Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Follow Carnegie
- Search
- Global Resources
Global Centers
Languages
Egypt risks following a Turkish model where the military, backed by other key institutions and secular political parties, acts against Islamist movements.
In the year since Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces drafted and issued its "Constitutional Declaration," the Egyptian political process has followed no consistent political logic. The revolution has made Egypt a country where nobody (or everybody) is in charge.
Quick progress towards a new Egyptian constitution is extremely unlikely. This means that the new president's powers will most probably be modified after he is elected, a situation likely to create a new crisis.
Morocco’s friends in the West, especially the United States and France, must pressure Rabat to expedite a significant devolution of power to the Western Sahara to limit the threat of instability.
Islamists in Mauritania, an important political force, are not currently a threat to the United States as the mainstream of the movement appears committed to democracy and unlikely to take power.
A number of longer-term trends engendered by the revolution that may gradually make the Egyptian state of the future very different from the one of the past half century.
While the world’s democracies have discussed the options for bringing a stop to the slaughter in Syria, far less time has been spent identifying the options that remain for Assad himself.
An independent Egypt judiciary could provide for a more liberal and pluralistic order but also one that is less coherent and democratic than Egyptians currently realize.
At this point, Hamas and Fatah have reached only an agreement to agree. It remains to be seen how much more, if anything, they can accomplish.
Both the Egyptian government and the United States must keep in mind that the future of bilateral relations is much more important than the future of U.S. NGOs in Egypt.