The World

If you thought the revolution in Egypt posed some tricky dilemmas for American foreign policy, how about the upheavals in Bahrain? Bahrain is a tiny place. But is also the base for the US Fifth Fleet – the basis of American power in the Persian Gulf. Hitherto, the Americans have hidden behind the convenient idea that Bahrain is moving towards democracy. In the recent past, Hillary Clinton has pronounced herself “impressed” by Bahrain’s “committment to the democratic path”. But now the government is killing demonstrators in the street.

From an American point of view, the toppling of the regime in Bahrain would clearly pose a threat to their naval base. There is also the worry that the demonstrators in Bahrain are majority-Shia and so may look across the Gulf to Iran for support. And, more generally, there must be concern that Arab unrest has now definitively spread to the Gulf region – home to most of the world’s oil reserves and to a bunch of conservative, autocratic pro-western regimes, with Saudi Arabia, the most important of the lot.

Of course, it is not just the pro-western regimes that are under threat. There are the demonstrations in Libya that target Colonel Gaddafi (a sort of friend of the West these days, but not somebody who will be much mourned in Washington or London). And then, of course, there is Iran, which is clearly not immune from the virus of popular revolt.

Meanwhile, western policymakers have to figure out how to approach the transition in Egypt. One idea might be for America to start diverting some of the $1.3 billion in aid it gives each year to the Egyptian military, in the direction of aid to civil society. Most people seem to agree that liberal forces in Egypt exist, but are relatively disorganised and inchoate. Perhaps it is time to give them some help? The European Union is hardly exempt either.

Denis Macshane, one of the few British MPs with a serious interest in foreign affairs, offered this wise advice in a round-robin e-mail yesterday: “What can we do to help political and social organisations like trades unions, scholars, journalists? The big European political foundations helped develop autonomous democratic party political organisations in Europe after the end of Mediterranean fascism and East European communism…So we need to ask the British government working with European and other democracies to invest fast and invest now in creating democratic space in both Egypt and Tunisia.” Quite right. But will they do it – at a time of budget-cuts at home?