"It’s somewhat remarkable that the Sissi regime still finds ways to be even more repressive than it was before"

My thoughts on #Egypt's rather maximalist interpretation of what an autocracy can and should be, in @emilyctamkin's new @washingtonpost piece: washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/…

The sad lesson of the Arab Spring is that extreme levels of repression can "work," at least in the short term. I wish it were otherwise, and maybe one day it will be

It didn't *have* to be this way, and I suppose there's a counterfactual history of the Arab Spring that exists in parallel in the world that never was. One of the things that could have produced the counterfactual (before it never was) was heavy costs imposed by the US and others