Most campaign rhetoric and political punditry is underpinned by an assumption that perfect solutions are possible, if only people would have the good sense to adopt the candidate’s or the pundit’s course of action. Alas, that is not always so.
Case in point: the apparent revolution in Egypt. Most Americans would like to see the emergence of a democratic government that respects human rights and nurtures a growing economy. But how to get there?
Advertisement
Barack Obama, so brimming with confidence when he took office, has stumbled around trying to find the right response. Gone was the self-assurance of the man who seemed confident he could win the hearts and minds of Muslims in his June 2009 speech in Cairo.
To the first peaceful demonstrations in Cairo, he was almost as stonily indifferent as he was to those in Tehran in June 2009. Almost a week later, in a less-than-surefooted televised statement, he said change must occur “now.” The next day, pro-regime thugs started beating up protesters in Tahrir Square.
Now he finds himself burdened with the responsibility to try to shape Egypt’s form of government for the future. The United States clearly has an interest in preventing the emergence of an Islamist government in a nation of 80 million people in the heart of the Middle East.
We have an interest in having Egypt continue to maintain at least the current cold peace with Israel. We have an interest in an Egypt that will be an ally in important causes, as Hosni Mubarak’s regime was in the Gulf War, or at least an uninvolved observer, as in the struggle in Iraq.
In fairness, it’s not at all clear what we can do to assure such an outcome. The scholar Walter Russell Mead notes that American presidents have been faced numerous times with revolutions — the fall of Louis XVI of France and the czar of Russia, the takeovers by the Chinese communists and Fidel Castro, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran — and have never managed to come out ahead.
“In all of these cases, the United States failed to find an effective policy response to the revolution, and each time the foreign revolution created thorny political problems for the sitting president,” he writes. “President Obama will do well if he can avoid being blamed by everyone involved for all the ways in which the new situation in Egypt falls inevitably short of their hopes.”
It is tempting to look back and try to identify mistakes made by Obama and his predecessors that helped create the current dilemma. Obama could have pressured Mubarak harder to make concessions to his people and to gracefully retire.
He and his predecessors could have placed less reliance and trust in authoritarian and dictatorial leaders in the Middle East, as George W. Bush forthrightly stated in his first term as president and in his second inaugural speech. And Bush himself could have stayed truer to that vision in his last years in office.
If you want to go back far enough, you could criticize Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles for canceling U.S. aid for the high dam in Aswan, which led Mubarak’s predecessor-but-one, Gamal Abdul Nasser, to turn to the Soviet Union for aid and an alliance.
But when you go through this exercise, you come to the conclusion that American leaders not only face difficult decisions, but tragic choices. The decision to back Hosni Mubarak ensured that Egypt, the only Arab country with the demographic heft to pose an existential threat to Israel in a conventional war, would remain at peace instead.
It provided us with an ally in at least some important policies for a period of 30 years — a very long time, just about as long as the time between the outbreak of World War I and the end of World War II.
American leaders have never had the luxury of allying our country only with pristine partners. We entered World War I allied with the odious regime of czarist Russia. We won World War II only with the aid of the even more horrifying communist regime of Josef Stalin.
The time we bought with our support of Mubarak is now obviously coming to an end. Let’s hope that the outcome is one we can live with at least as well.
What American Presidents and State Depts
Did For the past thirty years was simply buy time.
The Arab- Israeli conflict is a family clan clash of
Culture that started because Patriarch Abraham
Had an illegitimate son by his wifes handmaiden Hagar, having gotten tired of waiting for God to fulfill his promise of decendants that would be numbered like the stars. When his wife did conceive and she had Isaac, the true child of faith and the Father of the all the 12 tribes of Israel, the stage for conflict was set for future generations to argue over the birthright of the firstborn and where Isaac was the daddy to the Jewish tribes, Ishmael became the Papa to the Arab nations. This is how God set the world up for conflict in the last days. Because what we have been putting off for angeneration now has been allowed to simmer
And fester all these years, reallybsince '48.
And every time Israel would kick the Arabs but in a
War, things got worse. This seething cauldron will
Not stay buried for much longer as the stage us being
Set for a world leader to come along and pretend to
Solve this seemingly insolvable dilemma between two very proud cultures. Only the Appearance of the Messiah, Jesus Christ will this conflict ever be resolved. And the world will come close to blowing itself up in the process. PTLord
Your comment on the Aswan Dam is correct, but you should know the reason. The Dam has serious engineering problems that were predicted by the western engineers who were first consulted. I haven't checked recently, but I am given to understand that judgment has been borne out.
Minor quibble: the US was never allied with Czarist Russia. The Czar abdicated on 15 March, 1917, and a Provisional Government was formed the next day. The US declared war on 6 April, 1917.
We need a new and forthright doctrine setting out how we deal with dictator allies. My best shot:
America will ally itself with illiberal regimes when we believe it best serves the interest of peace and security for the US, and when those regimes do not use great force to maintain their power. We will push these regimes through incentives and disincentives to democratize, and when their people rise up in credible revolts, that we believe are likely to result in the establishment of democratic rule, we will support the people in driving out their leaders.
Our alliances are with peoples and states not ruling regimes. If David Cameron overstays his time in office, we will put the same pressures on him as we are now placing on Mubarak. This serves American long term interests because democracies make far better allies than dictators. We do not go to war with them, and we can usually count on them to abide by the rule of law, cooperate on common concerns, carry on a lucrative trade, and maintain their commitments when their leaders die. Dictators, on the other hand, present an illusion of peace, an illusion of stability, and an illusion of cooperation. Personally, I will be cheering when the regime falls in Egypt.
