The U.S.-Egyptian Breakup
Washington's Limited Options in Cairo
Article Summary and Author Biography
With the political era of Hosni Mubarak coming to an end, is the strategic relationship between Cairo and Washington similarly finished? The Obama administration must scale back its ambitions to affect change in Cairo.
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.
STEVEN A. COOK is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book on Egyptian politics will be published in the fall by Oxford University Press.
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Egyptian politics.
Author Interview
This week, Steven A. Cook answers readers' questions about Egypt after the rule of Hosni Mubarak.
With Hosni Mubarak's announcement yesterday that he would not seek a new term as president, the Mubarak era in Egypt came to an ignominious end. Although the Egyptian military may yet find a way to allow for a relatively graceful exit, Mubarak's historical legacy is sure to be colored by the very factors that led to his downfall: political alienation, economic dislocation, corruption, and the precipitous decline in Egypt's regional influence. After the chaos of this past week, not even his claim to have brought stability to Egypt will survive.
Yet the seeds of Mubarak's demise were sowed long ago. Although he came to power promising reform and vowing not to seek more than one term, Mubarak quickly became enamored with the power of the presidency and saw himself as indispensable to Egypt's future. He had witnessed first hand the drawbacks of Gamal Abdel Nasser's experiments with socialism and Arab nationalism and Anwar Sadat's efforts to correct the excesses of both. Instead, Mubarak eschewed ideology for a bland pragmatism that emphasized "stability for the sake of development" -- hardly an appealing political vision. He built a small, narrow constituency for his rule among big business, the police, and the army and relied on force and the threat of violence to keep the population under control.
By the end, Mubarak's disdain for the Egyptian people was so complete that last November, when the opposition sought to establish a shadow parliament after stunningly fraudulent parliamentary elections, he smirked and declared before his rubber-stamp People's Assembly, "Let them have fun."
The United States was not responsible for the inequity of Mubarak's rule, but it did enable and benefit from it. Mubarak was long Washington's man in Cairo: he kept open the Suez Canal, repressed the Islamists, and maintained peace with Israel. In return, the United States provided much for Egypt, contributing billions in economic assistance over the years to build up the country's infrastructure, agricultural technology, and public health programs. Yet this U.S. assistance, while certainly contributing to Egypt's development, also served to undermine the nationalist legitimacy of the regime. After all, how could Mubarak boast of Egyptian pride and ability when USAID employees were nestled in many government ministries?
The United States was not responsible for the inequity of Mubarak’s rule, but it did enable and benefit from it.
At the same time, Egyptians came to see that their country's foreign policy was being warped for the sake of U.S. largesse -- and that the jackboots of the Interior Ministry awaited those who objected too loudly to this bargain. The original sin was Sadat's separate peace with Israel, which Mubarak inherited and scrupulously upheld.
From the perspective of many Egyptians, this arrangement hopelessly constrained Cairo's power while freeing Israel and the United States to pursue their regional interests unencumbered. Without the threat of war with Egypt, Israel poured hundreds of thousands of Israelis into settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, invaded Lebanon (twice), declared Jerusalem its capital, and bombed Iraq and Syria. For the United States, Mubarak was pivotal in creating a regional order that made it easier and less expensive for Washington to pursue its interests, from the free flow of oil to the protection of Israel and the prevention of any one country in the region from becoming too dominant. The benefits to Mubarak were clear: approximately $70 billion in economic and military aid over 30 years and the ostensible prestige of being a partner of the world's superpower.
For Egypt, the particular policy ramifications of this deal have been plentiful, including Egypt's deployment of 35,000 troops to Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War of 1991, its quiet support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, its implicit alliance with Israel during the war in Lebanon in 2006, and its complicity with Israel in the ongoing blockade of Gaza. Mubarak believed that these policies served Egypt's interests -- at least how he defined them -- but they ran directly against the grain of Egyptian public opinion.
Mubarak thus faced two irreconcilable positions: he could either be Washington's man or a man of the people -- but not both. He chose the former and tried to fill in the resulting legitimacy gap with manipulation and force.
It is no surprise, then, that the relationship between Egypt and the United States runs like a live wire through the popular opposition to Mubarak's rule. As protesters in Cairo declared in March 2003, just as U.S. forces were pouring into Iraq, only a democratic Egypt would be able to resist Israeli and U.S. policies in the Middle East. More recently, opponents of Mubarak expressed a similar sentiment, calling Mubarak's presidency the "Camp David regime."
No Egyptian leader will make Mubarak's mistake again, which does not portend well for Washington's position in the Middle East. In the coming days, analysts and policymakers in the United States will voice loud recriminations of decades of U.S. policy. This debate will not focus on finding out who "lost" Egypt; Mubarak had become odious to most in the United States except his paid consultants and a few remaining die-hard supporters. Instead, commentators will argue over how to deal with the sudden explosion of Arab people power and how to fortify Washington's allies in the region. Yet simply retooling U.S. assistance to focus on promoting democracy, creating benchmarks for a new Egyptian government, and making Washington's expectations (whatever they are) known to Egyptian political actors is unlikely to influence the trajectory of Egypt's transition.
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U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy will have to meet the same standards of transparency and accountability that it is asking rulers around the world to demonstrate in their governing styles.