Just as Bismarck was the model for Europe after the fall of Paris in 1870, the Arab elite emerged from the First World War and the end of the Ottoman empire emulating their western conquerors. A snapshot of politicians in Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem or Baghdad in the 1930s would reveal a nationalist elite fighting for self-determination and democracy with western values.
They sent their children to be educated in France or Britain, dressed like Edwardian gentlemen in their Sunday best with fezzes and trilbies, and produced post-colonial regimes led by notables with secular and liberal aspirations.
The shock of the loss of Palestine in 1948 totally discredited that model and a snapshot in the 1950s would show pan-Arab nationalist dictators in military uniforms that had overthrown what were seen as the corrupt failed lackeys of imperialism. The US supported this new model while Britain was trying to cling to the liberal notables.
