What Do They Want from Obama?

The option of standing behind a hated tyrant and against the masses asking to bring him down is just out of the question for an American president. Presenting — the Egyptian option.

I am not a big fan of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Actually, I’m of the opinion that the American president has demonstrated a great naiveté since his taking the White House. His approach, which proposes that an international problem can be solved by a well-worded speech, has revealed itself a superficial one; one not less so than its counterpart, which postulates that every problem can be solved by a military strike. But in the light of the current crisis in Egypt, I have difficulty understanding the harsh criticism of the U.S. president’s conduct.

The quandary the American diplomacy ran into with the outbreak of the riots is a classic lose-lose situation: there are several available options, but all of them are bad. Under these circumstances, the performance of Obama and the American administration was, in fact, reasonable. There really was a lot of criticism voiced against the president, but not one of those pundits has come up with a better alternative, one that would work miracles and allow American interests to make it out of the plight without a scratch. No one has proposed such an alternative because it simply doesn’t exist.

The first option Obama faced, favored by many of his critics, had been to back Mubarak and oppose the protesters. In practice, this is a monstrously bad option, to the point that it’s doubtful whether one could earnestly consider it as an existing possibility. Indeed, as Obama’s critics claim, it would strengthen the credibility of the U.S. in the midst of the remaining dictators of the Arab world; but on the other hand, it should be recognized that even if America had put her full weight for Mubarak’s sake — the truth is, it wasn’t within her abilities to prevent his overthrow.

The government in Egypt would undergo a switchover one way or another and the U.S. would find itself in a very problematic situation facing both a new regime and the crowds in Egypt, as well as all over the Arab world. And if, in the coming months, more autocrats in the Middle East collapse — a probability not looking too far-fetched at the moment — choosing this tactic would inflict an irreparable harm for the status of the U.S. in the Middle East.

No Diplomatic Magic

The option of standing behind a condemned oppressor and against the mobs asking to take him down is just not an option for an American president — and this doesn’t matter whether it’s Barack Obama or George Bush. The ethos of freedom is so deeply rooted in the American experience that no president can allow himself to double-cross it so bluntly and enter history as someone who sold the soul of the U.S. to the devil in the shape of an aging dictator. But even before the judgment of history, the domestic political damage caused by such a move to the president executing it would be so enormous that this is not an option to be taken seriously.

“That being the case, why didn’t Obama keep quiet?” his critics ask, feigning innocence. For wouldn’t silence from the strongest superpower in the universe mean a thundering a dozen times louder than a repudiation of the loathed despot? It’s not only that the silence would be interpreted — and quite rightly so — as stabbing a knife in Mubarak’s back and thus resulting in exactly the same detriment to the American foreign policy that Obama’s critics are seeking to avoid, it would also present the U.S. in an embarrassing light — not to say ridiculing — as a broken-down superpower that the current of events had overwhelmed and left dumbfounded. If so, silence has not been within the realms of a realistic option as well.

What’s left? Well, the only valid option has been the one Obama has chosen — a practical approach, acknowledging the changing reality and aligning with it, instead of waging a hopeless holding action against it. True, dumping Mubarak has weakened American credibility among the Arab dictators still sticking to their chairs, but in view of the alternatives, it’s been the best of a bad lot. Anyone who was expecting a magical diplomatic trick and is now mocking Obama for not pulling one out of his sleeve is being naïve, no less than the American president whom he castigates.