By writing about such fast-moving events, I ensured that my contribution would be outdated as soon as it appeared. One thing I had to completely skip over in the essay was the events in Bahrain, but it’s worth talking about because it’s an important counterpoint to the cases I discussed in that piece. I focused on Egypt and Libya, and I argued that American leverage in those two cases was considerably less than most people — left and right — seemed to think. But Bahrain is the opposite sort of case, and it’s pretty clear that Obama has more influence over the situation there than anyone in the American elite wants to admit. A comparison between the way Bahrain and Libya are being discussed in the press illuminates the contradictions and hypocrisies that characterize debates about foreign policy in the United States.

To summarize: Saudi Arabia has sent troops into Bahrain to put down the escalating protests against the monarchy there. Bahrain’s ruling family is Sunni Muslim, while the majority of the population is Shia — and the Saudis are clearly afraid that the uprising might give their own Shiite minority some ideas. But by sending in troops, the Saudis could make the whole situation much more volatile and deadly — already, the opposition is denouncing the move as an “occupation” and a “declaration of war.” The US government, meanwhile, “does not consider” the Saudi action to be an invasion.

The United States is deeply implicated in all of this — there is a major US naval base in Bahrain, while the Saudis are close American allies and loyal customers of our military-industrial complex. And as Brookings Doha Center analyst Shadi Hamid remarked on Twitter, the Saudis wouldn’t have gone into Bahrain without US approval, or at least “lack of a red light.” Former British diplomat Craig Murray gets even more specific, reporting that “A senior diplomat in a western mission to the UN in New York . . . has told me for sure that Hillary Clinton agreed to the cross-border use of troops to crush democracy in the Gulf, as a quid pro quo for the Arab League calling for Western intervention in Libya.”