Q&A on Egypt's Post-Mubarak Future

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Snapshot

The U.S.-Egyptian Breakup

Steven A. Cook

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.

In "The U.S.-Egyptian Breakup," CFR Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies Steven A. Cook argues that the decades-long relationship between Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and the United States ran like "a live wire" through Egypt's popular opposition movement. As such, any new Egyptian government in Cairo is sure to have a more distant and perhaps more fraught relationship with Washington. With the Mubarak era reaching a dramatic end last week, what comes next for the Egyptian people -- and for their country's ties with the United States?

George Sanderson: With attention now shifting to Bahrain, Libya, and elsewhere, what crucial, unanswered questions are in danger of being ignored in Egypt? In other words, Hosni Mubarak may be gone, but how much have the protesters actually achieved?

Steven A. Cook: That's a very good question. Egyptians and foreign observers have taken to calling recent events in Egypt a "revolution," but technically speaking it isn't -- at least not yet. Mubarak is gone, but his military remains in charge of the country, the proposed constitutional changes are limited, and much of the security apparatus and even the once-ruling National Democratic Party remain strong (at least outside of Cairo and Alexandria).

Now, the constitutional committee has sought to go beyond the five constitutional amendments and the deletion of one article to which the military is (and Mubarak was) committed. The committee has now put eight amendments on the table, including an explicit reference to writing a new constitution.

It's important to remember that transitions to democracy are fraught and that revolutions rarely end the way that the people on the barricades hoped they would.

Samuel Levy: Does the transitional council in Egypt appear committed to achieving genuine reform, or is it merely hoping to quietly hold on to power until the world's gaze shifts elsewhere?

Steven A. Cook: There is reason to be wary of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. First, all these guys are Mubarak's officers. He promoted them and they were loyal to him -- to a fault.

Second, the armed forces are organically connected to the political order through a variety of institutions, but most important, through the presidency. The commanders are the inheritors of the Free Officers who founded the political system, and they are among its primary beneficiaries.

Third, the military has vast economic interests that the political system helped make possible. If you have a fundamental change from an authoritarian order to a more democratic, open system, it seems hard to imagine how the military can hold on to its various business ventures, which so far have been shielded from public view.

James Chute: Can Egypt, a culture that has long lived under autocratic or monarchic rule, accept democracy, believe in it, or even trust it? Democracy is self-rule that requires continual effort to be successful. What sort of historical or cultural resources can Egypt draw on to sustain its sudden transition to democracy?

Steven A. Cook: Yes, of course. It was clear even before Egyptians rose up against Mubarak in January that they wanted to live in a democracy. Egyptians have a history of proto-democratic institutions. Beginning in the 1920s, Egypt had a constitution and a parliament. It wasn't a Jeffersonian democracy, to be sure -- parliament was often suspended, the ideological and personal battles among politicians weren't pretty, and the British remained the arbiter of most issues. But there is something for Egypt to fall back on, unlike many of its neighbors.

Furthermore, if you take a close look at the Egyptian constitution, there are some aspects of it that are quite liberal. The Free Officers actually oversaw the writing of a fairly liberal constitution, but they ignored it. That constitution is the subject of an Arabic-language book by Salah Eissa titled The Constitution in a Garbage Can.  

Jeff: Talk a bit about some of the causes of the protests: Was the El Dabaa nuclear reactor or the May 2010 treaty on the equitable sharing of the Nile waters a factor in the uprising? What about revelations from WikiLeaks?

Steven A. Cook: I don't believe that either of these factors directly contributed to the uprising. To be sure, Egyptians were dismayed that some of the countries that are part of the Nile Basin Initiative agreed to change the terms of Nile water-sharing over Egyptian objections -- a sign of Egypt's weakness under Mubarak -- but there were other much more important factors. Scholars will look back and identify economic grievances, police brutality, electoral fraud, and the arrogance of the regime, but I don't believe these factors caused the uprising. After all, these problems clearly existed well before January.

In my forthcoming book on Egypt, The Struggle for Egypt, I identify coercion as the primary cause of the uprising. To the extent that Mubarak relied on force or the threat of force to maintain political control, he was at great risk of actually losing control because coercion is risky and expensive. Once the fear factor melts away, it almost always leads to an explosion.

Dennis McMahon: Have any signs surfaced of what sorts of guarantees for the rights of Christians will exist in the new Egypt?