Let me start by saying I have no particular love for the Muslim Brotherhood and this column is not about the rights and wrongs of the Egyptian military’s ouster of President Mohammad Mursi last summer. Watching developments from afar, however, one has to ask what exactly Egypt’s generals think they are doing?

At the most basic level, this is a question of tactics and efficiency. In the 85 years or so since its founding, the Muslim Brotherhood has been a secret, semi-secret or banned organisation far longer than it has been an open player in Egyptian politics. Egypt’s monarchy could not destroy it. Neither could Jamal Abdul Nasser, nor Anwar Sadat nor Hosni Mubarak. For nearly a century, Egypt’s rulers — military, civilian and pseudo-civilian alike — have veered between repression and attempts to co-opt the Brotherhood. The common denominator has been that the organisation never goes away. Indeed, there have been times when the iron fist of the government has severely weakened the Ikhwan, but surely it ought to be clear by now that eliminating it entirely is more or less impossible.

Then there is Egypt’s international position to consider. In rejecting America, Nasser could count on significant support from the Soviet Union. When Sadat reversed that policy, expelling thousands of Russian civilian and military ‘advisers’ from Egypt in 1972, and embracing America, the realities of the Cold War world meant he could count on both Washington and its European allies, both to fill the resultant financial holes and to soft-pedal any distaste they may have had for his dictatorship.

New great power equation

Though Mubarak’s was mainly a post-Cold War presidency (eight years in office before the Berlin Wall came down, 21 years after it) he was slow to adapt to the new great power equation, slow to appreciate the increasing political and trade power of a European Union that takes human rights more seriously with each passing year and slow to understand that Egypt’s ever-colder peace with Israel no longer placed his regime beyond criticism in Washington.

Fast forward to 2014 and anyone can see that three years of political turmoil have not been good for Egypt’s people or its economy. What is harder to understand is why General Abdul Fattah Al Sissi (officially Egypt’s Defence Minister, in practice its strongman) and the commanders around him think that reviving the kind of military-centred governments that dominated much of the Arab world in the 1950s and ‘60s is either a practical or an effective solution.

Make no mistake, I am not putting forward the theory — which has been popular, on and off, in the US over the last generation — that democracy, narrowly defined as elections, is the cure for every ill. Still, there is something remarkably regressive about the way politics is developing in Egypt three years after the original revolution in Tahrir Square.

If there is a long-term lesson to be learned from the past three years across the Middle East, it is that the status quo is unsustainable. This is not an argument for radical change in any particular country but, by the same token, it ought to be clear that neither Egypt nor any other country in the region can simply turn back the clock.

The flame that was lit in Tunisia in late 2010 has toppled governments in Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia. It sparked a civil war in Syria, added to the perpetual instability of Lebanon and Jordan and has had quieter, but marked effects in countries from Morocco to the Gulf. It has not led to solid, stable democratic reform anywhere.

That fact, however, neither discredits democracy nor devalues reform per se. Radical and permanent change has not come to the region, but only a fool will start with that fact and conclude that things can, or should, go back to being the way they were, albeit with a few new faces occupying a handful of presidential palaces.

The common denominator of the years of political turmoil that Egypt is living through is the failure to adapt. Mubarak failed to understand the ways in which the world and his own society had changed. Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood failed to understand that running a large and complex government is nothing like running a tightly-knit underground organisation. In the months since Mursi’s ouster, the Brotherhood and its opponents have both made the mistake of believing that emotional appeals to each side’s own supporters will be enough to ‘win’ the battle for political legitimacy. That might have been possible in the narrower, less media-saturated world of an earlier era, but it is unlikely to work in the 21st century.

The lesson from the Arab Spring was that much of the region hungers for something different, even if it is not sure exactly what that ‘something’ ought to be. In the region’s halls of power — and in Washington and other western capitals as well — it is a lesson today’s decision-makers ignore at their peril.

Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches Political Science at the University of Vermont.