Condoleezza Rice’s statement in 2005 that we traded freedom for stability in the Middle East and got neither has been revived in light of events in Egypt. In retrospect, I don’t think she was quite right about either stability or democracy, as I write today. Mubarak gave us, relative to the rest of the region, 30 years of imperfect but welcome stability. And it’s not as if we actively traded democracy for stability. We took Egyptian political culture as we found it — the country was an autocracy before we were an ally or began lavishing it with aid.