The Arab revolt of 2011 belongs to a rare class of historical events: a concatenation of political upheavals, one detonating the other, across an entire region of the world. There have been only three prior instances—the Hispanic American Wars of Liberation that began in 1810 and ended in 1825; the European revolutions of 1848–49; and the fall of the regimes in the Soviet bloc, 1989–91. Each of these was historically specific to its time and place, as the chain of explosions in the Arab world will be. None lasted less than two years. Since the match was first lit in Tunisia this December, with the flames spreading to Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Oman, Jordan, Syria, no more than three months have passed; any prediction of its outcomes would be premature. The most radical of the trio of earlier upheavals ended in complete defeat by 1852. The other two triumphed, though the fruits of victory were often bitter: certainly, far from the hopes of a Bolívar or a Bohley. The ultimate fate of the Arab revolt could resemble either pattern. But it is just as likely to be sui generis.

Two features have long set the Middle East and North Africa apart within the contemporary political universe. The first is the unique longevity and intensity of the Western imperial grip on the region, over the past century. From Morocco to Egypt, colonial control of North Africa was divided between France, Italy and Britain before the First World War, while the Gulf became a series of British protectorates and Aden an outpost of British India. After the War the spoils of the Ottoman Empire fell to Britain and France, adding what became under their calipers Iraq, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan, in the final great haul of European territorial booty. Formal colonization arrived late in much of the Arab world. Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Subcontinent, not to speak of Latin America, were all seized long before Mesopotamia or the Levant. Unlike any of these zones, however, formal decolonization has been accompanied by a virtually uninterrupted sequence of imperial wars and interventions in the post-colonial period.

These began as early as the British expedition to reinstall a puppet regent in Iraq in 1941, and multiplied with the arrival of a Zionist state on the graveyard of the Palestinian Revolt, crushed by Britain in 1938–39. Henceforward an expanding colonial power, acting sometimes as partner, sometimes as proxy, but with increasing frequency as initiator of regional aggressions, was linked to the emergence of the United States in place of France and Britain as the overlord of the Arab world. Since the Second World War, each decade has seen its harvest of suzerain or settler violence. In the forties came the nakba unleashed by Israel in Palestine. In the fifties, the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt and the American landings in the Lebanon. In the sixties, Israel’s Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In the seventies, the Yom Kippur War, its upshot controlled by the us. In the eighties, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and crushing of the Palestinian intifada. In the nineties, the Gulf War. In the last decade, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. In this, the nato bombardment of Libya in 2011. Not every act of belligerence was born in Washington, London, Paris or Tel Aviv. Military conflicts of local origin were also common enough: the Yemeni civil war in the sixties, the Moroccan seizure of Western Sahara in the seventies, the Iraqi attack on Iran in the eighties and invasion of Kuwait in the nineties. But Western involvement or connivance in these was also rarely absent. Little in the region moved without close imperial attention, and—where necessary—application of force or finance, to it.

The reasons for the exceptional degree of Euro-American vigilance and interference in the Arab world are plain. On the one hand, it is the repository of the largest concentration of oil reserves on Earth, vital for the energy-intensive economies of the West; generating a vast arc of strategic emplacements, from naval, air and intelligence bases along the Gulf, with outposts in Iraq, to deep penetration of the Egyptian, Jordanian, Yemeni and Moroccan security establishments. On the other, it is the setting in which Israel is inserted and must be protected, as America is home to a Zionist lobby rooted in the country’s most powerful immigrant community, which no president or party dare affront, and Europe bears the guilt of the Shoah. Since Israel is in its turn an occupying power still dependent on Western patronage, its patrons have become the target for retaliation by Islamist groups, practising terror as the Irgun and Lehi did in their day, and screwing imperial fixation on the region to a still higher pitch. No other part of the world has enjoyed the same level of continuous hegemonic concern.

The second distinguishing feature of the Arab world has been the longevity and intensity of the assorted tyrannies that have preyed on it since formal decolonization. In the past thirty years democratic regimes, as understood by Freedom House, have spread from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia. In the Middle East and North Africa, nothing analogous occurred. Here, despots of every stripe continued to hold sway, unaltered by time or circumstance. The Saudi family—the aptest sense of the term is Sicilian—which has been the central saddle of American power in the region since Roosevelt’s compact with it, has ruled unchecked over its peninsula for nearly a century. The petty sheikhs of the Gulf and Oman, propped up or put there by the Raj in the time of the ‘Trucial Coast’, have had scarcely more need to go through the motions of listening to their subjects than the Wahhabite helpmeets of Washington next door. The Hashemite and Alaouite dynasties in Jordan and Morocco—the first a creature of British, the second a legatee of French, colonialism—have passed power down three generations of royal autocrats with little more than gestures at a parliamentary façade. Torture and murder are routine in these regimes, the best friends of the West in the region.

No less so in the nominal republics of the period, each as brutal a dictatorship as the next, and most no less dynastic than the monarchies themselves. Here too, the collective longevity of rulers had no parallel anywhere else in the world: Gaddafi in power for 41 years, Assad father and son 40, Saleh 32, Mubarak 29, Ben Ali 23. Only the Algerian military, rotating the Presidency in the manner of Brazilian generals, have departed from this norm, while respecting every other principle of oppression. In external posture, these regimes were less uniformly subservient to the hegemon. The Egyptian dictatorship, rescued from a terminal military debacle in 1973 only by the grace of the United States, was thereafter a faithful pawn of Washington, with less operational independence from it than the Saudi kingdom. The Yemeni ruler was bought at a bargain price for service in the War on Terror. The Tunisian cultivated patrons in Europe, principally but not exclusively France. The Algerian and Libyan regimes, enjoying large revenues from natural resources, had a greater margin of autonomy, if within a pattern of increasing overall compliance: required by the Algerian variant to ensure Western blessing for its decimation of Islamist opposition, by the Libyan to atone for its past and place lucrative investments in Italy. The one significant hold-out remained Syria, unable to submit without a recovery of the Golan Heights, blocked by Israel, and unwilling to let the fossil-mosaic of Lebanon fall completely into the hands of Saudi money and Western intelligence. Even this exception, however, was brigaded without difficulty into Operation Desert Storm.

The two hallmarks of the region, its continuing domination by the American imperial system and its continuing lack of democratic institutions, have been connected. The connexion is not a simple derivation. Where democracy is reckoned any threat to capital, the United States and its allies have never hesitated to remove it, as the fates of Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende or currently Aristide illustrate. Conversely, where autocracy is essential, it will be well guarded. The despotisms of Arabia, resting on tribal hand-outs and sweated immigrant labour, are strategic pinions of the Pax Americana which the Pentagon would intervene overnight to preserve. The dictatorships—royal or republican—presiding over larger urban populations elsewhere in the region have been somewhat different conveniences, of a more tactical order. But the gamut of these tyrannies has mostly been aided and supported, rather than created or imposed by the United States. Each has indigenous roots in its local society, however well watered these may have been by Washington.