This year started with thrilling hope and vaulting ambition in the Arab world, as a chain of uprisings toppled long-ruling tyrants: four down so far, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, with the blood-drenched despot of Damascus surely not too far behind. But there has been much hand-wringing about how things are turning out: a string of Islamist election victories, especially in Egypt; a jostle for power and persisting instability accompanied (in Egypt and Syria) by sectarian flare-ups.

Yet it is hard to see how it could be otherwise, in light of history. In the first Arab Awakening, the normal course of nation-building and evolution of constitutional politics was interrupted, and its proto-democratic expression discredited, by the intrusion of the British and French empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That aborted evolution gave way to the purported revolution of pan-Arab nationalism, which masked the will to power of national, militarised, new elites, who built iron-fisted security states that left the mosque the only politicised space for their opponents to rally. The west colluded in that, in the interest of apparent stability, guaranteed oil and the security of Israel, and also bought the pipe-dreams of reform – reform of which these regimes were not capable.

Those who now worry where the Arab spring is leading should ask themselves where many of these countries were heading anyway, under tyrannies that bred Islamic revivalism with the efficiency of incubators. This is not some idle counter-factual. The Libya-is-heading-for-Somalia crowd and those who insist that Syria is the new Iraq are shallow in their realism and falsifying the political balance sheet. The real equation shows that the regimes they lament were the primary source of instability. The savagery and sectarianism of the Assad regime, as it clings to power and threatens to destabilise its neighbours, exemplifies this.