The Most Profound Foreign Policy Test for President Obama

“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.”

These sentences were uttered by former American president George W. Bush on Nov. 6, 2003. Back then, beneath the American ‘Democracy Promotion Policy’ and ‘Greater Middle East Project’ was the idea of challenging the anti-democratic status quo in the Middle East. President Bush maintained his new Middle East strategy, which promised to transform autocratic regimes in the region, until the last years of this term. During his term, relations between Washington and the repressive Mubarak regime in Egypt broke down. I remember that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice even canceled her trip to Egypt after the Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour was arrested. The U.S. had frozen $200 million of its annual $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt. Yet, when Hamas won Palestinian elections, the U.S. reverted to its conventional policy of conserving the status quo in the Middle East. The argument that ‘Islamists’ and ‘violent fanatics’ would come to power should elections be held in the Middle East beat out other arguments at the time.

The Obama Administration’s Ambivalence Toward Egypt

President Obama maintained the status quo favoring policy that he inherited from his predecessor, which comforted repressive pro-Western and pro-American regimes in the region. Obama’s preaching of democracy and freedom in his Cairo and Ankara speeches, without actually targeting any regime in the region, was pushed to the bottom of the agenda that guided Washington’s bilateral relations with other countries. The Mubarak regime, which played a role in the Arab-Israeli peace process that the U.S. liked, continued to enjoy the annual aid it received from the U.S. and thereby kept its international legitimacy unquestioned. Mubarak’s argument that “if the U.S. stops supporting them, Islamists and al-Qaida will get stronger and Israel’s security will be undermined” resonated highly within the national security community in Washington.

The protests that had begun in Tunisia and then spread to Egypt and Yemen put the Obama administration in a very tough spot. First of all, they were not expecting anything of the sort. They did not know what to say and how to act at first. When things just appeared like they were managing to save the day in Tunisia, protests in Egypt erupted. The American auto-response to protect the Egyptian regime overran American encouragement of freedom for Egyptian people. Joe Biden denied that Mubarak was a “dictator,” and Hillary Clinton winked at its stalwart ally by emphasizing the stability of the Egyptian regime. However, as they came to painfully realize that the masses’ rise was not to be temporary and that the rebellion was spreading further to other echelons of Egyptian society, the penny finally dropped in Washington. The amount of pressure and open criticism began to weigh heavily. Yet Obama still left room to maneuver with the Mubarak regime when he did not call for elections in his speech last Friday.

The ambivalent attitude present in the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis in Egypt demonstrates that they act on whichever way the wind blows, not on the basis of solid and consistent policy that respects democratic principles. They are afraid that if they support Mubarak but then the regime loses the battle against its own people, all the Middle Eastern peoples will confront the United States. If, on the other hand, they explicitly and overtly back up the protesters but the Mubarak regime wins the battle, then it will be near impossible to work with the Mubarak regime in the future. As Michael Rubin from American Enterprise Institute said to the Associated Press, “”We don’t side with the regime or the protesters when it matters. By being so cautious and cynical, we end up not winning the hearts and minds of either side.”

Obama Administration in the Process of Making a Tough Decision

We might have been angry with the neo-conservatives during the invasion of Iraq. But some of the most accurate and perceptive statements on the latest events in the Middle East come from them. Again from the American Enterprise Institute, for example, Danielle Pletka said to The Washington Post that “Some say that a freedom agenda only opens the door to Islamists; the truth is that our support for secular dictators does more for Islamists than democracy promotion ever did.”

Undoubtedly, the Obama administration is not paying as much heed to the neo-conservatives as Bush did. You can also be sure that some powerful groups with close ties to Israel are also whispering to the U.S. that “Don’t let Mubarak go, but if he really has to go, replace him with someone who will work nicely with Israel.” At the same time, the calls by influential newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post in their editorials for the Obama administration to quit its support for the Mubarak regime strengthened the hands of those adhering to the freedom agenda.

The U.S. is in the midst of making a tough decision. On the one hand, there are realpolitik concerns and the feeling that there is a need to pay homage to these repressive regimes that had kept their loyalty to the United States. But, on the other hand, the U.S. feels that it needs to atone for its negative role in the anguish of peoples in the Middle East. Trying to appease both the people and the repressive regimes does not work anymore. This is the most profound foreign policy test Obama has hitherto faced. Let’s see if he can turn the tide of events in a way that he favors. Let’s also see if he will eventually prefer freedom to the status quo in the Middle East.