Miscalculating Tunisia
from Middle East Program
from Middle East Program

Miscalculating Tunisia

Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied chant slogans denouncing Assembly Speaker and Islamist Ennahdha party leader Rached Ghannouchi in front of parliament.
Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied chant slogans denouncing Assembly Speaker and Islamist Ennahdha party leader Rached Ghannouchi in front of parliament. Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images

If Westerners are shocked at political developments in Tunisia, it’s because they described it as a straightforward success for too long. 

Originally published at Foreign Policy

July 28, 2021 11:46 am (EST)

Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied chant slogans denouncing Assembly Speaker and Islamist Ennahdha party leader Rached Ghannouchi in front of parliament.
Supporters of Tunisian President Kais Saied chant slogans denouncing Assembly Speaker and Islamist Ennahdha party leader Rached Ghannouchi in front of parliament. Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images
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Current political and economic issues succinctly explained.

On July 25, Tunisian President Kais Saied dismissed the country’s prime minister and suspended parliament for 30 days. Security forces were then deployed around the parliament building in Tunis, blocking legislators from passing through. The next day, the president forced out the acting justice minister, sacked the defense minister, and ordered the offices of Al Jazeera closed. He also banned gatherings of three people or more. 

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Rached Ghannouchi, the speaker of the now shuttered parliament and longtime leader of the Islamist Ennahdha party, called Saied’s action a “coup.” The president disagreed, citing Article 80 of the Tunisian Constitution, which gives the head of state the power to do precisely what he did in the event of “imminent danger threatening the integrity of the country and the country’s security and independence.” There is a significant difference of opinion, however, as to whether Tunisia’s current dire economic problems, parliamentary drift, and a debilitating wave of COVID-19 actually amount to such imminent danger. This would seem to be a problem that the Constitutional Court could adjudicate—but alas, there is no court because either no one can agree on which judges to appoint or the president has blocked their appointment. 

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Coup or no coup, this was not supposed to happen in Tunisia. Tunisia is (or was) the “lone success story” of the Arab Spring. But these kinds of clichés, used by international media over and over for a decade, were themselves always a problem. They framed Tunisian politics in a way that closed off other possibilities—like backsliding—and envisaged linear developments from protests to elections to a constitution. When breathless editorials described a peaceful transfer of power to a “genuine democracy,” they stripped out the complexity of Tunisian politics specifically and transitions to democracy more generally. 

It is unclear that Saied’s power grab constitutes the end of the country’s democratization. Tunisians have been on the brink before, including during an extended political stalemate in 2013. Then, in 2015, newly elected President Beji Caid Essebsi preferred a government that would have excluded Ennahdha and its allies. Unfortunately for Essebsi and the secularists of his Nidaa Tounes party, the parliamentary math did not work in his favor, forcing a broader coalition. Goodwill eventually developed between the president and Ghannouchi, but what seemed more important than personality in forcing a compromise was the very fact that neither Essebsi nor Ghannouchi had the kind of popular support necessary to impose his will on the other—an apparent benefit of a divided society.

It was laudable and notable that Tunisia did not descend into violence in 2013, that a workable coalition government was established in 2015, and that there was a peaceful transfer of power after Essebsi died in 2019––though none of these achievements necessarily meant that Tunisia was going to continue to progress. Serious analysts knew this because they understood the country’s economic challenges, the lingering questions around identity, the yen for the old order among elites, and the inability of parliament to make good on the promise of the January 2011 revolution. 

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Yet curiously, some of these same experts and observers continued to describe Tunisia straightforwardly as a success—creating an unwritten and unacknowledged expectation that the country’s progress would invariably continue. This was especially odd, given the ongoing erosion in the past decade of democratic institutions in countries considered consolidated democracies––including the United States. 

In the few days since Saied gave himself executive authority, there have been protests both in support and opposition to his actions. The former are more interesting. Dispatches from Tunisia indicate that those hailing the president have had enough of poor governance and a lack of economic opportunity. Layer into these problems the fact that a recent wave of COVID-19 has devastated the country’s health care system, and a lot more people seem willing to bet on an authoritarian who promises to make their lives better with more unencumbered power at his disposal. 

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The readiness to part with hard-won gains after a decade of democratization seems to be part and parcel of Tunisia’s particular political culture. No, I’m not referring to the canard that Arab and Muslim societies are unpracticed at democracy; rather, I mean to draw attention to the cultural legacy of the big Arab state that promised (but rarely, if ever, delivered) security, education, and opportunity. The analysts, journalists, and civil society activists with whom Westerners tend to interact in Tunisia want to forge a more just and democratic society. But what about Tunisians more broadly? Many—or at least the ones in the streets in the last few days—seem to have a more ambivalent relationship with democracy. They seem to want a more effective state that can deliver jobs and a social safety net regardless of the character of the political system. It is possible that after a decade in which Tunisians enjoyed greater personal freedoms, the lack of prosperity has made a potentially significant number of them more willing to give some version of authoritarianism another try. 

Of course, it remains entirely unclear what will happen in Tunisia and what foreign powers can do about it. Given how much attention the press and experts have lavished on Tunisia since the overthrow of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, combined with U.S. President Joe Biden’s commitment to a values-based foreign policy, there will be at least some pressure for the United States to respond. Yet here is the conundrum: In Washington, Tunisia tends to be viewed through the prism of its presumed success. Thus, experts and activists have advocated for providing more assistance to Tunisia precisely because it is alleged to have made the transition to democracy. The United States has also developed a security relationship with Tunisia based on fighting extremism. Should the United States now withhold or cut this aid? That would seem appropriate in terms of values but perhaps risky when it comes to security, given Tunisia’s penchant for producing extremists and instability in the neighboring Sahel region. This is not an easy circle to square. 

In what would be one of the more unexpected developments in U.S. Middle East policy, Tunisia may end up being a cautionary tale in building a policy around a regime type because political systems can change—quickly. 

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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran are engaged in what could be the most consequential conflict in the region since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. CFR’s experts continue to cover all aspects of the evolving conflict on CFR.org. While the situation evolves, including the potential for direct U.S. involvement, it is worth touching on another recent development in the region which could have far-reaching consequences: the diffusion of cutting-edge U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) technology to leading Gulf powers. The defining feature of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is his willingness to question and, in many cases, reject the prevailing consensus on matters ranging from European security to trade. His approach to AI policy is no exception. Less than six months into his second term, Trump is set to fundamentally rewrite the United States’ international AI strategy in ways that could influence the balance of global power for decades to come. In February, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Vice President JD Vance delivered a rousing speech at the Grand Palais, and made it clear that the Trump administration planned to abandon the Biden administration’s safety-centric approach to AI governance in favor of a laissez-faire regulatory regime. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vance said. “It will be won by building—from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.” And as Trump’s AI czar David Sacks put it, “Washington wants to control things, the bureaucracy wants to control things. That’s not a winning formula for technology development. We’ve got to let the private sector cook.” The accelerationist thrust of Vance and Sacks’s remarks is manifesting on a global scale. Last month, during Trump’s tour of the Middle East, the United States announced a series of deals to permit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia to import huge quantities (potentially over one million units) of advanced AI chips to be housed in massive new data centers that will serve U.S. and Gulf AI firms that are training and operating cutting-edge models. These imports were made possible by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a Biden administration executive order that capped chip exports to geopolitical swing states in the Gulf and beyond, and which represents the most significant proliferation of AI capabilities outside the United States and China to date. The recipe for building and operating cutting-edge AI models has a few key raw ingredients: training data, algorithms (the governing logic of AI models like ChatGPT), advanced chips like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—and massive, power-hungry data centers filled with advanced chips.  Today, the United States maintains a monopoly of only one of these inputs: advanced semiconductors, and more specifically, the design of advanced semiconductors—a field in which U.S. tech giants like Nvidia and AMD, remain far ahead of their global competitors. To weaponize this chokepoint, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration placed a series of ever-stricter export controls on the sale of advanced U.S.-designed AI chips to countries of concern, including China.  The semiconductor export control regime culminated in the final days of the Biden administration with the rollout of the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, more commonly known as the AI diffusion rule—a comprehensive global framework for limiting the proliferation of advanced semiconductors. The rule sorted the world into three camps. Tier 1 countries, including core U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, were exempt from restrictions, whereas tier 3 countries, such as Russia, China, and Iran, were subject to the extremely stringent controls. The core controversy of the diffusion rule stemmed from the tier 2 bucket, which included some 150 countries including India, Mexico, Israel, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Many tier 2 states, particularly Gulf powers with deep economic and military ties to the United States, were furious.  The rule wasn’t just a matter of how many chips could be imported and by whom. It refashioned how the United States could steer the distribution of computing resources, including the regulation and real-time monitoring of their deployment abroad and the terms by which the technologies can be shared with third parties. Proponents of the restrictions pointed to the need to limit geopolitical swing states’ access to leading AI capabilities and to prevent Chinese, Russian, and other adversarial actors from accessing powerful AI chips by contracting cloud service providers in these swing states.  However, critics of the rule, including leading AI model developers and cloud service providers, claimed that the constraints would stifle U.S. innovation and incentivize tier 2 countries to adopt Chinese AI infrastructure. Moreover, critics argued that with domestic capital expenditures on AI development and infrastructure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars in 2025 alone, fresh capital and scale-up opportunities in the Gulf and beyond represented the most viable option for expanding the U.S. AI ecosystem. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real time. In May, the Trump administration killed the diffusion rule, days before it would have been set into motion, in part to facilitate the export of these cutting-edge chips abroad to the Gulf powers. This represents a fundamental pivot for AI policy, but potentially also in the logic of U.S. grand strategy vis-à-vis China. The most recent era of great power competition, the Cold War, was fundamentally bipolar and the United States leaned heavily on the principle of non-proliferation, particularly in the nuclear domain, to limit the possibility of new entrants. We are now playing by a new set of rules where the diffusion of U.S. technology—and an effort to box out Chinese technology—is of paramount importance. Perhaps maintaining and expanding the United States’ global market share in key AI chokepoint technologies will deny China the scale it needs to outcompete the United States—but it also introduces the risk of U.S. chips falling into the wrong hands via transhipment, smuggling, and other means, or being co-opted by authoritarian regimes for malign purposes.  Such risks are not illusory: there is already ample evidence of Chinese firms using shell entities to access leading-edge U.S. chips through cloud service providers in Southeast Asia. And Chinese firms, including Huawei, were important vendors for leading Gulf AI firms, including the UAE’s G-42, until the U.S. government forced the firm to divest its Chinese hardware as a condition for receiving a strategic investment from Microsoft in 2024. In the United States, the ability to build new data centers is severely constrained by complex permitting processes and limited capacity to bring new power to the grid. What the Gulf countries lack in terms of semiconductor prowess and AI talent, they make up for with abundant capital, energy, and accommodating regulations. The Gulf countries are well-positioned for massive AI infrastructure buildouts. The question is simply, using whose technology—American or Chinese—and on what terms? In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it will be American technology for now. The question remains whether the diffusion of the most powerful dual-use technologies of our day will bind foreign users to the United States and what impact it will have on the global balance of power.  We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].

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