During the first months of Barack Obama's stint in the United States Senate and the beginning of President George W. Bush's second term, an Egyptian general wrote a thesis for the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pa., offering American policy makers advice about how to manage relations with the Middle East.
@import url(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/projects/assets/agenda/agenda-inline.css);The author, Brigadier General Sedky Sobhy, was elevated to chief of staff of Egypt's military this week as part of reshuffle of top defense officials by President Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected leader and the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood. General Sobhy now helps oversee the military institution that has been the closest United States ally in Egypt and the region. And his paper, first reported by the journalist Issandr el Amrani on his blog the Arabist, and which we wrote about in Friday's Times, is a vivid reminder of how fast the landscape of the region is changing in ways that may challenge whoever occupies in the White House.
United States policies in the Middle East were contradictory and unsustainable, General Sobhy wrote. Opposition to America's military presence in the Gulf, its interventions in the Muslim countries and its “one-sided†support for Israel had inspired an endless recruiting pool of Islamist radicals and “immersed†Washington in an “asymmetrical†global war against terrorists with no foreseeable goal or endpoint. United States policies and the Western hostility to Islam belied Washington's stated commitment to democracy. The best solution, the general wrote, was an all but complete withdrawal of United States forces from the region, to be accompanied by economic assistance, more forceful support for the Palestinian peace process, and “the impartial application of international law.â€
Neither Mr. Obama nor Mitt Romney have ever publicly considered such a sweeping reconfiguration of America's role in the region; for one thing, it would shock and alarm United States allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia because it would remove a potential check on Iranian power. At the same time, however, General Sobhy's views reflect the overwhelming Egyptian (and Arab) public as well as the past positions of the new president. So his War College essay is useful reminder of the complexities Arab democracies present to American strategy in the region.
Indeed, just as the United States campaign turned briefly to the foreign policy dilemmas of the changing Middle East - with Mr. Romney visiting Jerusalem on the heels of two cabinet secretaries shoring up the Obama administration's support in Tel Aviv - events on the ground in both Egypt and Syria were already revising the strategic questions arising from the Arab spring.
This update to the Agenda project will take stock of the changes in Egypt and another one will turn to Syria.
General Sobhy's appointment as Army chief of staff capped a dizzying week in Egypt. It began with the worst attack by Islamist terrorists in more than a decade and ended in consolidation of power by Egypt's main Islamist group, Mr. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
The terrorist attack, killing 16 Egyptian soldiers near the Sinai border with Israel, set off the first crisis of Mr. Morsi's two-month-old presidency. But some analysts, including some in the Obama administration speaking on condition of anonymity, argue that the response bodes well for the young government. Although the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement at least suggesting that Israel may have been responsible for the attacks - playbook political demagoguery in Egypt - Mr. Morsi resisted that temptation. He vowed to crack down on the Islamist militants responsible and Hamas - the militant Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood that controls the Gaza strip - denounced the attacks as well.
In a sign of regional stability, Israeli leaders did not allow themselves to be baited into a conflict with Egypt, an obvious potential goal of the attack near the border. And some Israeli analysts praised Mr. Morsi for standing against the militant Islamists, though scholars of the Muslim Brotherhood note that it has opposed the use of violence since Egypt's 1952 revolution against the British-backed monarchy.
The political aftershocks of the attack, however, have also brought United States policy makers closer than ever to a confronting a situation that has haunted American relations with Egypt for more than 30 years: a government truly controlled by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Before the attacks, Egypt's top military leaders - traditionally Washington's closest allies in Cairo - had drastically constrained the power of Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood. In the final days of martial law, the generals used the pretext of a court decision to dissolve the parliament and then issued a decree granting to themselves all budgetary and lawmaking power.
But amid the military's embarrassment over the attack, Mr. Morsi, with the consent of the top generals, appeared to redouble his own power. He announced that the defense minister and the former chief of staff would leave their posts and become his advisers. And he rescinded the military's power grab, claiming most power for himself until the election of a new parliament.
In public statements, the Obama administration called the reshuffle a welcome sign that Mr. Morsi and the generals were sharing power effectively. A shift of authority from the Mubarak-appointed generals to the newly elected president is, after all, a step toward democracy. But what checks on Mr. Morsi may remain are now thoroughly obscured from view, in shadowy, behind-the-scenes negotiations with the generals, including the former defense officials-turned-pr esidential advisers, Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and his chief of staff, General Sami Anan.
Already some in Washington are raising alarms about what the ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood will mean for United States interests in the region. Some have suggested that the 2005 essay by the new chief of staff, General Sobhy, augurs a meeting of the minds between the military and the Brotherhood on a turn away from Washington.
“If historical precedent is any guide, Morsi's shake-up at the Egyptian Ministry of Defense will be followed by a strategic realignment between Cairo and Washington,†the scholar Steven A. Cook wrote on the Web site of the journal Foreign Affairs.
“It thus stands to reason that Morsi's sacking of Egypt's top national security and defense officials might in part represent a shift in Egyptian foreign policy away from the United States,†Mr. Cook wrote. “Toward what country, however, remains unclear. There is no other power that could be Egypt's patron, yet Cairo might not need one. Egypt, representing a quarter of the Arab world and strategically located on the Suez Canal and Afro-Asian rift - is a power in its own right.â€
The military appointments “might signal a desire to pursue a foreign policy more befitting of Egypt's prestige, an approach to the world that does not privilege any particular foreign relationship over another and that is geared toward maximizing Egypt's national interests in contrast to what many perceive to be the record of the last three decades.†If so, the United States should begin to expect Cairo to be more of a strategic gadfly than a reliable ally, Mr. Cook said, much as it was during the Arab nationalist era of Gamal Abdel Nasser- when Egypt drifted closer to the Soviet Union as Washington stood by Israel.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 17, 2012
A previous version of this post refer red incorrectly to the college where the Egyptian general Sedky Sobhy wrote a paper on American foreign policy in the Middle East. It was the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pa., not the National War College in Washington.
