What does "the guns of spring" mean?
"The guns of spring" is a reference to historian Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and the journalist here used it as a paraphrase to conflate the Arab Spring uprisings with the beginning of the First World War.
It appears to be a figure of speech coined by the author as a complement to the now well-known Arab spring. Spring is in the air, literally and figuratively. In the recent dominant figurative sense, this construction points to a period of (revolutionary) upheaval.
An unintended consequence of such a development could be a long, cold winter that follows.