Anne Applebaum: Egypt's Uprising Should Be Encouraged
[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WaPo.]
As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery - just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy. No, he had said. None whatsoever. But now he was busily eating his words: If Egypt blows, anything could happen.
I don't know what people were saying in Davos or its equivalent in November 1989, because I was in Berlin. But I bet it was more or less the same thing. In 1991, when Ukraine was about to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush made a declaration (this was the infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech) in praise of the Soviet Union. For years, he and his advisers ran around Eastern Europe and the Balkans doing duct-tape diplomacy, trying to piece together again a fracturing world....
Read entire article at WaPo
As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery - just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy. No, he had said. None whatsoever. But now he was busily eating his words: If Egypt blows, anything could happen.
I don't know what people were saying in Davos or its equivalent in November 1989, because I was in Berlin. But I bet it was more or less the same thing. In 1991, when Ukraine was about to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, President George H.W. Bush made a declaration (this was the infamous "Chicken Kiev" speech) in praise of the Soviet Union. For years, he and his advisers ran around Eastern Europe and the Balkans doing duct-tape diplomacy, trying to piece together again a fracturing world....