We are making progress when the Washington Post acknowledges this in an editorial.
What the administration is discovering is something that it once loudly said it understood — that attempting to achieve U.S. strategic ends through partnerships with Arab autocracies yields mixed results, at best, in the short term and is cancerous in the longer run. To facilitate its new policy, the administration has all but dropped efforts to press Egypt to liberalize its political system and abandoned even the pretense of seeking change in Saudi Arabia, which continues to export its extremist version of Islam. When she first unveiled the new strategy, Ms. Rice described the Arab alliance against Iran as one of “moderates.” She shouldn’t have been surprised to find last week that in terms of America’s fundamental interests, Middle Eastern dictators are neither moderates nor good allies.
I thought the liberals were proponents of real politique.
