Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
President Bush concludes his Middle East trip with a visit to Egypt, who is an important anchor for the moderate coalition resisting the growing influence of Iran in the region. Despite its strong relationship with the U.S., Egypt has experienced unprecedented civil unrest in recent months as democratization efforts have effectively hit rock bottom in the nation.
While U.S. foreign policy continues to be formulated with an eye on short-term goals, European policies towards the Middle East, at both the national and EU levels, use the instruments of soft diplomacy and function in accordance with a multi-tiered approach that never loses sight of long-range strategies while allowing for alternatives that can be tried, tested and corrected along the way.
In view of the wave of social unrest and economic uncertainty debilitating Egyptian society today - as demonstrated by the latest rounds of violence between workers and security forces in the industrial city of Mehallah - the continued suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood is certain to aggravate conditions and lead to further instability in Egypt.
The Egyptian government’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in advance of the April 8 local elections was motivated by its determination to exclude the Brotherhood from the 2011 presidential election and is likely to persist until the matter of presidential succession is settled. The Brotherhood bowed under pressure and boycotted the elections, a lesson the regime is not likely to forget.
The common idea that every regional contest is succinctly played out in Lebanon is false. The Middle East is not a struggle between two invincible powers. It is rather a scene in which a troubled superpower and a hobbled regional power try to find their bearings in passageways cluttered with various Arab and non-Arab agendas.
Confrontational U.S. policy that tried to create a “New Middle East,” but ignored the realities of the region has instead exacerbated existing conflicts and created new problems. To restore its credibility and promote positive transformation, the United States needs to abandon the illusion that it can reshape the region to suit its interests.
Debate over the future political direction of the Arab world has too often been reduced to a set of absurdly simplistic premises, writes Amr Hamzawy. Opinion polls recently conducted in Arab countries cast into relief four significant phenomena: an increasingly heightened sense of the intricacy and severity of the world's problems; a growing conviction that these problems extend beyond the political crises and generally poor human development indexes in most Arab countries to touch on the very foundations of Arab society and the relationship between the state and society; a growing antipathy towards the role played by outside powers -- the US and Israel above all -- in tandem with increased awareness of the responsibility of ruling Arab elites for the problems faced by Arab populations and hence the need for democratic reform and a continuing concern for common Arab causes - unity, the Palestinian cause -- and a concomitant opposition to attempts to fragment the Arab world.
The production of a political platform by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is a sign that real developments — some encouraging, some worrying — are occurring in Egyptian politics. While the Muslim Brotherhood is prevented by the government from forming a political party,the release of a platform signaled what sort of party they would found if allowed to do so.
A major shift is taking place in the way decision-makers in the U.S. and major European countries view the political role of Islamic movements in the Arab world and also in the way they regard the perils such movements pose for Western interests.
