The main conclusion for U.S. policy is that the United States should welcome the political explosion in the Middle East as being on balance in U.S. interests. To the extent that words or deeds of the United States might either retard or encourage region-wide changes to the existing political order, it should aim for encouragement. In practice this may sometimes mean not doing things that would screw up the process. The United States should try to stay on the right side of history.

The United States should help to maintain the sense of popular empowerment—the feeling of the people being able to make change happen by themselves—that was such an important part of what took place in Tahrir Square in Cairo. The change in public attitudes that this sense of empowerment embodies is perhaps the most important change of all that we have witnessed so far, because it can do more than anything else to reduce the alienation between individuals and their countries that is endemic in the Middle East and that underlies stagnant economies, cynicism about political participation, and resort to extremism. The United States needs to avoid scrupulously anything that would compromise the sense of empowerment by making a U.S. role in political change too conspicuous. This will sometimes mean hanging back from direct involvement more than would satisfy many political appetites in the United States.

In the interest of not reintroducing more cynicism, the United States should respect popular sovereignty and the results of new democratic processes, even when specific outcomes may not be to its liking. It should be prepared and willing to do normal business with a wide variety of actors that are new either to the political process or to positions of power. Although the United States tactically needs to be mindful of the major differences among Middle Eastern countries as it manages its responses to revolutionary situations, strategically it should consistently respect democratic outcomes. It should not peremptorily determine who is to be its friend or its enemy, and it should not choose friends just on the basis of their ideologies.

In the new Middle East, it will be even more important than before to expend the necessary effort and political capital to resolve the Palestinian issue. Movement toward popular sovereignty in Arab countries, far from being a distraction from this issue, has made even more glaring the lack of Palestinian popular sovereignty. Indefinite perpetuation of the status quo in the occupied territories would mean being on the wrong side of history.

The shape of the new Middle East, and the extent to which it really will be new and different, will depend on events yet to play out. There will be a tendency to overreact to many of those events. Some will be interpreted as either an end to a wave of democratization or as evidence of the wave's unlimited power. Neither such interpretation is likely to be valid. There will be plenty of material in the months ahead for further analysis and strategizing, but enough has happened already to have a sense of history's direction.

Image by Jonathan Rashad