France established its Third Republic. The nations once ruled by the Habsburgs did gain independence after the First World War. In 1849, many of the revolutions of 1848 might have seemed disastrous, but looking back from 1899 or 1919, they seemed like the beginning of a successful change.

In the Arab world today we are also watching different peoples with different goals take charge of street demonstrations, each of which must be assessed “in its own context.” In Egypt, decisions made by the military may well have mattered as much as the actions of the crowd. In Bahrain, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites is clearly central. The role of “Islam” is not the same in countries as different as Tunisia and Yemen. In Libya, the regime has already shown itself willing to use mass violence, which others have avoided. Tempting though it will be to lump all of these events together and treat them as a single “Arab revolution,” the differences between countries may turn out to be more important than their similarities.

It is equally true that by 2012, some or even all of these revolutions might be seen to have failed. Dictatorships might be reimposed, democracy won’t work, ethnic conflict will turn into ethnic violence. As in 1848, a change of political system might take a very long time, and it might not come about through popular revolution at all. Negotiation, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is generally a better and safer way to hand over power. Some of the region’s dictators might eventually figure that out.

But thinking about 1848 provides a useful sort of balance. There was a moment, at the height of the Cairo demonstrations, when I found myself sitting in my living room, watching in real time as Hosni Mubarak addressed the Egyptian people. I could see him speak, hear the translation, watch the crowd’s reaction: For a moment, it was possible to imagine that I was watching the revolution unfold in real time, too. But of course I could see only what the cameras were showing, and much of what was important was invisible – the men in uniforms negotiating behind the scenes, for example.

Television creates the illusion of a linear narrative, giving events the semblance of a beginning, middle and end. Real life is never like that; 1848 wasn’t like that. It’s useful to ponder the messiness of history from time to time, because it reminds us that the present is really no different.

At the zenith of the Cairo demonstrations, I sat glued to my television set, watching Hosni Mubarak address the Egyptian people. I could see him speak – there was simultaneous translation – and watch the crowd’s reaction at the same time. Mubarak was in the corner of the picture, but the rest of the screen was filled with chanting Egyptians. For a moment, it was possible to imagine that I was watching the revolution itself unfold in real time. It was almost as if I were there, too.

But, of course, I wasn’t. I could only see what the cameras were showing, and much of what was important was invisible. I couldn’t see the military men in uniforms, negotiating behind the scenes. I don’t know what the envoys from the Obama administration were telling Mubarak and his aides. I couldn’t see Mubarak’s family, and didn’t know whether they were making frantic preparations to leave town or digging in their heels. I couldn’t see the businessmen moving their assets into foreign bank accounts, if that is indeed what they were doing, or the secret policemen burning their files.

Although I could see the happy crowds on the screen, I didn’t know much about was happening on the streets of Cairo either. A few days after the Egyptian revolution seemed to have triumphed – peacefully, or so it had seemed on the television – a truly ugly story emerged. Lara Logan, a prominent television reporter, was reported to be back at home in the US, traumatised after being attacked on February 11, the night of Mubarak’s resignation.

While the crowds in Cairo reportedly danced for joy, Logan, as we’ve now all read, was separated from her crew by an angry mob of some 200 men who beat her and may have raped her; they screamed she was a “Jew” and an “Israeli spy” – which is exactly how official Egyptian media had described all foreign journalists. For many, Logan’s story came as a shock. On the television, we saw the “pro-democracy” demonstrators, young and happy, male and female, celebrating the downfall of the dictator. Yet it seems that there were mobs of angry Egyptian men in the background, who were not at all happy about the dictator’s resignation, and not at all pleased to be making history on the CBS evening news.

Nor was this the only piece of information missing. On TV, it certainly looked as if the power of the crowd had forced Mubarak to concede. But we still don’t know why he decided to board that helicopter and depart for Sharm el-Sheikh. Was there a coup within the army? Did the generals push him out because they prefer democracy, or because they want someone else to take power? This might not have been a revolution at all – or at least not the revolution we thought it was. It is possible that the army will now respond to what the televised crowd wanted, and will hold elections. It is also possible that the army used the protests as a convenient excuse to force Mubarak out of office, while preserving their own power.

But then, every televised revolution is the same. I was in Berlin at the time of the fall of the Wall, and the contrast between the televised narrative and the reality on the streets was just as stark. On television, there were champagne corks popping, people dancing and cheering, politicians making weepy speeches. When I got there, 24 hours later, in the middle of the night, the mood of the city was less light-hearted.

The crowd around the Brandenburg Gate was still there, but I didn’t see any champagne. Instead, people were shouting insults at the East German guards, who were still standing in No Man’s Land beside the wall, dressed in riot gear, looking nervous. Ordinary East Germans were wandering around the western half of the city, looking lost, sleeping on the floors of shopping malls and train stations. Many of them silently lined up for the Deutschmarks promised to them as a “welcome” from the West German government, bought a few bananas, and walked back across the wall to the East.

It wasn’t that the television cameras had lied, exactly, it was just that a vacuum had suddenly opened up, nobody knew what was going to happen next and the mixed emotions that people felt – happiness, confusion, alarm, disorientation – weren’t all that easy to easy to explain or describe, let alone put into pictures and words. And the reality of German unification which followed swiftly turned out to be a disappointment for many people, although one wouldn’t have guessed it from the coverage of the events of November, 1989.

Television isn’t lying about the other Arab revolutions which seem to be taking place. But as they unfold (or don’t) it’s important to remember that television creates the illusion of a linear narrative and a clear-cut story. The uprising in Bahrain, for example, looks like Egypt in the pictures. A young, unarmed crowd; people wrapped in the national flag; a heavily armed regime which fires on its own people; a defiant crowd, now camping out in a square in the centre of the capital. In fact, the conflict in Bahrain is quite different, not least because it is ethnic, as well as political: What we are seeing is a Shi’ite majority threatening a Sunni ruling class and a Sunni monarch. This is as much a civil rights movement as a call for democracy – and there can be no happy resolution following the resignation of the king.

In Libya, paradoxically, there is no televised narrative, or at least not much of one, because Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has successfully kept most of the international press out of the country and followed his Egyptian neighbours in switching off the internet. There are second-hand reports, and a few blurry, shaky video clips which show men standing on street corners, sometimes running, sometimes throwing rocks. Cars honk in the background; people shout; guns go off. In one scene, someone off camera is shouting questions at an injured government soldier, who says he has been sent by “Khamis”, one of Gaddafi’s sons. Images of loyal crowds, waving the national flag and pledging support for Gaddafi are circulating too, possibly from Libyan state television.

It isn’t clear what’s happening in these pictures. They are confusing, not only because there is no logic to them, but because there is no voice-over, nobody to give the story a neat beginning, middle, and end. In fact, if you really want to know what it feels like to be in the middle of something as complex as a national revolution, watch a few of them. You probably won’t understand what is happening – which means you will have an excellent sense of what it is really like to be there.

Listening to her, I felt something like envy. Anyone who has ever attended a rock concert or a football game knows how much fun it is to be part of a roaring, victorious crowd. The experience is even more memorable when you are standing in a crowd that might be able to change your country, or your life, forever. In a New Yorker article that touched upon the emotional power of mass activism, as opposed to the loneliness of online activism, Malcolm Gladwell recently quoted the political theorist Michael Walzer, who had interviewed civil rights activists following mass sit-ins in 1960: “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ”

“It was like a fever.” Walzer was not the first to observe that people who join an exultant crowd feel something out of the ordinary, as if they were in a hallucination or a dream. Since the 18th century, writers and sociologists have observed that a crowd thinks and acts differently from an individual, and even seems to have its own psychology. In 1896, the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon published a famous treatise called The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which observed, among other things, that crowds can be variously “generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly” but always have one thing in common: “the interest of the individual . . . will not dominate them.”

Coming down from the high of a crowd experience and returning to the humdrum ordinariness of an individual life can never be easy, especially if one has been part of a crowd for almost three weeks. It’s not remotely surprising that demonstrators keep returning to Tahrir Square after Mubarak’s resignation, not just to celebrate but to demand more: “We won’t leave because we have to make sure this country is set on the right path,” declared one protester, described as unemployed. On Sunday and Monday, soldiers clashed with demonstrators who were reluctant to go home, and the army even threatened to arrest those who refused to leave.

A letdown is inevitable. Disappointment in the slow pace of post-revolutionary change cannot be avoided. Historically, the months following a revolution can therefore be more dangerous than the revolution itself. The dissatisfaction with the February Russian revolution of 1917 led to the Bolshevik coup d’etat in October. In France, the mob kept resurrecting itself in the years following 1789 (a tradition which continues into the present).

Disaster and dictatorship are not inevitable, but if Egypt is to avoid either a coup d’etat or a return to mob rule, the soldiers now ruling the country will have to do more than send everyone home. As Le Bon understood, the essence of crowd euphoria is the feeling that one is part of something greater than oneself. Now the country’s leaders must help channel all of that enthusiasm into institutional change, not next month or next year but right now.

By whatever means possible, the army should encourage the formation of political parties, the creation of citizens’ committees, the building of neighborhood watch groups and cleanup brigades: Anything to prevent those unemployed men in Tahrir Square from going home, staring at the wall, and then slumping down again in front of Facebook or Al-Jazeera. Online activism is not a substitute for real activism. The satisfaction one receives from Twitter is not the same satisfaction one receives from spending hours in a room with a group of people, planning an election campaign.

Traditional forms of political activity are not the only outlet possible, either. A couple of years after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, I met a woman who had spent days camping out on the Maidan, the Ukrainian equivalent of Tahrir Square. Afterward she returned home, determined to re-organize her life. She quit her job. She founded a publishing house dedicated to Ukrainian-language translations. When I met her she was disappointed with the new Ukrainian government but philosophical about it.

“We can’t expect the government to do everything for us anymore,” she told me. “We have to learn to do things for ourselves.” If the woman who spoke so rapturously about Egypt last weekend can speak with the same distance about her own government a year from now, then the Egyptian revolution will have been a success.

So similar were the words of these two American secretaries of state, in fact, that one had to pinch oneself to avoid confusing February 2011 with June 2005. On that earlier date, Rice gave her famous “democracy” speech at the American University of Cairo. During that lecture she declared, among other things, that “for 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East – and we achieved neither.” Now things would change:

“Egypt’s elections, including the parliamentary elections, must meet objective standards that define every free election. Opposition groups must be free to assemble, and participate and speak to the media. Voting should occur without violence or intimidation.” Rice argued against those who fear that “democracy leads to chaos, conflict and terror.” On the contrary, she declared, “freedom and democracy are the only ideas powerful enough to overcome hatred, division and violence.”

Clinton put it differently – but only slightly. She, too, spoke of free elections, as well as of “good governance, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, transparency and a free press, strong political parties, protection for the rights of minorities.” Some leaders in the region, she noted, raise “fears that allowing too much freedom will . . . lead to chaos and calamity.” But, like Rice, she argued to the contrary. “If the events of the last weeks prove anything, it is that governments who consistently deny their people freedom and opportunity are the ones who will, in the end, open the door to instability.”

In between those two speeches, American foreign policy traversed a full circle. Not long after Rice’s Cairo speech, the Bush administration began to retreat from its “freedom agenda,” at least in public, after the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections and facing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s steadfast refusal to step aside. It may be true, as a former administration official argued in Munich, that Bush officials continued to push that agenda behind the scenes and off the record. Obama administration officials say that they do exactly the same.

But in public, President Obama and Clinton, anxious to distance themselves from George W. Bush and Rice, backed off even further. They accepted Egypt’s rigged elections in November without much comment. More to the point, last year – possibly at Mubarak’s request – the administration cut funding for democracy promotion in Egypt. To be clear: That was money that would have been targeted at promoting “good governance, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, transparency and a free press, strong political parties, protection for the rights of minorities,” which Clinton so decisively advocated Saturday.

As a practical matter, greater funding for democracy promotion in 2010 would have had little impact on the demonstrations of 2011: We don’t have that kind of influence and never did. But if powerful Americans had cultivated the leaders of Egypt’s secular opposition – and they do exist – they would at least have more people to talk to right now. In Munich, Clinton declared that “we are committed to supporting strong civil societies, the activists, organizations, congregations, intellectuals, reporters who work through peaceful means to fight corruption and keep governments honest.” Had we actually maintained that commitment over many years, perhaps we might even have helped enrich “the soil in which democracy grows,” as the secretary put it – maybe, possibly, increasing the chances of a happy ending for Egypt in the coming months.

By “democracy promotion,” or “civil society construction,” I do not mean that we should have funded violent opponents of the Egyptian state or paid anyone to bring down Mubarak. But it is possible to maintain relations with an authoritarian government while simultaneously helping to nurture civil society through education, radio and media. We did that in the Soviet Union and Central Europe for decades.

We should follow the same course in the Arab world, not only because it’s morally right but because it’s pragmatic. Come the revolution, it might even pay off.

Egypt’s uprising should be encouragedBy Anne ApplebaumMonday, January 31, 2011;
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND
As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery – just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy. No, he had said. None whatsoever. But now he was busily eating his words: If Egypt blows, anything could happen.
I don’t know what people were saying in Davos or its equivalent in November 1989, because I was in Berlin. But I bet it was more or less the same thing. In 1991, when Ukraine was about to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush made a declaration (this was the infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech) in praise of the Soviet Union. For years, he and his advisers ran around Eastern Europe and the Balkans doing duct-tape diplomacy, trying to piece together again a fracturing world.
Politicians like stability. Bankers like stability. But the “stability” we have so long embraced in the Arab world wasn’t really stability. It was repression. The dictators we have supported, or anyway tolerated – the Zine el-Abidine Ben Alis, the Hosni Mubaraks, the various kings and princes – have stayed in power by preventing economic development, silencing free speech, keeping tight control of education and above all by stamping down hard on anything resembling civil society. More books are translated every year into Greek – a language spoken by more than 10 million people – than into Arabic, a language spoken by more than 220 million. Independent organizations of all kinds, from political parties and private businesses to women’s groups and academic societies, have been watched, harassed or banned altogether.
The result: Egypt, like many Arab societies, has a wealthy and well-armed elite at the top and a fanatical and well-organized Islamic fundamentalist movement at the bottom. In between lies a large and unorganized body of people who have never participated in politics, whose business activities have been limited by corruption and nepotism, and whose access to the outside world has been hampered by stupid laws and suspicious bureaucrats. Note that the Egyptian government’s decision to shut down the country’s Internet access over the weekend – something it can do because Internet access is still so limited – had almost no impact on the demonstrators. For all the guff being spoken about Twitter and social media, the uprising in Cairo appears to be a very old-fashioned, almost 19th-century revolution: People see other people going out on the streets and decide to join them.
We are surprised, and no wonder. For the past decade, successive American administrations have sometimes paid lip service to democracy and freedom of speech in the Arab world. Some American organizations, official and unofficial – the National Endowment for Democracy comes to mind – have supported independent human rights activists in Egypt and elsewhere. Some American journalists, such as my Post colleague Jackson Diehl, have cultivated Egyptian democrats, interviewed them, written about them. But to American presidents and secretaries of state of both political parties, other issues – oil, Israel and then the war on terrorism – always seemed more important. Our aid subsidized the Egyptian army and police, and the Egyptians know it. In Cairo, police were firing tear gas labeled “Made in the USA” at protesters.
Hence the gloom. If there are potential leaders in Egypt, other than the stuffy and somehow unlikely Mohamed ElBaradei, then we don’t really know them. If there is an alternative elite, we haven’t worked with it, as we had worked with the alternative elites in Central Europe in the 1980s. George W. Bush’s administration spoke a good deal about “democracy promotion” but then allowed the idea to become confused with the invasion of Iraq. Real democracy promotion – support for journalists, judges and educators; financing of independent media and radio; encouragement of open discussion and debate – has never been a priority in the Arab world.
Our options are now limited. But there are a few, and we should exercise them immediately. We should speak directly to the Egyptian public, not only to its leaders. We should congratulate Egyptians for having the courage to take to the streets. We should smile and embrace instability. And we should rejoice – because change, in repressive societies, is good.