![Protesters crowded Tahrir Square in Cairo earlier this month to call for their President's ouster. The military obliged them. [Credit: Washington Times]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Protests_get_ugly_in_Egypt_s640x427.jpg)
Protesters crowded Tahrir Square in Cairo earlier this month to call for their President’s ouster. The military obliged them. Is that the triumph of democracy or just a military coup? [Credit: Washington Times]
In 2011, the President at first stood by Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, only to hail his ouster as the green shoots of Arab Spring. Last month, President Obama was firmly behind Mohamed Morsi, but then refused to condemn his military overthrow.
The President finds himself in a terribly difficult position. Unable to influence events, he at times struggles even to express his intentions. He didn’t describe the military’s overthrow of the Morsi regime as a coup, but intimated that it wasn’t legal. He didn’t threaten to cut off $1.5 billion in annual American aid, but he didn’t rule it out either.
His critics have been less reticent. For John McCain (R‑AZ), this was a military coup that trampled on the fragile Egyptian constitution. He called for cutting off US assistance to the beleaguered country. For others, it was a recrudescence of the Arab Spring, in which young demonstrators with smartphones and Facebook accounts toppled a tyrant; democracy’s triumph over tyranny.
Then there are those who yearn for the good old days when the US government could advance its interests and shape world events or at least maybe see a coup coming. These are the people who are most aggrieved by the President’s indecisiveness. The President doesn’t seem know which outcome in Egypt is most congenial to US goals and ambitions — a popularly-elected Islamist, a military dictatorship or a secular democratic republic – much less how to nudge Egypt in a particular direction.
His critics have something the President lacks: certitude. They differ in how they view developments in Egypt, but they see them in black and white — as a military coup that violated the Egyptian constitution, as an exercise in democracy by protestors in Cairo, as evidence that our nation’s ability to influence world events has declined.
The President, having repeatedly been made to look foolish by rash pronouncements on Egypt, now appreciates its complexity. It simply is not yet clear what is best for Egypt, much less for U.S. interests. Hence the President’s lack of clarity.
We have a habit of viewing occurrences like this in very simple terms: do they advance or impede democracy? In this case, at least, they are not that simple.
Islamists also offer a simple narrative of world events, one that combines medieval theology with decidedly modern grievances. Their Manichean view of oppressors (us) vs. oppressed (them) recalls Marxist dialectic. Their particular adaptation calls for the proletarian faithful to submit to sharia law and revive the caliphate, so that Allah himself will crush their Western tormenters and establish theocratic paradise.
If that sounds a little loopy to us, we need to remind ourselves that millions of Egyptians believe it. Their resistance to Morsi’s ouster and the military’s brutality in suppressing it will not be soon forgotten, making the success of Egyptian secularists a bit of a long-shot.
Democratic sensibilities and Islamist hallucinations are no match for Egypt’s harsh realities. Its economy depends on imports. It must buy wheat and the diesel fuel needed to transport it, among other things, and provide massive subsidies to vast chunks of its population to enable them merely to subsist. Purchasing imports, in turn, requires foreign currency, derived in large part from foreign investment.
While its economy was never stellar, it was growing until the effects of the 2008 global financial meltdown and its progeny, the sovereign debt crisis, took hold. Per capita GDP stalled after 2010 and the resulting economic misery induced the widespread unrest that led to Mubarak’s removal. While that coup cheered the masses, it didn’t halt the country’s economic slide. Nor did last year’s elections. Indeed, the resulting political instability worsened the country’s problems, spurring inflation, tepid growth and high unemployment. Government debt mounted and suffered a series of downgrades, foreign capital fled, tourism flagged, and the central bank depleted its currency reserves. Amid deteriorating conditions, dissatisfaction with the Morsi government grew, prompting it to take a series of steps to enlarge his power. Meanwhile, Morsi was unable to negotiate a $4.8 billion loan from the IMF, which conditioned assistance on the government undertaking politically suicidal measures like cutting food and fuel subsidies to the struggling masses.
The downward spiral of economic woes, fiscal incontinence, ham-handed governance, and popular resentment prompted the military to sweep Morsi from power just a year after his electoral triumph.
Whoever replaces him, whether by popular election or other means, will face a daunting task. Foreign currency reserves don’t provide even a minimal three-month cushion, and orders that already have been placed may well exhaust those reserves. The U.S. seems unlikely to provide more aid and may, depending on how heavy-handed the military is, be tempted to discontinue it. Unless the IMF softens its austerity demands, the new government will have to choose between demanding more sacrifice from its restive constituents or foregoing needed assistance. Ratings agencies are unlikely in the current chaos to upgrade the government’s debt and foreign investors and tourists probably don’t find Egypt any more attractive today than they did when Morsi held power.
Egypt, in short, confronts problems that are not easily solved by a popularly-elected government, since they require politicians to distribute pain, not assistance, to their constituents.
In some respects, Egypt really isn’t so different from countries with more robust democratic traditions. Democratically elected governments in the U.S. and throughout Europe have promised their people very costly benefits. To finance these promises, they have borrowed heavily. We could, of course, scale back those benefits, but austerity and sacrifice are no more popular here than in Tahrir Square. We don’t elect leaders to raise our taxes or cut our benefits, so our political system pits the party that proposes to raise other people’s taxes against the party that proposes to cut other people’s benefits.
I favor democracy. But I’m not delusional. Democratically-elected governments can create problems that they’re ill-suited to resolve. In some ways, they are especially prone to folly, dependent as they are on creating and maintaining crowd-pleasing but short-sighted entitlements.
In earlier ages, war drained public treasuries, breeding insurrection and unrest. In the modern state, peace can produce similar results. Popularly elected governments have accrued an enormous weight of debt, not to fund armies, but to finance entitlement programs. At some point, popular demand for benefits may threaten to collide with investor demand for repayment. Avoiding that collision will test even the most durable democracies.