The problem with what passes for public discourse on foreign policy in mainstream media and much of the blogosphere is that it is centered on the United States. Other societies, it seems, exist in the American imagination almost as aesthetic concerns, discussions of which serve to highlight what purport to be political, but which in fact are aesthetic differences between Americans. This struck me when I found myself reading USA Today’s opinion page a couple days ago.
The military, which receives $1.3 billion in U.S. military assistance, is poised to play kingmaker in this next phase but, so far, has stayed largely neutral.
Considering the economic cost, as well as the cost in U.S. credibility, this paralysis cannot continue indefinitely. Regime forces are looking for ways to hold the revolution back, to run out the clock until the elections. The Obama administration, then, has the leverage to push Mubarak more quickly out the door. Up until now, though, the U.S. has been behind the curve. On Jan. 25, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed that the Egyptian regime was “stable.” A week later, the country is crumbling. This, presumably, is what happens after three decades of pent-up anger over the indignities of autocratic rule. The Obama administration has since toughened its tone, calling for an “orderly transition,” but hasn’t gone as far as supporting the protesters’ one key demand: that Mubarak quit now. More than a week into the crisis, the U.S. is still hedging its bets.
The author is Shadi Hamid, employed by the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution. That is to say, he is in the Zionist camp of the US intelligentsia. That’s not my main point here, though it’s interesting that the Zionist camp is hedging its bets in the situation, because had they their druthers Mubarak would rule until after his death, preserved by formaldehyde in a jar. What is of interest is the notion that what happens in the United States–in the White House in particular–is what will determine the outcome of the events.
What will determine events is whether or not protesters will continue despite violent reprisals. It has been widely noted that the Egyptian military has a tradition of not firing on its own people. Note–there is an Egyptian tradition, not an American one. This is probably the most critical local condition, so to speak. Fundamentally, it means that military assistance is from the United States is not as significant as leverage as it might be, particularly if the US would try to overplay, so to speak, its hand. The conflict is between supporters and opponents of Mubarak, the latter a diverse camp, and that’s it. It’s internationally significant, but it is so only as a local event.
Most of the time through the 20th century, United States diplomacy was enormously successful, from the point of view of the United States ruling classes. It would be wrong to suggest that the second President Bush, or, more specifically, his administration, failed at diplomacy. More properly, the second Bush abandoned diplomacy altogether in its first term, and then, in its second, realized that after the first term nobody wanted to have a real talk with them, and so could not pursue diplomacy even though some in the administration wanted to and, I suspect, Bush himself came to realize that his father’s general approach to things–execrable as far as I’m concerned in its intent–was more effective than threats, bluster, and two counterinsurgencies.
I’ve said this before: I’m a Marxist who voted for Obama, and I’m not disappointed in him because he has acted more or less as I expected him to, which is much better than John McCain would have. He has a genuine understanding of international affairs and very clearly is, personally, an exceptional diplomat, as he was by all accounts an exceptional community organizer. Those kinds of things matter. I don’t think I’m naive in saying that it seems to me that in his heart of hearts Obama is all about devolving power to communities. That his actions are often very contrary to that, particularly as he continues many of the second Bush’s detention policies, seem to me to reflect an absolute commitment on his part, clearly made either early in the 2008 campaign or most likely before it even started, but definitely confirmed during the transition, to not fight the Constitutional fight on Bush’s terror policy, to in effect let bygones be bygones, but at the same time, to not actively continue them, i.e., no torture, no new detainees without charge, no new wars. He wanted his cake and to eat it too, and to some extent his Presidency has been marred by the impossibility of doing that.
Having said this, it’s obvious that the President has two desires: 1) popular sovereignty and 2) orderly transition. This is the contradiction in his policy, though he comes by it honestly. He can, firmly, pressure Mubarak to leave, and it might work–frankly, I think that more likely it would strengthen Mubarak’s resolve to stay in office. Clearly, Obama has not done that, though he surely has had “frank”–the word pops up constantly in public statements–with Mubarak, gaming out what it would be like if he stays or if he goes. To me, the life of a wealthy exile seems fantastic, and Mubarak, if he leaves office, would certainly not need to go into exile in any event. For the United States to become the causal factor in Mubarak’s departure would, however, be precisely the opposite of popular sovereignty, and though the press would report the fall of a dictator and there would be much self-congratulation among the American press corps, the result would be, for lack of a better term, a sort of diplomatic imperialism. Obama knows that the world will be safer, in the aggregate, the greater the degree of popular sovereignty in the world. Really, I think that his deepest concern in foreign policy is the threat of nuclear weapons of any kind, and though that discussion has almost entirely disappeared from public discourse, he’s right about it.
One could fault his clear desire for an “orderly” process, whatever that may be, because “order” by default favors those already in charge, not only politically but, more importantly, socio-economically. That said, social disorder ends up nearly always favoring those who can marshal more physical force and makes it vastly more difficult for actual working people to work and make ends meet. Beware the leftist who doesn’t understand this and casually calls for violent revolution as a panacea for social injustice. Political aesthetics: that was never Marx’s way.
To be sure, the idiot right–not the whole right, but the cadre that gets a lot of press and so genuinely influences a too-great sector of the public–is playing the episode, as ever, for domestic political reasons, i.e., to get more paid speaking appearances for higher pay. I label her idiot, but I do not dismiss her as such:
Palin said the U.S. must find out who is “behind all the turmoil” and that “we should not stand” for a government led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Surely, this is her act, and her livelihood, but at the same time there is what may be an almost subconscious belief, shared by a vastly greater part of the population than her base, so-called, of support, and by a huge portion of people ostensibly on the left, that somehow what matters at this point, or at any point, is what the United States does. On the right, the key language is to “not stand for” this actually-existing reality or that, because in the United States conservative politics has become, essentially, a cognitive dissonance, or a political aesthetics, to begin to overuse that phrase, with horrific practical implications. “Not stand for”: not doing something as taking positive action. We can expect, as an aside, the House leadership to continue to not stand for the Affordable Care Act with the same non-results.
The President makes public statements that are simultaneously so vague as to be nearly meaningless and, at the same time, the most effective on his part to bring about greater popular sovereignty in Egypt:
“The Egyptian people want freedom, they want free and fair elections, they want a representative government, they want a responsive government. So what we’ve said is, you’ve got to start a transition now.”
That’s not particularly deep, but it’s factual and about all the President should do unless he wants to really screw things up.
I’m late for my meditation. OUT!
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Crossposted at http://www.palaverer.com/
