Having ignored the Tunisian uprising initially, the American right is now struggling to come to terms with it. Very inconveniently, it's hard to fit into standard neocon/clash-of-civilisations narratives – though that doesn't stop Robert Kaplan, writing in the New York Times, from having a try. He starts by denying its wider significance.

I have argued previously in this blog that the overthrow of Ben Ali will have a powerful inspirational effect on Arabs generally and will prove deeply unsettling for Arab regimes, though we should not expect an immediate domino effect because circumstances differ from country to country.

Kaplan, however, goes much further in differentiating Tunisia from other Arab countries. Its historical experience, he claims, is "unique" in "pivotal ways", and he comes up with the stunning suggestion that it is not really Arab: "Even today, many of the roads in the country, particularly in the north, were originally Roman ones," he says.

After the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 BC outside modern-day Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilised territory ... The town of Sidi Bouzid, where the recent revolt started when a vendor of fruit and vegetables set himself on fire, lies just beyond Scipio’s line. 

That leads to the main point of Kaplan's brief run-through of Carthaginian/Roman history, which is this:

Tunisia is less part of the connective tissue of Arab North Africa than a demographic and cultural island bordered by sea and desert, with upwardly mobile European aspirations.

Perhaps fearing that readers may not be totally convinced by his "not-really-Arabs" line, he then falls back on the more familiar argument that there is still time for the Tunisian revolution to go horribly wrong. In which case, presumably, it could deter democratic activism elsewhere rather than encouraging it:

There are plenty of reasons to think we are not on the cusp of a democratic avalanche. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 began as a revolt against the tyranny of the shah, but ended with a theocratic regime that was even worse. The seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca the same year by Islamic radicals might have brought a tyranny far worse than that of monarchial Saudi Arabia. In any event, it was put down and so remained a localised revolt. The Cedar Revolution in 2005 in Lebanon was stillborn.

Finally, Kaplan says, "in terms of American interests and regional peace, there is plenty of peril in democracy" (though the interests he mentions are primarily those of Israel rather than the US):

It was not democrats, but Arab autocrats, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, who made peace with Israel. An autocrat firmly in charge can make concessions more easily than can a weak, elected leader – just witness the fragility of Mahmoud Abbas’s West Bank government. And it was democracy that brought the extremists of Hamas to power in Gaza. In fact, do we really want a relatively enlightened leader like King Abdullah in Jordan undermined by widespread street demonstrations? We should be careful what we wish for in the Middle East.

And here was I, thinking that freedom is a fundamental right. But apparently not if it gets in the way of American and Israeli interests.