The Congressional Research Service has a new backgrounder report on Egypt that provides an overview of the domestic situation, Egypt’s foreign policy, relations with the US and more.
This sentence caught my eye: "The Egyptian government has resisted any U.S. attempts to interfere in its domestic politics and has responded harshly to overt U.S. rhetoric calling for political reform."
Is that really true? How, "harshly"? Sure they've protested a bit, but when the US was actually pushing for liberalization (mid-Bush), what I remember happening was multi-candidate presidential elections. Crackdowns came later, after the US made it clear they weren't interested in elections anymore if Islamists were going to win, and democratization talk turned pro forma. I think real US pressure would probably be very helpful, and that the regime hasn't put up much of a fight when such pressure occurred. The problem is that the democratization talk has normally been leveraged to coax Egypt into doing other stuff (Gaza etc), and hasn't been about actually forcing liberalization.
This sentence caught my eye: "The Egyptian government has resisted any U.S. attempts to interfere in its domestic politics and has responded harshly to overt U.S. rhetoric calling for political reform."
Is that really true? How, "harshly"? Sure they've protested a bit, but when the US was actually pushing for liberalization (mid-Bush), what I remember happening was multi-candidate presidential elections. Crackdowns came later, after the US made it clear they weren't interested in elections anymore if Islamists were going to win, and democratization talk turned pro forma. I think real US pressure would probably be very helpful, and that the regime hasn't put up much of a fight when such pressure occurred. The problem is that the democratization talk has normally been leveraged to coax Egypt into doing other stuff (Gaza etc), and hasn't been about actually forcing liberalization.
Link to report is not working !!