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REALTIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST 21 otherwise unwelcome consequences..... And another message should be equally clear: leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations."5 But the success in Libya was not replicated elsewhere. No country has come forward to renounce a nuclear or other WMD program. In the last few years, several countries in the Middle East and North Africa announced their intention to pursue the production of nuclear energy, citing the necessity of developing new energy sources. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco declared their intention to do so, and Algeria revived an old project that had first surfaced during the 1990s. While each country has expressed plans to develop only nuclear power plants, a combination of factors, such as increasing doubts about the U.S. ability to continue to provide security for the region; concerns about an ascendant and nuclear-armed Iran; and prestige, suggest that at least some of these countries may follow in Iran's footsteps and seek to build a nuclear weapons capability on the back of a civilian energy program. Whether Syria has or has not been pursuing links with North Korea to develop civilian or military nuclear power — a question raised by the Israeli bombing of an unknown site in northern Syria in 2007 — remains an open question. **The Failure of the Freedom Agenda** Among the new or increasingly difficult issues that have emerged in the Middle East recently is the failure of the signature effort of Bush’s regional policy—democracy promotion, or the “freedom agenda”—and the unanticipated consequences of the early insistance on reform. Today, democracy promotion is no longer at the center of U.S. policy toward the Middle East, although the democratic deficit denounced by the 2002 UN Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report remains as large as ever.6 Only three Arab regimes—those in Bahrain, Lebanon, and Yemen—showed any improvement on the Freedom House index between 2002 and 2006, moving from “not free” to “partially free.” Making things worse, U.S. credibility has been deeply affected by a policy that first promised too much, and then was quietly frozen, if not abandoned. The failure of the freedom agenda is due not only to poor policy choices the Bush administration made in some countries, but also to a set of underlying realities of both Arab and American politics and policy making that will affect any future policy as well. American goals in the Middle East have focused historically on security, support for Israel and Arab–Israeli peace, and the free flow of oil. All three require stability in the region. In keeping with policies followed throughout the world during the Cold War, the United States did not worry about the domestic policies and conduct of Arab regimes, as long as they aligned with Washington internationally and retained control over their countries. Even in the 1990s, when the American democratization industry spread across the world after the Cold War ended, it trod lightly in the Middle East. Democracy promotion programs were CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE