A discussion of how "optimism bias" influenced US foreign policy decision-making during the Arab Spring of 2011. As crowds gathered in the streets in the Middle East demanding an end to dictatorships the media and policy-makers were ignoring the potential problems and even the actual rhetoric to blindly report that the Middle East was moving into an entirely different era of democracy and freedom.
When the spring first bloomed in the winter of 2010–2011 it was welcomed
by jubilation on the part of the young revolutionaries congregating day
after day in places such as Tahrir Square in Cairo, but also by the
foreign correspondents who would carry the good news about the fall of
tyrants to the rest of the world. The air of freedom was intoxicating,
as one young Egyptian wrote; the lion-hearted Egyptians were risking
their lives to overthrow the corrupt and cruel dictatorship in an
uprising such as the world had not witnessed in living memory. It was
people power at its best and it was a shining example for the whole
world. The rebels told the foreign correspondents that they had been
inspired by America’s example of freedom, and that it was therefore a
great shame that America and other Western governments, blinded and
paralyzed by unreasonable fear of Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood,
had not given full support to these freedom fighters.
There is a place for Bismarckian realists.
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