Despite Barack Obama’s much-heralded efforts to bring a “new beginning” in relations between America and Muslim countries, his efforts were already off to a bad start during his 2009 trip to Cairo. The solid alliance between the U.S. and Egypt was further weakened by the policies of the subsequent seven years. Robert Satloff explains what went wrong, and what can be done:
Speaking not to parliament, as he did in Ottawa and London, but to a by-invitation-only gathering at Cairo University, the president of the United States uttered not a single word toward the president of Egypt—not a word of thanks for his hospitality, not a word of gratitude for Egypt’s quarter-century fulfillment of peace with Israel, not a word of appreciation for the 36,000-man Egyptian force sent to assist America in the war to liberate Kuwait eighteen years earlier. Instead, after insisting that Egyptian authorities admit a Muslim Brotherhood delegation into the campus auditorium to attend the speech, the president spoke over the heads of Egypt’s ruling elite in order to, as he said, “eradicate years of mistrust.” . . .
Whether he knew it or not, Obama’s “new beginning” outreach to Muslims—not as Egyptians, Tunisians, or people with some other nationality but as adherents of a trans-national religion—was fundamentally different and profoundly threatening. . . . [T]o the always-paranoid (sometimes justifiably so) political leadership in Cairo he seemed to lend America’s stamp of approval to the Islamist project that, for decades, offered itself—sometimes violently, sometimes not—as the alternative to the military-led nationalists. Just eighteen months after Obama lit the fuse with his Cairo speech, the holder of the nationalist flame—President Hosni Mubarak—was forced from power. . . .
[O]n regional political issues, [Egypt’s current leaders] often display surprising good sense—showing real backbone in withstanding Saudi blackmail to dispatch troops to join the Yemen quagmire, taking firm measures to end the subterranean flow of weapons to Gaza, and building an unprecedented partnership with Israel against common enemies. In cold-blooded fashion, and without donning blinders to the eccentricities and outrages one can find in Cairo, . . . an administration with a different set of priorities might have found a way to take advantage of the real opportunities presented by a Sisi-led Egypt. That sort of cooperation without illusions . . . is what the Trump administration may find on offer with Egypt today.
Read more on Hoover: http://www.hoover.org/research/us-egypt-strategic-relations-obama-trump-what-went-wrong-and-what-might-be-possible