Not radicalism but rivalry: Why autocrats fear the Brotherhood

The Washington Post has published many fine pieces over the years. This piece, published on March 25, 2026, entitled “The Mideast pushed out the Muslim Brotherhood. Here’s where it landed” (https://wapo.st/4v2kHhF), is not one of them. It is instead an illustration of a broader and troubling pattern in which influential Western platforms reproduce, often uncritically, the anxieties of autocracy in the language of security analysis. The author, Tareq Alotaiba, presented to readers as a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, is no disinterested scholar. His work does not merely coincide with the strategic posture of the United Arab Emirates. It reproduces it. The UAE is a dynastic state where dissent is treated as […]