The international reactions to the Arab Spring have been disparate, including calls for expanded liberties and civil rights in many authoritarian countries of the Middle East and North Africa in late 2010 and 2011.
"[25] The French government later took a leading role in supporting the opposition to Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya, forming a tripartite alliance with the United Kingdom and Lebanon on the United Nations Security Council to successfully lobby for international military intervention,[26][27] though it was Peru that was the first country to sever bilateral relations with the government in Tripoli over the crackdown on Libyan protesters in February 2011.
[32] Conversely, while Qatar staked out its place as a primary backer of the attempted revolution against Gaddafi and a "key ally" of the partially recognized National Transitional Council, the provisional government of the self-declared Libyan Republic,[33][34] it steadfastly supported the supranational Gulf Co-operation Council in its military intervention to quell protests in neighboring Bahrain, contributing troops to the Peninsula Shield Force mission there.
[47] However, it was also the largest contributor of troops to GCC operations to help suppress the Bahraini uprising,[48] as well as a vocal supporter of Bahrain's embattled monarchy amidst protests and violence in Manama.
[55] In March 2011, just months after the protests started in Tunisia, Hillary Clinton commented on worldwide news sources, "Al Jazeera has been the leader in that are literally changing people's minds and attitudes.
[57] Some scholars and pundits, including Slavoj Žižek and Robert Fisk, have argued that the range of international reactions to the various protests, uprisings, and revolutions associated with the Arab Spring demonstrate hypocrisy on the part of governments in the Western world and elsewhere.
Žižek, a Slovenian political theorist, charged that the "western liberal reaction to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism".
[58] When asked if he considered Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, to be an "authoritarian ruler" prior to the popular movement that ousted him from power, the United States' President Barack Obama replied that he tends "not to use labels for folks", called him a "stalwart ally in many respects to the United States", and claimed that Mubarak "has been a force for stability and good in the region", something American journalist Jeremy Scahill criticized.
[59] Scahill also claimed that "the day before US missiles began raining down on ... Libya ... security forces under the control of Yemen's US-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, massacred more than fifty people who were participating in an overwhelmingly peaceful protest".
[62] During international operations in Libya, Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn called NATO's concern for Libyans "deeply hypocritical ... when they ignore or promote savage repression in Bahrain".
[63] Veteran British journalist Robert Fisk also condemned the relative lack of concern on the part of Western leaders over the security crackdown in Bahrain.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah's response to the uprisings also came under criticism, with Iranian academic Hamid Dabashi penning an op-ed for Al Jazeera in which he called Nasrallah a "once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history", accusing him of hypocrisy for supporting Shia protesters in Egypt and Bahrain but backing the "murderous" Shia government in Syria against peaceful demonstrators.
He concluded that the Saudi monarchy's positioning on the Arab Spring protests was part of ongoing efforts to outmanoeuvre and isolate its traditional rival Iran, an ally of Assad, as well as to limit the actual amount of political liberalisation occurring in the region.
Whitaker criticised the Saudi-sponsored GCC initiative in Yemen, claiming it "was meant to prevent a genuine revolution, not help to accomplish it", and called Saudi Arabia's actions amidst the regional unrest a "monarchical insurance scheme" evident in its intervention to support the Bahraini monarchy.