Many wonder why the Middle East is in the midst of what appears to be a great unraveling. They question what can be done about it, if anything.

The forces we see contributing to broad disruption and conflict today — including terrorism — had been building for decades and predated America’s response to 9/11.

The political order Europeans put in place throughout the Middle East following World War I, which established nation state boundaries and produced a unifying Arab nationalism, steadily failed to hold the region’s countries together.

Authoritarian military rulers such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Syria’s Bashar Assad ruled over deeply fractious societies with an iron fist, but the kettle was always simmering. Now the iron fists are mostly gone, and there is no viable governing option available to replace the old order.

The so-called Arab Spring that started in Tunisia in 2011 swept through the region like a wild fire, throwing off authoritarian military rulers in places such as Egypt and Libya. In fairly short order, many of these popular rebellions produced not orderly rule but chaos, fueled by powerful ethnic and sectarian divisions and new forms of abuse against those out of power.

In Egypt, the revolution led by the Muslim Brotherhood that toppled Mubarak was quickly reversed in a counterrevolution that immediately returned to power another ruler of the Mubarak mold.

Egypt’s neighbor, Libya, lies in ruins, a failed state with two separate governments and security forces consisting mostly of roaming private militias.

So the real crisis in the Middle East has to do with the power vacuum created by the toppling of authoritarian regimes and a lack of broadly representative, stable governing institutions as alternatives.

But the greatest source of faction and instability may be the crisis in Islam. Long suppressed by dictatorial rule, the two factions of Islam — Sunni and Shia — are now engaged in a regionwide struggle for power that is strengthening the most radical elements of each wing. The terrorist movements, Al-Qaida and the Islamic State only represent the extreme ends of this division.

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Terrorists depend on the crisis inside Islam — on the willingness of local populations to side with them against failed, corrupt regimes. Even within mainstream Islam there is a longing to return to puritanical roots, to cast aside compromises with Western secularism, which they believed failed, and to put Islam in charge of state affairs. But as the more mainstream Muslim Brotherhood’s brief experiment with democratic rule in Egypt showed, political Islam finds it nearly impossible to practice inclusive, tolerant rule.

No effective democratic model has yet emerged. Now, the order of the day seems to be restoring stability, not advancing human freedoms, particularly as the larger fight against Islamic State has become the priority.

As The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote: “There are so many conflicting dreams and nightmares playing out among our Middle East allies in the war on (the Islamic State) that Freud would have not been able to keep them straight.”

He added: “If you listen closely, of those dreams, ours — pluralistic democracy — is not high on the list.”

So is the Middle East ungovernable? All agree that solutions to the problem must be found in the region itself, with moderate Arab states standing up and taking responsibility for what is happening around them. There are some good signs.

For far too long some Arab states directly supported radical elements, often imagining that these Islamist fighters might be useful in countering hostile regimes elsewhere. Now these same extremist movements are a threat to their homelands, and a long overdue crackdown is underway in places such as Saudi Arabia. The great challenge, however, will be to crush terrorism without cracking down on political dissent, thereby aiding the very radicalism they are trying to confront.

Second, whereas moderate Arab states have had great difficulty in the past uniting against a common enemy, they are now coordinating security strategies across the region. Some moderate Arab states, such the United Arab Emirates, are doing what has never been done, which is to declare an “intellectual war” against their Muslim brothers who have embraced radicalism, recognizing that the crisis cannot ultimately be solved by military action alone.

Whether a new model of governance can emerge and produce stability remains to be seen. The solution for now may be in simply attempting to contain the cancer and protect the islands of stability and decency that do exist.

Don Eberly, of East Hempfield Township, served in the White House as an aide to two presidents, has had official roles in postwar reconstruction, and is the author of several books, including “Liberate and Leave: Fatal Flaws in the Early Postwar for Iraq.”