The past few months have brought despair to millions of Arabs as they’ve watched the rapid and seemingly definitive restoration of an old, dictatorial order throughout a region that was not long ago full of promise. The end of the Arab Spring has been forecast many times already. Now the last stubborn buds have been crushed.

Tunisia, the country that started the wave of democratic uprisings in December 2010, served for more than a decade as a model for other states contemplating the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Now it’s sliding back toward autocracy, with President Kais Saied, elected in 2019, appearing to outdo the country’s previous dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in repression. Since assuming office, Saied has imposed an emergency regime, suspended parliament, and rewritten the country’s constitution. In recent months, he’s taken to cracking down on any whiff of criticism of his rule by arresting journalists and union and political leaders.

Sudan renewed hopes for a democratic wave when a year-long movement of protest, led mostly by women, brought an end to the two-decades-long dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir in 2019. A 22-year-old woman named Alaa Salah, standing atop a car, dressed in white with large gold earrings and leading men in a chant about freedom, became the image of that democratic revolution. But last month, two of the generals who helped remove Bashir went to war against each other in an all-out battle for control of Khartoum. The conflict has already killed more than 500 people and led tens of thousands to flee the capital, with no end in sight.

[Read: Protesters in Sudan and Algeria have learned from the Arab Spring ]

Then there is Syria, whose revolution was the bloodiest of them all. For 10 years, world leaders shunned President Bashar al-Assad for his ruthless repression of what began as a peaceful uprising in March 2011 and became a bloodbath in which 500,000 Syrians were killed, an estimated 90 percent of them by Assad’s regime and its allies, Iran and Russia. Assad, who also used chemical weapons against his people, has now come in from the cold, at least in the Arab world. His neighbors have turned to him for help resolving a host of problems that he himself created, such as huge outflows of refugees and a lucrative trade in a highly addictive synthetic amphetamine called captagon, produced in Syria under the control of the Assad family.

Successive American administrations have treated the Middle East as a lost cause, a place to fix by force or to ignore. Former President Barack Obama described strife in the region as “rooted in conflict dating back millennia,” suggesting that it was an inevitable and eternal condition. Such an approach risks blinding Washington to the region’s place in the bigger global story that the current U.S. president, Joe Biden, likes to speak of as a worldwide contest between democratic and autocratic forces. In the Middle East, the autocratic side is making a strong comeback. What happens there will have ramifications for the West, whether in the war in Ukraine or the standoff with Iran.

The sight of Assad walking the red carpet to the Arab League meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last month was particularly troubling—not only because he should instead be standing trial at an international tribunal but also because of what this moment signaled beyond Syria’s borders. The Syrian dictator is still standing in large part because of Vladimir Putin’s 2015 military intervention in Syria to shore up the regime. At the time, Washington reacted with relative indifference, if not satisfaction: Syria was going to be someone else’s problem. Russia might even sink into a quagmire there. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself recently highlighted this view as a gross miscalculation by the West.

“The people of Syria received no adequate international protection, and this gave the Kremlin and its accomplices a sense of impunity,” Zelensky said in a speech this March. “Russian bombs were destroying Syrian cities in the same way as they are our Ukrainian cities. It is in this impunity that a significant part of the Kremlin’s current aggressiveness lies.”

Arab officials who have met Assad recently say he has shown neither remorse nor any willingness to compromise. He feels vindicated, and his sense of victory will give comfort to Russia and to Iran, which is assisting Putin with drones and other military support in his war against Ukraine. So far, the Biden administration has adopted a mostly laissez-faire attitude to Assad’s return to the Arab fold.

Western countries share the blame for the failures in Syria, Sudan, and Tunisia. They  have repeatedly made shortsighted policy choices that have contributed to the region’s return to authoritarianism and made it a more receptive place for both human-rights abusers and the West’s strategic adversaries. In Sudan, the U.S. and other countries focused their efforts on mediating between the two warring generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. As the former State Department official Jeffrey Feltman wrote in a scathing opinion piece in The Washington Post: “We reflexively appeased and accommodated the two warlords. We considered ourselves pragmatic. Hindsight suggests wishful thinking to be a more accurate description.”

[Kim Ghattas: ‘We want a nation’]

The same could be said of Washington’s dealings with other strongmen in the region, including Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (who has reportedly explored the possibility of supplying Russia with military hardware), or of the European Union’s dealings with Saied in Tunisia. European leaders tiptoed around Saied, counting on him to help stem the flow of refugees from Africa to Europe. Instead, he has pushed more people to flee across the Mediterranean with his far-right, xenophobic positions on migrants and Africans, even while his economic policies are leading Tunisia into crisis.

The stability such leaders provide has always been illusory and temporary. The eruption of mass protests around the Middle East in 2011, deposing such friends of the West as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali, proved as much: The oppression required to keep the lid on disaffected populations was unsustainable then and remains so today. In Egypt, Sisi’s reckless spending on fanciful megalomaniac cities in the desert and other vanity projects, combined with corruption and inefficiency, have brought the country close to default. Government officials glibly advise Egyptian people to eat chicken feet if they can’t afford chicken, while the regime holds some 60,000 political detainees in prison. Even in the Gulf, which is enjoying an oil boom, discontent can’t be silenced forever: Youth unemployment in Saudi Arabia has come down but still sits just below 30 percent, and unemployment in the UAE has also become a major concern.

So what now for the aspirations of millions of Arabs, who once demanded the fall of their regimes? Even just two years ago, they still had some momentum—in Sudan, but also in countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, where a new cohort of activists applied the lessons of 2011 and got organized to run for elections. Their efforts amounted to little or were violently quashed, leaving no clear path forward for a renewed push for democracy in the Arab world.

Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian diplomat and a longtime champion of pluralism and reform in the region, refuses to accept that the journey has come to an end. “You cannot judge the process by the first or second wave of failure,” he told me.

Muasher likened the Arab revolutions to other revolutions, including the French one of 1789, which went through several stages: the restoration of the monarchy, more revolution, a first unstable version of a parliamentary republic, and the ultimate establishment of the Fourth Republic after World War II. The interregnum may be messy in the contemporary Middle East, Muasher suggests, but transformation will not take a century in these rapidly changing societies: “The old Arab order that relies solely on brute force is dead, and the riches from the oil surge are a short-term remedy.” Most important, he says, people are no longer afraid.

In Tunisia, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest political party, and one of the region’s most influential and progressive thinkers on political Islam, has also been taking the long view. He spent years in prison in Tunis during the 1980s, followed by decades in exile in the United Kingdom. After the 2011 revolution, Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia and entered politics. In 2016, he wrote a landmark essay in Foreign Affairs in which he argued that democracy was the best, or the least bad, system available and was compatible with Islam. He urged fellow Muslims to reject the term Islamist and adopt Muslim democrat instead.

At the end of April, Ghannouchi was arrested on trumped-up charges related to corruption and terrorism. In May, he was sentenced to a year in prison.

“The cure for failed democracy is more democracy,” Ghannouchi told The New Yorker in 2013, when hundreds of people were killed for protesting a coup in Egypt. In a video recorded just before his arrest, he urged patience: “Trust in yourselves, trust in God, trust the principles of your revolution; democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis, it is a transformation that will also bring light to the rest of the Arab world.”

The demands of the Arab Spring are also not a passing thing. Millions of young people across the Middle East still yearn for justice, dignity, the rule of law, good governance, and jobs. When Washington sounds the themes of democratic struggle against autocratic forces around the globe while mostly ignoring the abuses in the region, not only do its words sound hollow but the contradiction undermines the whole effort. No one wants a return to the bombastic freedom agenda of the George W. Bush administration, but the Biden administration should rethink how the Middle East fits into the broader struggle to counter authoritarianism. The Middle East’s new autocratic order may seem convenient for the U.S. right now, but the people’s silence is only temporary.

As part of the deal to extend the debt limit, President Joe Biden and Congress agreed to rescind about $30 billion that had originally been allocated in 2021’s American Rescue Plan, some of which was going to be sent to state and local governments for a variety of projects. The amount isn’t that large, at least by federal-budget standards, but it is indicative of a huge change in policy. The federal response to COVID-19 included enormous amounts of mostly unconditional fiscal aid to states, cities, and other local governments. But this era of huge federal aid, and the flush state and local budgets it helped create, is over.

In its place will be a period of state fiscal retrenchment. Between the huge buckets of federal aid and the strong economy of the past few years, state budgets have never been healthier. Some states and cities have used this time to address long-standing fiscal problems and to sock away significant “rainy day” funds, which will ease the coming crunch. But others have not, instead using the money to build out new government programs or cut taxes, policies that will prove hard to reverse even when budgets get tighter.

[Read: Why Biden caved]

And they are getting tighter. Across the country, state and local tax and other revenues are declining, and the outcome will be particularly bad for transit agencies dependent on farebox revenue where many fewer people are riding transit and for cities reliant on downtown commercial property taxes where more people are working from home. When the flow of federal money to state and local budgets runs out, some jurisdictions—including California, Illinois, and New York City—will face enormous budget gaps.

People have become used to the state and local politics that were ushered in by the full budgets written amid the growing economy of the late 2010s, and the boom in state revenue around COVID. During these flush years, even some liberal politicians supported tax cuts and even some conservative ones supported increasing pay for teachers. The next few years will not look like that. Rather than new programs and tax reductions, we are going to see a number of states and localities forced to cut back. Police departments will be partially defunded not because of political preferences but because of fiscal necessity, despite worries about crime; class sizes in public schools will increase because fewer teachers will be hired. Federal efforts to encourage green infrastructure will be partially frustrated by declining state and local investment. Some places will raise taxes. And, in the medium term, we are likely to see severe fiscal crises in at least a few jurisdictions, like what we saw in Detroit in 2013.

The central lesson of the past few years is that although federal aid to state and local governments can be extremely useful in heading off economic crises, it should be paired with conditions that encourage states and cities to budget responsibly. Congress could still encourage some changes in state and local fiscal policy. Achieving these reforms would have been much easier when federal money was flowing; now, however, we’ll be able to see the need for them more clearly.

Federal aid for states and cities came in several packages in 2020 and 2021 and was crucial in ensuring that the economic shock of COVID didn’t turn into a giant recession. One reason the post-2007 Great Recession was so big was that it led to a huge downturn in state and local employment, substantially extending the economic decline. States and cities ended up hiding a lot of their lost revenue in underfunded public-pension systems, and the consequences persist to this day. During the Great Recession, interest rates were low and unemployment was high, which should have led to massive investment in new infrastructure, but states and cities used their borrowing capacity to accrue pension debt (ask yourself, where are the infrastructural wonders of the past 20 years?). Some jurisdictions, notably Detroit and Puerto Rico, were forced to default on their debts.

In contrast, the state and local aid during the COVID recession was so substantial that it far exceeded the holes in state and local budgets created by the pandemic. It was so successful as an economic stimulus that it likely contributed substantially to inflation.

Aid to states and cities during budget crises—a measure the federal government has taken intermittently since Alexander Hamilton’s plan to assume state debts in 1790—has real benefits, as it helps avoid austerity or defaults. But such aid has obvious drawbacks as well. States and cities begin to expect aid going forward, leading to irresponsible budgeting decisions. Perhaps more important, lenders to states and cities grow less concerned about the condition of their budgets, encouraging reckless fiscal policies. In some periods, these drawbacks were seen as so severe that the federal government allowed states to default on their debts, rather than bailing them out. In the 1840s, the 1870s, and the 1930s, states defaulted, leading bond markets to shun those states and limiting their ability to invest in infrastructure.

The best answer is to provide aid to states and cities in a crisis, but to add explicit requirements that states and cities reform their budget processes. Conditions on aid could encourage states to take steps that are politically harmful in the short run but that will improve their fiscal sustainability.

Congress had leverage to encourage these reforms when providing massive amounts of aid during the COVID emergency. But it failed to do so. Congress still can pass legislation to encourage states to budget responsibly, even though it will be harder now.  

[Conor Clarke: There’s no constitutional end run around the debt limit]

For instance, states and cities regularly budget using the “cash accounting” method, measuring dollars in and dollars out during a given year while failing to account for the accrual of liabilities that will hurt down the road (such as underfunding pensions or failing to maintain bridges). Congress could encourage states to adopt a more reasonable approach. Here’s how: Congress gives states and cities a subsidy every time they borrow, because it has made the interest paid to lenders on state and local debt exempt from federal income taxes, meaning that lenders are willing to lend to states and cities at lower rates. Congress could say that this income-tax exemption is available only if states put a covenant in their bond contracts that they will budget in accord with generally accepted accounting principles, taking into consideration the accrual of liabilities. Even more dramatically,federal regulators could require jurisdictions to adopt “volatility caps,” or covenants not to spend money when state tax revenues suddenly spike.

Congress could model these reforms on improvements made in the state of Connecticut, which until recently had been one of the nation’s most significant fiscal basket cases. Several years before the pandemic, though, Connecticut put spending limits and volatility-cap covenants into its bonds. This made the state’s fiscal rules enforceable by bondholders, and any effort to break them extremely risky. Connecticut saved an extraordinary amount of money during the pandemic, emerging as one of the true fiscal-policy success stories of recent years.

Congress could also create tools to make defaults less costly if they do need to happen. After 2008, municipal bankruptcy proved a useful tool for places such as Detroit and Stockton, California, ensuring that neither one set of creditors (bondholders, public pensioners) nor today’s taxpayers would be held entirely responsible for the bad fiscal decisions of the past, balancing losses for groups of creditors with court supervision of future spending plans for sustainability. Municipal bankruptcy law could be made more functional, however, by clarifying what it takes for a government to be “insolvent,” by authorizing multiple overlapping governments (a city, a county, and a school district that all govern and tax the same people) to file all at once and thereby reducing conflicts between them, or by authorizing state governments to file themselves.

But the biggest policy questions are going to happen at the state and local levels. We will need to do more with less. There is huge demand for state and local governments to make historic investments—in clean energy, in affordable housing, in transportation. Ideally, governments would have saved money during the boom so that they could continue to make investments even when revenues dry up.

Where that is not the case, state and local governments simply won’t be able to make these investments unless they figure out how to reduce costs. The cost of building highways has been growing for decades, and the cost of building tunneled mass transit in America is completely out of whack with the cost in our peer countries. To get new investment during a fiscal retrenchment, we will have to focus on the drivers of those costs—bad planning practices, difficult permitting processes and environmental reviews, and refusals to negotiate with labor unions. Calls for state investment will have to lean into “supply-side progressivism” ideas that see “Yes, in My Backyard” regulatory reforms as both good in and of themselves and as tools for making state investment more efficient.

[Annie Lowrey: America has wasted its chance to move the economy forward]

The responsibility for these state budget problems rests on state government officials, and even more fundamentally, on us, the voters who select them. Over the past few decades, voters have used state and local elections as a way to comment on national politics—for instance, voting for Democratic state legislators if they like President Joe Biden or for Republican ones if they like former President Donald Trump. What people in state and local office actually do has mattered less and less to general-election outcomes.  

We have ignored state and local politics, assuming that everything will work out fine. Once federal cash stops flowing and budgets worsen, the costs of having done so will be all too clear. Whether and how we respond are up to us.