Egypt changes course

America’s top general has been talking to Egypt’s top military leader about the future of US military aid, or “choices and consequences,” as a Pentagon spokesman put it delicately.

Since a row blew up over the Egyptian decision to prosecute 16 American employees of pro-democracy non-government organisations -  apparently part of a scare campaign which has designated America as the “foreign hand” stirring up unrest in Egypt – it’s not just the future of the annual $1.3 billion in American aid to the Egyptian military but also that of the US-Egyptian relationship which is at stake.

You might think the Egyptians are bluffing when they shrug off the threats to the US aid package. But I was in Cairo just before the wholesale arrest of the NGO workers and I think they are deadly serious. I was struck by how many people were already talking about how Egypt needs to take up the challenge of managing on its own. One academic said that the issue of cutting the American aid would figure in the upcoming presidential elections, with candidates identifying domestic alternatives to boost the economy. It might take 10 years to end Egypt’s reliance on US aid, but that is the direction of travel.

Egypt is changing course. This will have inevitable consequences for relations with Israel - on which the dominant party in the new parliament, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has promised a referendum on the 1979 peace treaty – as well as for those with the West. You have only to look at the pictures in the Nasser museum in Cairo – at which the former Egyptian president is photographed with his close allies Colonel Gadhafi and Fidel Castro – to remember that Egypt has had all sorts of bedfellows in the past half century alone.

So in Washington, Congress and the State Department have been huffing and puffing about the American aid being under threat if the NGO prosecutions go ahead. I can imagine that the US Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, made the point quite forcefully to Field Marshal Mohammed Hussain Tantawi this weekend in Cairo. From what was said after the meeting, it looks as though there could be a solution in sight over the fate of the NGO workers.  A statement stressed “the importance of maintaining the established relationships between the U.S. and Egypt, and strengthening them.”

It could be that Washington and Cairo have just pulled back from the brink. But in the longer term, this is a relationship that cannot survive in its current form.

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