I don’t know what is going to happen in Egypt today, but I suspect that the military is going to dislodge the democratically-elected government because it has lost too much support. It’s hard to say whether that is a good or a bad thing. The potentially good part of it is that the conflict is in large part about constitutional issues, and they need to get the constitution right if they are going to be a functioning democracy. The Muslim Brotherhood-led government tried to have things their way, but they only had the support of a bare-majority of the people. That’s enough to win an election, but not enough to gain a consensus about a constitution.
The potentially bad part is that there is no guarantee that the democratic process will survive a military coup. And the Muslim Brotherhood feels like their legitimate electoral victory is being stolen from them and a lot of their leaders are calling for martyrdom (suicide) operations. No one wants to see a protracted civil war in Egypt.
What’s unambiguously a good thing is that the Muslim Brotherhood has lost legitimacy. As an anti-Mubarak organization, it had legitimacy. But once allowed to wield power, the people of Egypt thought that they were too religiously conservative and rejected them. This is a process we would like to see throughout the Muslim world, where Islamism has gained support as the main opposition to tyrannical governments that are often supported by the U.S. government.
We can benefit in several ways. First, we benefit when the governments we are supporting are democratic in nature. We benefit when the people are focused on their own political battles rather than on our role in denying them political options. We benefit when the more radical religious groups lose legitimacy and support.
But the situation in Egypt is too fluid and chaotic to make firm predictions about how it will affect our interests.
