The Perils of Taking Egypt for Granted

A Middle East political ritual took place recently. After a significant development in the region--the Alexandria summit between Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak--the Israeli leader immediately flew to the United States. There both U.S. and Israeli officials made a series of public statements that helped the political fortunes of incumbents in both Jerusalem and Washington. But they gave little thought to the impact of these statements on their absent Egyptian partner.

A visit to Egypt the week after the Alexandria summit and arbitration agreement regarding Taba offered a chance to hear about that impact. Conversations with high-ranking Egyptian officials, opposition figures, university officials and representatives from the younger generation convinced me that Egypt needs much more political understanding from the United States and Israel than it has been receiving.

At this point Egypt is not strong enough domestically to take further risks for peace. If the Taba crisis proved anything, it was precisely this point.

Although U.S. officials in the area are still unclear why Israel made such an issue of the minuscule enclave of Taba when its case was so weak, the dispute proved a blessing in disguise for the Egyptians. For after the Israelis withdrew their forces from Lebanon, Mubarak needed a new rationale for freezing relations with Israel. He needed something that would justify keeping relations at a level sufficiently low to mollify those Egyptians who had never accepted Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative. At the same time, it could not pose such a grave challenge to Egypt’s honor that Mubarak would no longer be able maintain the relationship at a high enough level to ensure continued U.S. aid to Egypt. The Israelis, through Taba, unwittingly provided him with the ideal issue.

It is difficult for Americans to understand the delicate game that Mubarak has been playing and how skillfully he has maneuvered. As many Egyptians will explain, Mubarak has pursued a policy between that of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sadat, while tilting in the latter’s direction. He has tried to avoid Sadat mistakes that led to assassination. He has, for example, allowed the opposition a real voice. At the same time Mubarak has been careful to preserve Sadat’s strategic gain--to recognize that a previously unexploited national resource, a lifeline much like the Nile, is the seemingly inexhaustible willingness of the U.S. Congress to pay large sums for the security of Israel. For if Congress’ concern is the safety of Israel, why would the United States not pay large sums of money to neighboring states that agreed to stop posing a threat to Israel?

The other Arab states had oil. Egypt had this equally important resource--the price the United States might be willing to pay for Egyptian docility.

Like oil elsewhere, the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security could some day yield a smaller return. But at this point it provides Egypt with a form of payment as close to an entitlement embedded in the U.S. budget as one can get. U.S. economic and military aid to Egypt is now in the order of $2.5 billion a year.

If the Taba dispute was so helpful to Mubarak--protecting Sadat’s gain while rationalizing a more distant relationship with Israel--why then did he agree to a settlement and summit at Alexandria? Egyptians reason that when Yitzhak Shamir becomes prime minister of Israel in a few weeks, he will be the only man in Israeli politics with a vested interest in continuation of the coalition government. His opponents in the Likud Bloc will want to bring him down; so will the leaders of the Israeli Labor Alignment. There could be an early election. By allowing Peres to come to Alexandria, the Egyptians were accomplishing two important goals: They were pleasing the Americans, who like good news from the Middle East in election years. And they were providing a potential election advantage for Peres, in whose party they see the main hope for further progress in the peace process.

The Egyptians also agreed to the summit in Alexandria because they believe that U.S.-Soviet relations might move into a better phase. They are very doubtful, in the absence of a U.S.-Soviet summit, that the parties to the dispute in the Middle East can make much progress. But if there were a fundamental improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations, then new opportunities in the Middle East would open up. The Alexandria summit put Egypt in position to take advantage of such opportunities.

Even then, Mubarak only agreed to a precooked deal, according to those close to the negotiations. The Egyptian side was in effect assured that the decision would go in its favor. No other solution was possible because both sides know that if Israel came out ahead, it would not only be unjust--Israeli negotiators admitted they had a weak case--but there would be a political explosion in Egypt.

Presumably Mubarak would not have agreed to the summit unless he was convinced of sufficient domestic support to risk it. Nonetheless, it would be a grave mistake for either Israel or the United States to treat Mubarak’s mounting domestic problems lightly.

In talking to Egyptian and American officials about current trends in Cairo, one is struck by how little either pretends to know. The rise of fundamentalism is acknowledged by all to be a serious concern--but no one knows its extent. In a bizarre way, it is somewhat like the classic science-fiction movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Because the body looks the same while the mind changes, no one is sure how many individuals the alien force has taken.

University professors in Cairo and Alexandria maintain that the dominant trend among students is fundamentalism. Moreover, they say that students who privately might be moderate--approving Camp David, for example--turn hostile when they discuss such issues in a group.

Egyptians report that the fundamentalists are trying to penetrate every facet of the society. Yet no one seems to know what all this means. Some foreigners and Egyptians point to the country’s tolerant tradition. They caution that outsiders should not assume that even if victorious, a fundamentalist party in Egypt would establish the kind of regime found in Tehran. Other Egyptians, by contrast, warn of a massive blood bath with Coptic Christians and Westernized Egyptians the first victims if Egypt were to turn fundamentalist.

Confronted with this specter, many U.S. officials in Cairo and Washington pretend not to be too concerned, noting that the U.S. aid program gives the United States unusual influence in Egypt. There is little margin of maneuver for the country, they say. But regimes survive because they offer national pride as well as bread. And the U.S. government has an easier time knowing when the latter has run out than when the former has been irreparably wounded.

What is clear is that the regime in Cairo, so important to U.S. and Israeli interests, is fragile. As one Egyptian official put it, “A hereditary monarch can claim legitimacy for a lifetime. A president elected democratically can claim legitimacy until the next election. Mubarak is not a hereditary monarch and although he has created the freest Egypt we have seen in 30 years, he certainly is not elected democratically. He has to earn his legitimacy day by day.”

The performance of Peres and Reagan in Washington, where each made statements that weakened Mubarak, did not help the Egyptian leader in this daily task.

For the past decade, Israel and the United States have asked Egypt to take risky steps in order to meet domestic requirements of U.S. and Israeli politics. It is about time they returned the favor.