The Arab Spring should dispel the delusional gospel that the United States should be in the business of saving the world for democracy.

Instead, as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams admonished on July 4, 1821, we should wish freedom and independence well abroad but fight only to defend our own. All interventions will prove costly fool’s errands inviting blowback. Among other things, we should keep our hands off Syria and withdraw our troops.

The Arab Spring was a turning point in history that didn’t turn. Unity in opposition to dictatorship is pushing water downhill. Unity in support of a change in power is a high-wire act where the formerly oppressed maneuver to become oppressors.

Beginning in 2011, the Arab Spring featured uprisings against established dictatorial orders in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Syria and Bahrain. It was sparked by the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor to protest police corruption and abuses. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali was overthrown. Dictatorships in Libya, Egypt and Yemen soon tumbled. Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad was ousted last December. With military support from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain’s Sunni dictator Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa survived a Shiite insurrection.

But the more things changed in the Arab world, the more they stayed the same: dictatorships with new faces. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has notoriously imprisoned political opponents, destroying the judiciary, and diminished parliament to an ink blot.

In Egypt, President Abdal Fattah el-Sisi has made freedom of speech and assembly felonious and corruption the coin of the realm.

In Libya, dictators rule in Tripoli and Benghazi, with multiple regional warlords in the background. In Yemen, civil war rages between Shiite Houthis and multiple Sunni opponents commonly at war with themselves. In Syria, internecine warfare has already emerged between Kurds in the northeast, former President Assad’s Alawite sect, and transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who led the organization HTS, which the United States designated a terrorist group.

Israel, which occupies huge swathes of southern Syria, will promote endless civil war for its own interests, keeping Syria in convulsions indefinitely. Alawites and Christians have already been slaughtered.

The United States should stay away from the hecatomb, not because we are indifferent to human misery, but because any cure would be worse than the disease, as it proved in Vietnam and more recently in Afghanistan.

The DNA of the species is unalterable. Societies instinctively gravitate toward monarchy or its equivalent. Think of the Bible or the Quran.

Humans crave a singular leader who will give them a blueprint to enter heaven and relieve them of moral responsibility for their destiny.

This gravitational pull can be resisted only by an educated public informed and thrilled by the cerebral faculties and acutely alert to the depravity of human nature that can only be domesticated by separation of powers pitting ambition against ambition — political sociopaths against political sociopaths. The miracle in Philadelphia in the United States that gave birth to the Constitution was the abandonment of our species’ narcissism and the acknowledgment that we need institutional guardrails to avoid destroying ourselves through constant warfare and upheavals.

The unschooled elevate personalities over institutions and juvenile amusements — having fun — over the quest to diminish injustice, to strive for wisdom, to display courage and to be guided by every benevolent instinct of the human heart. As Thomas Jefferson admonished, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Not a single Arab Spring nation today salutes the thinker over the armored knight, critical thinking over unthinking obedience. Separation of powers is nowhere to be found.

They lack the building blocks for government by the consent of the governed to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No outside force can summon these building blocks into being.

This is not a call for isolationism. We trade. We exchange ambassadors. We respond if asked for advice in building a democracy. And we influence by example. The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution frightened monarchies and despots around the world without a single bullet or gunboat.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.