In December 2010, a little over a year after the adoption of the Directive of the US Department of Defence dated September 16, 2009, mass protests began in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, called the "Arab Spring".
The process reached its apogee in the spring of 2011, it encompassed Tunisia (the regime of President Ben Ali fell), Egypt (the unrest continued from 2010 to 2013 and led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood, headed by President Mohammed Morsi, came to power, then overthrown by the military), Libya, Syria, Yemen (the president resigned), Bahrain (King Hamad, with the help of force, including foreign, suppressed all protests and paid small compensation to each family), Algeria (led to the lifting of the state of emergency, which had been in effect for 19 years, and the beginning of serious political transformations), Jordan (King Abdullah II dismissed the government), Morocco (the Muslim Brotherhood rushed to power, but the government carried out important constitutional changes, and the West was not interested in creating a hot conflict in his “soft underbelly”), Oman (the sultan began transferring some of his powers to parliament).
Less large-scale protests took place in Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia (King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz al-Saud “turned off” the protests by allocating 16 billion dollars for social needs), Sudan. In Sudan, mass demonstrations ended with the division of the country into two parts and the registration of South Sudan as an independent state), Djibouti and Western Sahara.
In Libya and Syria, the protest movements turned into a civil war. Then foreign military intervention by Western countries was undertaken in Libya, and foreign militant groups of Islamic radicals began the intervention in the country.
The most interesting interpretation of the events of the "Arab Spring", in our opinion, was proposed by the Russian researchers O.A. Kolobov and E.E. Schultz, according to which Arab Spring should not be understood as a season, since "spring" has another meaning - an unexpected blow, “and in this context - a blow aimed at a deep transformation of the political process of a particular region of the planet” [4]. What is meant here is a "strike against the Arabs" in the space from Tunisia to Syria.