One of the least appreciated aspects of the Arab Revolutions that opened the second decade of the twenty-first century was that they toppled the most enduring dictatorships sponsored by the USA in a region of immense strategic importance to it, the most pre-eminent among them, Egypt, also the most populous Arab nation. However, a world inured to regarding the USA as more or less omnipotent has been slow to register this and to work out its implications for the complex and still-unfolding fate of the revolutions and what they herald for the world order. This only compounds the problem of understanding contemporary developments in a region already legendary for the complexity of its politics and political economy, and, we may add, its geopolitics and geopolitical economy.
