Games Nations Play.

But they forget the people and the Street.

Whilst these essays will always be free, you can still support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

And thanks again to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.Thanks finally to others who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages. I am always happy for this to happen: all I ask is that you tell me in advance and provide an acknowledgement. So, now ….

I thought I would take a break this week from writing about war and conflict, and focus instead on something which has generated extraordinary passions recently, and led governments all over the world to introduce repressive legislation to control the availability of information. It’s about ways in which governments try to influence other countries and other governments indirectly through information, and to stop other countries influencing their own populations. It’s a subject which, I suggest, is not actually as complicated or difficult as it’s sometimes made to appear, and as often with these essays my purpose here to set out in simple terms what I think the issues actually are.

Collectively, these efforts have sometimes been described as “soft power,” but I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful way of putting it. “Power” after all, is not something existential: it has no importance until is used to try to do something, and succeeds or fails, and is always relative to other types of power from other directions. There’s also the implication that it’s deliberately sought, which is not necessarily the case. To take a simple example, western culture has been flooded with Japanese popular culture, as well and art and cooking, since the 1980s. You now find sushi bars in small provincial cities everywhere. And yet, what has the actual effect of this been? Perhaps to improve the image of Japan in the eyes of the western public, but beyond that it’s very difficult to show any practical results. Indeed, the fascination with Japanese culture is largely a “pull” rather than a “push” phenomenon, something that grew organically in the West rather than being deliberately organised from outside. And whilst it’s true that all over the world popular entertainment and fast-food restaurants are dominated by American companies, I’m not sure you can show that, in practice, that has actually rebounded to the credit of the US. Similarly, the fact that working-class European adolescents now dress in American university sweatshirts doesn’t have quite the same political resonance as the political elite of Gaul dressing in Roman togas.

I want to concentrate instead on deliberate attempts at influence of all kinds, and here we will find that not only do major nations do that, but also that a number of less likely states—Turkey, for example, or Qatar—have been surprisingly successful, often in very discreet ways, whereas the West has often been ineffective. But before we go into more detail, let’s recall the basics of how the international system itself works with information.

It’s important first to dismiss crude Realist stereotypes of the world as an anarchic structure dominated by clashes between nation-states seeking power. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the international system works far more by cooperation than by conflict, and in many cases the interests of small states and the interests of large states are complementary, rather than conflicting. A small country in Africa might actually welcome a foreign military base or a Chinese investment project, as a contribution to its security and as a move in the regional power games with which it is involved. It follows that small states can, and often do, use non-conflictual techniques to influence the behaviour of great powers, to get what they want. (Great powers don’t always realise this.)

It might be helpful therefore to work through the ways in which nations try to influence each other subtly, a process which by definition excludes threats and attempted coercion. The most banal, obviously, is a simple public statement of national positions or objectives, the kind of thing that nations do all the time. Inevitably, these statements will be partial. The Chinese Ambassador to the UN is not going to present a thoughtful analysis of his country’s position on some issue, helpfully pointing out weaknesses and contradictions that can be exploited by other nations. Ask a diplomat at a cocktail party what he or she thinks about a particular issue, and you will get their government’s position on it. Someone you know really well may then go on to point out that their country’s position is exaggerated or unrealistic, or may even change, but that’s a matter of personal relations. There’s nothing unusual about this at all, and it reflects how the world as a whole works. A lawyer in court is not going to gratuitously admit weaknesses in their client’s argument, any more than, if you were asking for a bank loan, you would spontaneously reveal your concerns about whether you would pay it back.

All official government positions are therefore partial, and reflect a desire to support national objectives and national interests. Naturally, then, part of the job is to present a positive image of one’s country abroad. Your local Russian Embassy is not going to sponsor an exhibition about the Katyn massacre, just as the Turkish Ambassador will politely refuse to be drawn, at a social event, on the history of the Ottoman slave trade. Embassies work to ensure positive coverage in the local media, will promote visiting celebrities, encourage trade delegations and so forth. In turn, national governments, and through them Embassies and other foreign representations, will push particular interpretations of events and issues that they think are advantageous for them, in the media and privately with other governments.

Thus, in even the most basic exchanges between states, we have the principle of selectivity. That is to say, states put the interpretation that suits them best on the facts they have, emphasise the positive and play down the negative. In general, though, what states say may be selective, but is generally “true” in the sense of being an allowable interpretation of the facts as they are known. States thus frequently talk past each other, because they select facts, and favour interpretations, which are different, but genuinely believed in each case. The West and Russia both claim that the other has acted in bad faith over Ukraine, especially since the Minsk accords, on the basis of evidence which they find persuasive, even if the other side doesn’t. And of course we forget too easily that there is no such thing as “an” interpretation  of events, in the singular. Only the hopelessly naive would assume that events in Ukraine would be seen in precisely the same way in China, Brazil or Egypt, still less that their different interpretations would resemble those dominant in the West. Life is like that.

It is this selectivity, and the presentation of facts to suit an argument, that qualifies most government statements as propaganda. The point about intent is important, because, as George Orwell said with characteristic directness, all propaganda is lying even when it’s true. What he was suggesting is that, to the propagandist, the truth or otherwise of what’s being said is irrelevant; what counts is the intended effect. Thus, a speech by a Finance Minister may contain only accurate statements about the nation’s economy, but the purpose is nonetheless instrumental—to make a point, to win an argument—not educational. And the corollary applies of course: criticism is never more effective than when it is factually based. Somebody recently mentioned to me that “Russian propaganda” depicted the electoral system in the US as hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional. But since that description is factually correct (and would be accepted as such, I think, by most Americans), this is actually a good example of one of the essential types of propaganda: truth as a weapon.

“Propaganda” did not begin as a process of deliberate untruth. Its origins, as most people know, are with the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, founded by the Vatican in 1622, as essentially a missionary organisation. Propaganda was “that which was to be propagated.” In this case, those who carried out the work believed implicitly that what they said was true, and that it was essential that their audience believed it as well so that their souls could be saved.

In the modern sense, propaganda can be said to have begun with the Bolsheviks, and especially with Lenin in his 1902 pamphlet What is to be Done? Lenin argued that, left to themselves, the working classes would never gain class-consciousness and revolt. What was needed was both propaganda, which is to say the use of reasoned argument to convince the educated, and agitation, which was the use of slogans and highly simplified (if not actually misleading) arguments to convince the uneducated. Lenin coined the term “agitprop” for the combination of the two, and this policy was continued through the Revolution and into the age of mass Communist parties. It presupposed the greater (indeed infallible) wisdom of the Soviet Party, and acceptance of its unchallenged leadership by an obedient set of national parties, which in turn the working class of each nation would dutifully obey. The end justified pretty much any means. (As the appeal of orthodox Marxism faded in the 1980s, the same method was taken up by by various identity groups, first feminists, then others, seeking to create a faithful clientèle, helpfully convinced that they were oppressed, and acting as a power-base for the ambitions of the leaders.) The argument of the Marxists was essentialist: ie the workers of all countries were exploited and had objective common interests, which went beyond differences of national identity, culture and religion, and should unite them under Moscow’s leadership. In that sense they had indeed “no country.” This argument was never entirely accepted, and started to break down irretrievably with the rise of Euro-Communism in the 1970s. Its degenerate, identity-based successor has now degenerated further, into an undignified scramble to impose various competing identity labels onto disparate groups, to exact their support and obedience.

The best-known, or at least most notorious, example of twentieth century propaganda is that of the Nazi Party, primarily after 1933. (Its propaganda does not seem to have been responsible its rapidly-growing support after 1930.) Nazi propaganda was certainly spectacular, and recent academic research has shown how extensively it was based on the clever manipulation of Germanic mythology and traditional occult symbolism. Like Communist propaganda, that of the Nazis was essentialist, but constructed according to a racial rather than economic logic. The world was divided into various “races,” doomed to eternal competition with the weakest being exterminated. The Aryan race—surrounded by powerful enemies—would itself be exterminated if it did not act together. You were therefore inherently an Aryan before you were an intellectual, a businessman or a factory worker. (Indeed, a constant of Nazi propaganda was the portrait of the Communist trades unionist who sees the light and joins the Nazi Party.)

Yet there is some doubt about how effective such propaganda actually was. Communist propaganda was at least linked to objective criteria. It proposed an intellectually demanding and coherent framework, which at certain periods, such as the 1930s, seemed to provide a good explanation of what was actually happening in the world, as well as a functional substitute for religious belief and observance. And it retained a mass power-base because it spoke to the objective concerns of ordinary people (being poor or unemployed is an objective state, after all) and because a dedicated band of party members worked, often without pay, to improve their lives. But the propaganda seems to have been much less successful in the countries where the Communists were actually in power.

For all its glamour and ingenuity, and for all that Goebbels was hailed at the time and since as some kind of satanic (note that word) mastermind, Nazi propaganda doesn’t seem to have been anything like as successful as was assumed at the time. Support for the Nazi party and Hitler personally was much more related to the transformation of the German economy and the desire to undo the humiliation of Versailles, as well as to the traditional threat from the crazed Asiatic hordes to the East. Sociological studies have shown that the actual relationship of the German people to their leaders was extremely nuanced and complex, and they were anything but obedient tools of the Party machine.

Nonetheless, sensational treatments of both of these episodes helped to spread the idea that modern propaganda could be an irresistible force, and that ordinary people, just by being exposed to it, could be led to revolt and overthrow governments. Historically, such propaganda was generally assumed to come from abroad—hence, in part, its threatening character—and to be aimed at the corruption of society and overthrowing of institutions. It was probably the invention of printing that sparked these fears for the first time, as books and tracts became weapons in the war between Catholics and Protestants, and different states banned them and imprisoned and even executed those who printed and distributed them. At least the stakes were serious in those days: after all, wrong beliefs could consign you to hell forever. (We recall that in the Gospel of John, Satan is described as “The Father of Lies:” some ideological memes have very long lives.)

For a long time, the French Revolution was believed essentially to have been sparked off by propaganda, in this case, the flood of books and pamphlets associated with the Enlightenment that appeared at the end of the 18th century, and even the famous Encyclopaedia edited by Denis Diderot. Quite who was behind this tide of subversion was never fully established (the Illuminati? the Freemasons?) but many influential people were convinced that the Revolution was ultimately caused by skilful propaganda, and other European countries, especially Britain, went to great lengths to prevent their citizens having access to pro-revolutionary materials. In reality, Enlightenment ideas were severely challenged even at the time, but it made a good story.

But it was in the Cold War where this kind of thinking reached its apogee. Whilst few western countries explicitly banned Marxist political materials, and indeed Marxism was fashionable intellectually in certain quarters, “Moscow” was nonetheless believed to be behind the dissemination of books and films intended to undermine “our way of life,” including the Monarchy and organised religion, and to rot the moral fibre of the nation. In Britain, the BBC was frequently accused by right-wing parties of broadcasting “communist propaganda.” In addition, “Moscow” was seen as masterminding political dissent, such as demonstrations against the Vietnam War or peace and anti-militarist movements, as well as terrorist groups like the Irish Republican Army, and even nationalist political parties. (There was a degree of truth in some of these accusations, but not much.) The Soviet bloc banned a great deal of literature also which it regarded as “decadent”, although it never alleged that the West was engaged in a similar organised campaign.

The apogee of the apogee, if you like, was apartheid South Africa, where the interestingly-named Suppression of Communism Act (1950, amended, supplemented and later replaced)  enabled the government to designate virtually anyone, or the expression of virtually any opinion or publication, as “communistic.” This included notably books and films criticising apartheid itself, or otherwise offending against the beliefs of the Afrikaner political and religious establishment. (It’s not surprising the television was only introduced in the 1970s.) But then the government considered that South Africa was the target of a (literally) devilish Total Onslaught directed from Moscow, and including not only violent and peaceful opposition to apartheid, but every type of NGO and civil society group, many newspapers, trades unions and left-wing parties, as well as books and films from the outside world. The intention was allegedly to bring about what we would now no doubt describe as a Colour Revolution, delivering South Africa into Communist hands, and destabilising the entire continent. It’s amusing, for those of us of a certain age, to see the same kind of accusations trotted out today, although more normally directed against the United States. Truly, some ideological memes do have very long lives.

So if we accept first that governments, like people, will try to put the best face on events and present them in a way that suits and furthers their interests, and secondly that it is fair to describe this process as “propaganda” in the non-judgemental sense, we can go on to consider the mechanics of how governments deal with each other, and how they seek to influence opinion around the world. That said, and in spite of excitable media assertions, little of what governments say, directly or indirectly, is consciously false, though it is often exaggerated and frequently amounts to special pleading. Indeed, one of the basic rules of politics is to avoid making statements that turn out to be wrong and can be used against you later. That’s why you find governments saying things like “our position has been consistent on this issue: we have always said …” and any statement about a controversial subject will normally include enough ambiguity to enable it to accommodate the situation changing.

In a properly organised state, these themes will be disseminated for general use, so that ideally, every person working for government X that you meet is saying the same thing. In the real world there will always be nuances, since governments necessarily represent a compromise between different institutional and political interests, but the basic idea is that there is a single government line which everyone sticks to, whatever their private opinion. In many societies, especially more nationalistic ones, this commonality goes beyond and outside governments, and they may indeed reflect, rather than initiate it. You may hear the same things from academics and even journalists. It wasn’t that long ago, that at academic meetings French participants would say things like “the French position is that …”

In many ways, that’s not surprising, even if it offends against the separation-of-powers assumptions of Liberal ideology, and it doesn’t mean that any direct ideological control is necessarily being exercised (OK, the Iranian case, for example, may be different.) But the fact is that diplomats, civil servants, military officers, journalists, academics and NGO workers have always tended to come from the same strata of society, and these days it’s almost universally true. In most western nations today, they will have attended the same universities, studied the same subjects, socialise together and may indeed intermarry. It’s hardly surprising that their views on the world are going to be similar. It used to be a bit different with journalists, especially when they were called “reporters,” and often came from humbler levels of society. These days, they all have journalism degrees, and consider themselves the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

This is why a lot of allegations of stories being “planted” in the media, or NGOs somehow linked to dark government agendas are, at a minimum, exaggerations. Journalists will write stories that reflect their view of the world, and will reproduce interpretations of events that are congenial to them. In turn, these interpretations reflect common ideas and assumptions in the intellectual bubble where most of them live. A western journalist abroad picking up something from Twitter will call a contact back home or at the local Embassy, and it’s likely that they will find the interpretation they get convincing, because they come from the same background with the same assumptions. As I was writing this, a mini-scandal about doping in Chinese sport emerged, and was negatively covered in the western media. It was immediately pronounced a “psychological operation” by some, but the truth is likely to be much more prosaic: western journalists just believe sources who look and sound like them. (I can’t resist observing how bizarre it is that the West spends a fortune abroad trying to promote independent journalism, strong and critical NGOs and civil society groups and powerful parliaments to hold governments to account, whilst the homogeneity of the western ruling class means that, at home, these are all in lock-step with each other.)

It should be added, though, that a degree of homogeneity among elites is a pervasive cultural phenomenon, not limited to the West, and not necessarily linked to individual political positions. For example, in my experience journalists in the Arab world, in the Balkans and in Africa frequently reflect just as much the cultural mindset of their elite class, and they say things to their audience that they would never repeat to westerners. This is especially the case in countries of the former Ottoman Empire, where the consciousness of being ruled from such a distance long ago undermined any belief in the ability of people to govern themselves. As the great Egyptian-Lebanese writer Amin Malouf has pointed out, this deeply-rooted historic feeling of helplessness and inferiority has now been transferred to relations with western countries. It is believed (my translation) that

❲these western countries❳ are omnipotent and there is no point in resisting them. It is believed that they necessarily agree among themselves and that it is useless to exploit their contradictions. And it is  believed that they have contrived very detailed plans for the future of nations, that can certainly not be changed, and all that can be done is to work out what they might be. It follows that the slightest remark by a junior official at the White House is scrutinised as though it was a message from heaven.

In turn, this defeatist, self-hating and disempowering ideology finds its way bit by bit into the mainstream of international thinking, and even westerners of certain political persuasions can fall victim to it, and imagine that it reflects real life. Needless to say, it massively complicates western efforts at genuine communication with such countries, since all actions and all statements risk being assimilated to this vast, unstoppable conspiracy, which western nations themselves, of course, are unaware of. .

In fact, whilst western interactions with the Global South and attempts to push agendas are open to many criticisms (naivety, hypocrisy, ignorance of local conditions, belief in universal rules) disciplined collective attempts to influence or overthrow governments are seldom among them. In part, this is because there is a confusion between surface coherence and hidden rivalry. On the one hand, such is the homogeneity of the modern ruling class and the Professional and Managerial Class of which overseas representation and relations are part, that, quite unprompted, its representatives will often sound the same when talking about various issues. The Political Counsellor, the head of the development office, the head of the trade office, the human rights attaché, the legal attaché, visitors from capitals, and any number of others (even the Defence Attaché) have probably gone to the same universities, studied much the same subjects, and hold the same general sets of opinions. (For that matter, if there is an intelligence officer at the Embassy they probably share these same general experiences and attitudes as well.)

Yet on the other hand a certain amount of division is inevitable, simply because all governments have complex relations with other governments, and the various factors often pull in different direction. A classic is that trade and political relations may suffer if there are performative statements and actions about human rights, yet the human rights lobby in your capital may be temporarily dominant, which means you can’t get some political or trade concession you want and need. Different factions will compete for the time and attention of the Ambassador, and often report back to different masters in the capital. The degree to which this is a problem depends on the country concerned: as you might expect, the foreign representations of the United States sometimes feature vicious internecine warfare.

It’s also a question of who has the money. For example, it’s quite common for development departments to be lavishly funded, but also very limited in what they can spend money on. As I always say, you can’t get money to train policemen properly, but you can easily get money to set up an NGO to collect complaints about bad police behaviour. This isn’t as bizarre as it sounds, because for many countries the priority is happy-clappy initiatives that don’t risk any fallout if things go wrong. It may be essential for a country to have a properly trained police or military, but there’s always the worry that somewhere down the line there will be allegations of corrupt or violent behaviour, and some enterprising journalist or NGO researcher will discover that, years before, your country sent a technical training mission to the country. Ah-ha. Story here. So often donors will balk at such initiatives, and prefer things which are nice but useless. And, whilst the representatives of most western nations sing from the same hymn-sheet these days, that of extreme social and economic liberalism, there are enough nuances to distinguish them, largely resulting from different worries back home, that they frequently trip over each others’ feet. No wonder the locals get confused, listening to different western actors. .

Beyond these overt attempts at influence, of course, and at a different level entirely, are all the stories about “information operations,” “psychological warfare,” “disinformation” and so on, as well as the use of the media and NGOs to gather and to spread information and influence. What are we to make of this? Is there a realistic and unhysterical way to look at it? Partly, I think, it’s a question of loyalties As regular readers will know, this site is largely concerned with how things work, and understanding what is going on in the world. I’m not greatly interested in value judgements, nor do I consider myself especially well equipped to make them. Yet most people, consciously or not, view international relations a bit like a sports competition, in which Our Team has to be supported no matter what. For some people, allegations that their government may behave in a certain way are unacceptable. For a smaller number, who find reasons to detest their own government, the idea that another government may behave equally dubiously is also unacceptable.

The nearest we can come to a general rule, I think, is to say that all governments both need information, and will pursue political advantage through its use. Governments will therefore do things if they think that (1) there are advantages to be gained (2) what they want to do can be defended legally in their own system and (3) the consequences if things fail are acceptable. This applies to all governments everywhere, and always has. So the question to ask of some particular allegation is, Would a rational government consider that it could get advantage from behaving in this way? Put another way, if we assume that the intelligence services of another country are minimally competent (since it is they who are usually alleged to be involved) what would they do?

This perhaps helps us to resolve some of the pointless arguments about, say, China. If we assume that the Ministry of Public Security is minimally competent, then we assume they will want to profit from any advantages that come their way. Of course they will send scientists abroad to try to discover secrets and recruit potential collaborators. Of course they will make use of the diaspora and students abroad to gather information and spread influence. Of course they will investigate technical means for using computer and other equipment made in China to gather information. Of course they will seek to fund helpful research and publications indirectly. Why wouldn’t they? If they weren’t, and I were Chairman Xi, I would want to know what my intelligence services were doing all day: playing video games? It’s not a moral judgement, it’s a very practical one.

Much the same applies to less aggressive activities. All governments try to cultivate relationships with journalists, to try to ensure that their point of view and interpretation of events is reflected in the media. In some cases, this may involve the deliberate planting of information, which may be true, partially true, or on occasions quite false. The latter, though, is less common than often believed, because it risks backfiring in the end. But as I mentioned above, it’s not hard for governments to identify sympathetic journalists who will believe anything positive you tell them about your country, or who for that matter may be so disenchanted that they will believe anything negative you tell them about their own country.

Governments also sponsor, directly and indirectly, internet sites and allegedly independent organisations. There’s nothing new about this: fifty years ago, Student Unions in Europe were inundated with glossy posters and publicity for the International Federation of Students. If you didn’t find it significant that the organisation was based in Prague, you might have thought that posters urging “Solidarity with the Independence Struggle of the Workers of Guinea-Bissau”  gave some clue as to the origins of the funding. Western countries tried similar things but generally on a smaller and less organised scale. Things haven’t changed that much since. Pervasive western influence in allegedly-independent organisations tends these days to be fairly easy to discover, and many sites, linked to western interests and sometimes directly government funded, are anyway run by the kind of people who accept the precepts of the bubble in which they live. Likewise, there are sites in the Middle East whose funding is to say the least opaque, and other sites, like Strategic Culture, which shows signs of being funded by the Russian government. But once you realise this, so what? It is, as Alice said, a game being played all over the world.

How much actual value all of this is, is open to doubt. For a generation now, following the invasion of Afghanistan, the West has been fighting virtual wars, using information as a weapon. How much money was wasted on “information operations” in Afghanistan, I shudder  to think. As Ukraine has amply demonstrated, though, it’s no good winning the information war if you then lose the real one, so I suspect that some of the hysteria about “propaganda” and “disinformation” and “colour revolutions” is now on the way out, as the limitations of such techniques become horribly clear. In turn, this means that it’s time for western governments to calm down a bit about “propaganda “ from elsewhere, and perhaps be more realistic about their own.

And anyway, we are not the only ones playing this game, and some are perhaps playing it differently and better. Because the West targets decision-makers and elites with its information activities, it is relatively blind to grass-roots level initiatives among ordinary people, and does not know how to reach them anyway. Yet if you think about it, many powerful organisations grew that way. The Christian church began as a movement among the poor and illiterate, with many women members. Protestantism received its initial impetus from ordinary people. Left-wing political movements almost always had grassroots origins, in factories and local communities. Liberalism, however, which is an elite political doctrine, never really understood political movements from below. It just wants obedient followers.

This is why the electoral success of parties linked to the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and Tunisia so stunned western experts. Yet it should not have: these movements had been working for decades, even generations, patiently building up local networks based around mosques, and imams preaching the need for a theocratic state run entirely according to Islamic law. Secular intellectuals and politicians friendly to the West (and who, incidentally, warned repeatedly of what was likely to happen) were considered by the West as representative, and assumed to constitute the essence of the resistance to Ben Ali and Mubarak, and to be their likely successors. But then Liberalism has never had much interest in what ordinary people think.

For several decades now, the same tactics have been extended to Europe. Islamist preachers from Turkey, Qatar and elsewhere are well established now, and have been working for the last generation on radicalising Muslim communities in Europe, with the discreet encouragement of the states that send them. They have had some success: younger Muslims in Europe tend to be more pious and more radical than their parents, who often, ironically, came to Europe to get away from societies where religion had too much influence. The Islamists are not interested in capturing the secular state: they want to abolish it. (As the famous formula has it: “one person, one vote, one time.”) Over the last century they have proved themselves long-term strategic thinkers, and they are now seeking to create electoral blocs in European countries who will vote according to their guidance, and force European states, step by step, to accept a political role for organised religion that until recently was assumed to belong to the past. To this end, they are prepared to enter into tactical alliances with “anti-racist” groups, or anyone else who serves their purposes. There are at least two seminaries in France where Islamist preachers are being trained, and an explicitly Islamist political party appeared for the first time in the 2022 elections.

All of this has flown under the radar of western elites, because it involves languages they don’t speak, concepts they don’t understand, a chiliastic set of beliefs that should have disappeared generations ago and, most of all, the views of ordinary people. There were western-funded NGOs in Cairo and Tunis in 2011, and there were journalists, intellectuals, politicians, even military officers, trained in the West and generally receptive to our ideas. But they did not have the support of the one constituency that mattered: the Street. The Street is ultimately decisive in any political conflict, not as a single actor, but as a critical resource for those who know how to use and mobilise it. Coups and dictatorships won’t last long if they genuinely lack any popular support at all. Elitist political Liberalism, with its disdain for ordinary people, will never understand the importance of the Street, and never bother to talk to the people, but in the end, the Street will have the final word. It always does.