Obama’s Egyptian Dilemma

Since the Cold War’s end changed world order, U.S. foreign policy in the East has been marked by contradictions between claiming championship of democracy, and at the same time, safeguarding the sacrosanct stability of old autocrats; between keeping an unconditional alliance with Israel and having fundamentalist Saudi Arabia as a prop in the region.

As Arab masses remained submissive, handling these contradictions was relatively easy. Emboldened by his initial success in Iraq, Bush publicly called for the democratization of his allies … until Hamas won the Palestine elections in 2006, and he had to keep his “Freedom Agenda” in a drawer.

Obama thought that he had found the ideal formula for handling the complicated relationships with Arab dictators: pressure in private meetings for a greater respect for human rights and silence in public about the need for reform — all of this while he remained committed to resolve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the suspected key to regional stability.

However, the peace process never began and a Tunisian spark ignited the region. All of a sudden, the Yemenis, Jordanians, and particularly the Egyptians discovered that their king was left empty handed. Apart from some of the order’s powerful forces, and some pervasive intelligence services, the public realized that the autocrats were in need of consent from the tactic in order to maintain their power.

And so, rebellion has struck out. Specific reforms are no longer requested like before. It won’t stop with increasing subsidies on bread or abolishing the state of emergency, but rather they require a change of regime without ambiguity.

For now, Obama has opted for a fair position on Egypt: to publicly advocate for political reform and to ask the parties to refrain from violence. However, with the speed at which the situation is developing, it is likely to soon be taking off soaring, in which there would have to be a decision made between supporting a very bloody repression or withdrawing support for Mubarak, with running the true risk of collapsing his regime. And simply, nothing is clear if they could sustain themselves without the more than 1,000 million Euros a year that they receive from Washington.

This is quite a dilemma, because one option is to give lessons about democracy from the halls of the White House, and a whole different option is to dare to bet on Egypt without Mubarak, which is the same as jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Will Egypt fall into the hands of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood? Given Egypt’s weight, will there be a domino effect that will break all pro-American regimes, transforming completely, but unpredictably, the face of the Middle East?

Everything seems to indicate that time is running out for ambiguity. Washington will have to move quickly. But if they delay too long, it is possible that the game has already ended.