The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2015 13 look to other kinds of allegiances, whether it’s sectarian, tribal or other, to try to pro- tect themselves.” The Arab Spring failures were “a long time in the making,” The Economist con- cludes in its July 5, 2014, article “Tethered by History.” It sees the Arab Spring being a “region-wide rerun of the Algerian experience,” where “a flurry of freedom in the late 1980s gave way to a vicious civil war in the 1990s that left as many as 200,000 dead and Algeria’s Islamists more or less defeated, but not eradicated.” With voices calling for reform almost always too weak to effect change, The Economist points out, only Tunisia has emerged as truly changed: “Elsewhere the result has been either a reprise of the ancien régime, as in the Egypt of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, or civil war.” David Ignatius, writing in The Wash- ington Post on Jan. 27, opines that there is not much the United States can do to steer the course of the Arab Spring. “U.S. military intervention hasn’t checked the disintegration,” he writes, “nor has American retreat.” The conclusion to draw from this, which he calls “so obvious we sometimes overlook it,” is that “this history is being written by the Arabs, not outsiders.” Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the Lon- don School of Economics, speaking Feb. 5 on “Here and Now” with Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson on WBUR in Boston, agrees but sees reason for optimism. “There is no going back in the Arab Middle East,” he says. “Setbacks are to be expected. Counterrevolutionary forces are doing their best to return to the old order, but the psychology and the mood of the Arab people has changed.” Gerges calls for patience, saying that revolution takes “decades,” not three or four years. “It’s going to take some time,” Gerges says, “for the dust to settle on the battlefield.” —Debra Blome, Associate Editor William Faulkner, Cold War Diplomat O ne of the stranger tasks certain For- eign Service officers were charged with during the Cold War was wrangling William Faulkner, says Greg Barnhisel in a Feb. 26 posting on The Vault , Slate’s history blog. Faulkner, the Southern writer and Nobel Prize winner perhaps most famous for his novels As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury , was an important figure in cultural diplomacy from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. He traveled exten- sively through Latin Amer- ica and Asia at the request of the U.S. government, as part of a public diplomacy campaign to win hearts and minds abroad, and combat anti-Americanism in areas vulnerable to communist ideology. William Faulkner. CARLVANVECHTEN/LIBRARYOFCONGRESS,PRINTSANDPHOTOGRAPHSDIVISION Protesters hold a banner in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, February 2011. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS/POPOLECHIEN