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waiting for his flight in front of a TV in the crapped-out lobby of an old hotel on the road out of town, watching Mubarak’s promised speech. The President projected total confidence on screen. This was the Mubarak Wisner had known in the 1980s. There had always been a barreling self-assurance about the man; it was alive in him now, facing the unthinkable. Ruggedly handsome and perfectly controlled. You could almost believe, as Wisner did for a moment, “This was a great man who had led a country through difficult times. He will endure.” Six assassination attempts. Mubarak had always been a survivor. Yet as he watched, Wisner knew the challenge the great man faced. Did Mubarak, he wondered? Did he even understand what was happening around him? That he was giving the speech on television, in the face of this strange revolutionary movement that was unfolding on the smart phones of Cairo as much as on its streets, was a subtle admission: Old power struggles to handle new rules. Wisner had seen tapes of the earlier speeches, the ones intended to calm the crowds which had in fact inflamed them further. He knew just how fine the edge Mubarak now paced. Mubarak needed to address the protestors on their own level. He needed to show he understood. There was only one thing he must not do, Wisner thought as he watched. He must not address the protesters paternalistically, as a father might speak to a child. On the screen in front of him, Mubarak continued in his steady, slightly strident voice. “I am speaking to you all from the heart,” he said. “A speech from a father to his sons and daughters.” Two weeks later, Mubarak was gone. 2. Imagine, fora moment, you are Mubarak - or really any successful early 215' century autocrat. You’ve managed several decades of control in your Middle Eastern, North African or Asian country. Perhaps you've inherited your position from your father or an uncle. They’ve taught you about power. Keep it tightly controlled. Replace key officials regularly. Execute your enemies from time to time. You've learned the virtues of the hard crackdown. You've sent your security officers to the best military schools in the US and Europe, and taught them to temper their firm grip with (a bit of) humanity. In short, you’ve mastered the use of a strong hand and the establishment of a certain national logic that suggested your name — Qadafi or Mubarak or el-Abidine ben Ali - as a synonym for stability, for prosperity and even pride. This seems to you like the most stable possible order. You know that someday it might have to change, but that day seems a long way off. You delay reform. You prepare your son to take over. Meanwhile, your citizens begin to acquire the Internet and cell phones. And one day in 2008, following a financial crisis far away from your own shores, you begin to notice an unnerving trend. On the streets of Iceland and then Spain and then Chile and then Israel and Ukraine and Turkey and Mexico and then New York City, thousands or hundreds of thousands of citizens gather. There is no one leader of any of these protests. Instead these movements breathe and grow like an organic whole. The discontent is diffuse 61 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018293