Why the U.S. can do so little about Egypt

Conflict in Egypt
(Image credit: Ed Giles/Getty Images)

With scores murdered and thousands injured, it is hard to square the United States's deciding to cancel a military exercise along with lukewarm language condemning violence with anything resembling a noble and liberal strategy for Egypt. One reason for this is that whatever the U.S. strategy may be, our hard and soft power spheres don't correspond with the fundamental disputes that drove the military coup and the earlier ouster of Hosni Mubarak. On a deeper level, President Obama believes that secular Arab nationalism ought to take root without the hidden hand of a Western power. Here are six other limitations on what the U.S. can "do" with Egypt.

1. The Egyptian military holds all of the cards. And the guns. And the credibility with non-Islamists. It is not clear whether Egyptian nationalists prioritize the protection of the rights of Islamist minorities, which is one reason why the military can act with relative impunity and with immunity (to an extent) from a blow to their standing.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

3. The U.S. requires Egyptian cooperation to speed U.S. Navy vessels through the Suez Canal.

4. The U.S. cannot alienate Egypt to an extent that the government (in whatever form) decides to deliberately slow down U.S. engagement with Iran. President Obama's Iran policy is predicated on a synchronization of interests between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

5. As has been pointed out before, U.S. military aid to Egypt is not nearly as critical to Egypt's military as it once was.

6. The U.S. has little credibility with Egyptians. It's not that the U.S. didn't label the military coup a coup; whether the Morsi government itself was a transitional experiment, an Islamist bridge to a non-Islamist democracy, and whether the competition for power is part of a struggle that simply cannot be resolved in the space of a few short years is very much open for debate inside of Egypt, probably more so than outside of it.

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.