 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, we have with us Professor Vijay Prashad from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Vijay, good to have you with us again. Pleasure. Vijay, you have written this book on Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. Do you think that we have now entered into a situation where the steam is running out of the Arab Spring completely? Well, the… If I may mix my metaphor. Ah, correct. This is what the first thing I would say is yes, let's stay with one metaphor at a time. The metaphor of Arab Spring was in a sense to bottle the jubilation that came out of a very punctuated set of events. You know, those who follow North African politics, West Asian politics have been following for a long while political turbulence in Egypt, in Tunisia. You know, Egypt since the 1990s has seen a concatenation of protests. Some of them camouflaged around international events. You know, one of the big formations, big demonstrations was around, for instance, the Second Intifada to insolidate you with the Palestinians. Another big event was in opposition to the run-up to the Iraq War of 2003. So, this region has been in turbulence. There have been class struggles in the textile town of Mahalla where tens of thousands of workers have been on extended rolling strikes. One knew that there's no settled state in the North African, West Asian region. When the series of events took place, you know, and sometimes one has to really appreciate that structures make themselves manifest when people's enthusiasm, you know, in a way snowballs. And that snowballing effect was given the name Arab Spring. But Arab Spring wasn't something that was to capture the totality of the process. It was simply the opening up of a new moment for the Arab people. And if you say that has that run out, well, the moment has opened. Now we are in the second stage of the Arab, you know, kind of new history of Arab modernity. We are at another place where people are trying to consolidate. What does it mean for us to have overthrown these settled regimes, these regimes which had made various national liberation kind of promises but had actually settled into a kind of neoliberal authoritarianism? You know, they've moved those, at least the formal elements of those regimes aside. Now the principal task is what to reconstruct and how to start reconstructing it? You know, even if we don't go into reconstruction just as yet. If we look, for instance, there was also movements taking place in Jordan. Yemen, of course, was on the boil and still movements are going on. Saudi Arabia, the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia has seen ferment. Bahrain has seen ferment. At the same time, we have also had Libya and after that Syria are going on. So you do see now sort of contradictory movements in this part of the world? Well, the main thing that one has to, what I have actually emphasized in the book is that it is the case that the Arab Spring was an authentic rising of various classes coming together because they had a common sort of enemy in the authoritarian regimes of Ben Ali, of Mubarak, of the Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, of the Saleh regime in Libya. So this was a coming together of various classes in popular struggles. Fine. That's up to their simple. They caught the Americans and the Europeans completely off-footing. I mean, the Americans were desperate to try to reconstruct their control, their pillars of authority in the Middle East because one by one, they seemed to be falling. You know, Mubarak being as it were first among equals as the guardian of the American order in West Asia and North Africa. And in a sense, by March of 2011, the Americans had come to some understanding of how to move an agenda forward and they found a very willing and of course enthusiastic ally in the Gulf Coordination Council, basically Saudi Arabia, Qatar, these were the two leaders in the GCC, which some people call the Arab NATO. And they came out now as an alternative social force to this populist uprising. And it was their interventions into Bahrain, into Yemen, into Syria, and of course into Libya that included a new character into the Arab Spring. And I just call that character the Libyan winter. You know, it was the counter-revolution as it were. You know, nobody who rose up against Mubarak was under any illusions that their demonstrations in Port Said, in Alexandria, in Cairo, these demonstrations weren't going to completely overthrow the regime without the regime fighting back. And the regime has fought back quite strongly. Well, if the regime fought back, do you think the forces of imperialism were just going to sit back, watch TV and say, well, this is a good day for democracy? No, they also just as Mubarak sent in, you know, camel-riding thugs into Tahrir Square, the people in Washington, in the Elysee Palace in Paris, they had their own camel-riding thugs. It's just that they don't ride camels and they pretend not to be thugs. They don't ride camels anymore. They don't ride camels anymore. You are referring to T.E. Lawrence. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. Now they have drones. Now they have F-16A fighter jets. And now they have planes that can sit above the ground and claim to be doing things like maintaining a no-fly zone when actually they are troops in the air because they just unleash vast amounts of ammunition at people on the ground. So using ideas like the no-fly zone, they insinuated themselves to try to, as it were, put in place new pillars of imperial authority in a region where it looked absolutely to have been lost to them in the same way as South America was lost. You know, there's an interesting issue of Qatar now aligning with Saudi Arabia. They were at one point sort of competition in the space. Now they simply have completely come together. Do you think that the Islamic popular movements, which also we have to accept that both in Tunisia and Egypt, they constitute a part of the popular movement? Do you think this alliance between the Islamic fundamentalists, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and this kind of Islamic movements on the ground is also is helping the shift away from Arab Spring? Yeah, I mean absolutely. But you know, the alliance between Saudi Arabia and Qatar is in a sense a tactical, maybe even a strategic alliance. It's not an alliance of final vision. You know, and the way to maybe put this kind of, you know, in a way very bluntly is that the Saudis in Egypt preferred to finance the Al Noor Party, which was the much more orthodox Salafi political organization, whereas the Qataris funded the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood. So they have some differences in, as it were, the final vision. If you look at what you were saying, Qatar is a recent founder of Islamic groups like Ikhwan. But otherwise, Saudis had funded Ikhwan, Muslim Brotherhood for a long time. And the Al Noor is also the group that we are calling the Salafis and Al Noor have broken away from Ikhwan also. So it is not that they really have a very sharp division of vision in a long term sense. Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, my general sense between the two is that the Qataris are a little bit more hesitant about some of the more, shall we say, medieval aspects of the Saudi social vision. But that's a really, you know, those are splitting hairs at the end of the day because they have found common cause for at least two reasons. One is the monarchies must not be at all threatened. You know, the Bahrain thing was a real test case. The Saudis are firm in the idea that the neighborhood must not allow democracy. I mean, Yemen as well. That was a kind of moderated transition from Saleh to his deputy Hadi, hardly democratic. I mean, Hadi ran unopposed in the election, you know, and it was welcomed around the world as a major step for democracy is ridiculous. So in the neighborhood, they will not allow. Second thing is they are united fully in their complete apprehension about Iranian ambitions, what they see as Iranian ambitions. So these are the two reasons, principal reasons why they are highly galvanized. I mean, in a sense, they see the opportunities for themselves much faster than the Americans. You know, for instance, in Syria, the Americans, I think, have an Israeli opinion about what's happening in Syria, whereas the Qataris and the Saudis seem to have a Gulf opinion about what's happening in Syria, which is why they went ahead of the curve to say we should fund the opposition. We should direct the opposition. We should get weapons and arms there. The Americans, I think, have taken an Israeli view, which is the Israelis are terrified about the loss of security in their neighborhood. That is security on their terms. You know, they've lost the Egyptian wall. They've completely lost the Lebanese wall for 30 odd years. And now with unrest in Jordan, with uncertainty in Syria, I mean, Syria, whatever the kind of rhetoric coming out of the Assad regime, Syria has been a firm border guard for Israel. You know, they have not allowed any nonsense on that side. So the Israeli opinion, in a sense, has modulated or at least provided the kind of hesitancy from America. But the Qataris and the Saudis are totally joined in a certain view where they see this as a tremendous opportunity to undermine Iran. So when you say why are they, the two of them emerging as a block almost together, the real thing is the question of monarchies, you know, in the Gulf region and the issue of Iran. And there they are almost 100% united. The other party to this is, of course, Turkey. And Turkey under Erdogan has been very aggressively going into Syria. And in this sense, the Iran issue, as well as what the monarchies see, as well as the way they see Islamic popular movements, Turkey seems to be also one of the key drivers in this in this game. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that Turkey, I mean, right after the Arab Spring came to its high point, you know, Erdogan goes on his tour. He goes to all the important capitals he welcomes and he offers a kind of Turkish model as a way forward. You know, essentially he says, we are an Islamist party, but we're a modern party. You know, it's what my colleagues calls Islam without fear. You know, you can, we are going to be moderate, reasonable, reasonable is a code word in contemporary affairs, which means the Americans and Europeans have nothing to fear from us. That's what they mean when they say we are reasonable. So they went on their reasonable tour. Now the issue between Syria and Turkey is so complicated and fraught. You know, they have so many mutual interests. For instance, the problem of the Kurdish question, which has united these regimes. Secondly, the issue of the double dealing and dancing with Israel, you know, both Syria and Turkey have played a similar role on the one hand, all kinds of agreements with Israel, you know, whether it's sanitation contracts or whether it's arms dealing, they are very complicated relationship to the force of many years, they were quite close in their unified vision in the region. And now it seems that the Turks have made a strategic decision that Assad regime has lost legitimacy. They want to put their chips elsewhere. They want a forward policy into the Arab world, and maybe Syria will provide them, you know, I mean, don't forget that that was the main part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. So Syria is going to be their door back into West Asia and North Africa. I mean, that is very plainly the way Erdogan seems to articulate what they are playing at with the Syrian question. You know, they want back in in the region in a much more aggressive way than they've had previously. So what you're saying is that essentially Erdogan seems to see Syria as really an opening into West Asia at large. And that is that is what is driving the policies. You know, you say talking about Syria and Israel, there is a kind of left position which argues that Syria is a bulwark against Israel and Palestine issues and so on. This has been coming in a lot of whereas, you know, there's a big controversy on this. It seems to forget that actually Syria had played the policeman's role against the Palestinians in Lebanon, right? Absolutely. I mean, if you talk to the Palestinian left, whether in the West Bank or in Lebanon, they will tell you unequivocally that the Syrians lost their legitimacy in the 1970s. You know, so those on the left now who harken back to some kind of rhetorical statement from Syria about its anti-Zionist position, they're blinded by the fact they don't know the reality on the ground. You know, Syria has no legitimacy among these forces precisely because they have been a check on Hezbollah. On the one side, it's true. Hezbollah gets arms, they get, you know, support from Syria, which is why they are in a very complicated position. But they are also reined in. You know, Syria has been the kind of a driver, attempted driver of a populist movement inside Lebanon. But again, look at it from the other point of view. In Syria, there was the opening for Palestinians to come and bring their organizations. Hamas had an organization there, the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. George Habash had his center there, the DFLP. Every Palestinian faction had some place in Syria. Over the last 15 years, as Syria has liberalized, as the big capitalists have begun to dominate, you know, the kind of cronyest capitalism of Syria, you've seen the left-wing factions all lose the shine. And the bottom line was when the Hamas leadership in Damascus essentially decamped and condemned the regime. After even that, forget the 1970s, after even Hamas has condemned the regime, it's ridiculous that people hold to the illusion that Syria is a major force, you know, against Israel. It's unbelievable that people say that, you know, it somehow suggests that people are trying to hold on to something, you know, when nothing is there.