Clinton has been the administration's most single-minded practitioner of engagement. When she emerged from a meeting with Aboul Gheit in Washington last November to brief the press, she decided to omit one subject they had discussed -- human rights in Egypt. According to two Middle East experts, Aboul Gheit had been so offended by her private remarks that she decided to say nothing in public, though aides had included such remarks in her prepared text. (A State Department official would neither confirm nor deny the account.) Clinton has rarely criticized autocratic allies in public. Although Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, has recently jailed political opponents and shut down human rights organizations, Clinton has remained silent on the subject -- as has the White House -- and she did not allude to this unpleasantness in the speech she gave in the Persian Gulf kingdom last month.
The truth is that, just as Bush's bluster didn't relax the iron grip of Arab regimes, neither has Obama's policy of engagement. The president asked Mubarak to lift Egypt's state of emergency and permit international observers to monitor the recent parliamentary election; Mubarak stiffed him on both counts. Taking engagement seriously has had the effect of demonstrating its limits as well as its virtues. It's time to try something else -- or something more.
Is the Doha speech, then, a sign of new thinking? Tamara Cofman Wittes, the State Department's lead official for Middle East democracy promotion, insists that it's not. "We've been watching these trends in the region for quite some time," she says. But Clinton's language was in fact a sharp departure from the past, and my understanding is that the administration has been conducting a broad reassessment of human rights and democracy promotion policy in recent months, though not specifically with regard to the Middle East. Obama himself seems more willing to use the kind of moral vocabulary he once regarded with skepticism: Witness his public welcome to Chinese President Hu Jintao, which included a call for China to accept universal standards of human rights. Obama also made a point of meeting with five Chinese human rights activists and scholars the week before Hu's arrival.
China, of course, will not give much more than lip service to American calls for reform. But the lesson of Tunisia is that even in the Middle East, public fury can demolish apparently stable regimes -- and do so in a moment. Some regimes, especially in the Persian Gulf, will be able to continue bribing restive citizens into submission; some may even retain legitimacy through good governance and economic mobility. But others will try to stare down their domestic and foreign critics as internal pressures rise higher and higher. What then?
The answer that some administration officials give -- and this does, in fact, represent a new strain of thinking -- is that they have begun to look beyond regimes in order to strengthen the hand of other actors. In this sense, Clinton's swing through the Arab world, which included meetings with local human rights and democracy activists, was itself the message, as much as the speech itself: The administration has increasingly come to see the funding and public encouraging of civil society organizations as a "second track" of engagement in repressive regimes. I was told, in fact, that the harsh criticisms of regimes that Clinton heard in these sessions found their way into her speech.
This is all to the good. But how will the administration respond when regimes jail those activists or shut down their organizations? With silence, as in Bahrain? With private entreaties and public tact, as in Egypt? Or has the logic of engagement finally exhausted itself? Betting that Arab autocrats will stay in power and preserve American interests looks riskier than ever. How will the White House react if public outrage threatens Algiers, or Cairo? The time to start thinking about this question is now.
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