The free way Should US foreign policy demand liberal policy outcomes as well as elections, or is it hiding behind its 'democratic dilemma'?

Whatever else he leaves behind, Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-whiz charged with multiple counts of fraud, has bequeathed a lasting gift to the publishing business.

-  Jonathan Freedland

“I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” mused SBF to an interviewer. “If you wrote a book, you fucked up and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Of course, most literary types would dismiss those as the words of a barbarian. But they could serve as an initial hurdle any would-be author must clear, if only with their own conscience: does this warrant a book – or could you boil it down to six paragraphs in a blog?

That’s especially applicable to a nonfiction work of argument such as the latest from Shadi Hamid, a rising-star scholar affiliated with two of Washington’s liberal bastions, the Brookings Institution and the Atlantic. Hamid writes the book as if prepared for his argument to be distilled into six paragraphs. He regularly performs the task of summary himself, offering cable-TVready precis of his thesis’s core elements.

His case is that when it comes to US attitudes to the great abroad, especially the Middle East, there is a “‘democratic dilemma’: we want democratic democracy in theory but do not necessarily want its outcomes in practice”. He cites the Arab spring of 2011 and especially the way it played out in Cairo, a place Hamid knows well: he was born and raised in Pennsylvania, but his parents came from Egypt and he was on the ground during the great upheaval a decade ago.