WATERLOO, Ontario — Writing in The New York Times on Aug. 20, 2002, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb quoted an Asian activist's conviction that "American democracy requires the repression of democracy in the rest of the world."
This explains why Washington finds itself both behind the curve and on the wrong side of history in struggling to cope with the crisis in Egypt, despite the $1.3 billion annual U.S. stipend since 1979.
The privileging of "our" geopolitical and commercial interests over "their" freedoms and aspirations has been a toxic legacy of wrongheaded Western policies for more than half a century. The face of America in the Arab world today is that of aging autocrats using U.S.-backed and armed security forces to rob and brutalize their own people while presiding over corrupt and rotting political systems.