Jason Brownlee - The Egyptian Counter-Revolution (2014)

Jason Brownlee: Hi, everybody. It's nice to be joining you tonight. I'm Jason Brownlee from the University of Texas at Austin. I teach in the Departments of Government and Middle Eastern Studies over at UT. I offer courses on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East, and Egypt in particular. And it's a pleasure to join you tonight and speak about two different aspects of of the Arab Spring or the Arab uprisings. A couple years ago, I published a book on U.S.-Egyptian relations, and that came out the year after Hosni Mubarak left power, and actually shortly after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, Egypt's first democratically elected president. He stayed in power a year, as many of you know, and was removed in a military coup last summer. So I have a book on U.S.-Egyptian relations until recently, and that's going to be the latter part of The latter part of my talk will draw from that book. I also have a book coming out later this year with two co-authors, Tarek Massoud of Harvard's Kennedy School and Andy Reynolds from UNC Chapel Hill. And just kind of an early plug, we're going to do a book launch at UT on Monday, November 17th. So it's a little ways away, but this fall, Tarek and Andy will be coming joining me at UT Straus Center for an event about that book. And the first part of my talk today will draw on our research from the book. The structure of my remarks today is to first talk about the Arab Spring, the Arab uprisings, and why actually, despite all of the excitement and enthusiasm that I think many of us were feeling in 2011, why the Arab Spring ultimately produced a rather modest harvest when it came to political change. Then, in the second part, I'm going to show you some data that comes from a professor at University of Maryland, a colleague of mine, Shibley Tilhami, who does public opinion polling in the Middle East, just to give you a sense of attitudes in the Middle East toward the United States and toward U.S. foreign policy. I think a lot of times we have some kind of representations or depictions of what people in the Middle East think in Western mainstream media and American mainstream media, but it's seldom really grounded in actual kind of evidence from the region. And in the public opinion polling that Professor Tilhami has done, you actually get a sense for kind of what the priorities are coming out of the region and how those priorities differ from the priorities of U.S. policy makers. And so then in the third part, I will talk about U.S.-Egyptian relations and the reasons why actually U.S.-Egyptian relations have not changed as much as we might have thought during the past several years. So even though Mubarak was replaced by Tantawi, Tantawi was replaced by Morsi, and Morsi was replaced and will be replaced soon by Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt's presumptive next president, U.S. relations with Egypt, Washington's relations with Cairo have remained very much the same. And so that kind of stability is worth kind of looking into and explaining. So really the first and third parts of my talk are two different tales of continuity. In the first part, a tale of significant domestic continuity when it comes to the authoritarian regimes of the region. In the third part, a tale of continuity when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. And the latter part of the talk, dealing with U.S.-Egyptian relations, can also be a sort of prelude to a more open-ended discussion that we can have about U.S. relations with other countries as well. I'd be glad to, in the kind of question and answer period and discussion, talk about Syria or Bahrain or other cases that interest, or Libya, other cases that may interest you. But let's start with the kind of domestic scene and just get an overview of the Arab Spring, as I will call it. We have gone back and forth in this project between talking about the Arab Spring and the Arab uprisings. But I think right now we're settling on going with Arab Spring, even though the outcomes don't seem very spring-like. If you look at the amount of repression that's happened, the idea of an Arab Spring actually fits with prior historical periods that earned the moniker of spring, such as the Prague Spring of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, which ended in a Soviet crackdown. or the Spring of Nations, Spring of the Peoples in 1848 in Europe, which culminated in counter-revolution rather than revolutionary advances as people had initially expected. So when you say Arab Spring, it's actually, there's a kind of historical connotation which is sort of the opposite of spring, and it's kind of anticlimactic, actually. So we have this modest harvest. If you look at this nice chart that I found online, this is giving you an overview of the main cases of the Arab Spring, like why we even think that 2011 was different from other years. The significance was that you had not only the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia in mid-January of 2011, but then successive uprisings that tried to emulate the Tunisian example. So it begins in Tunisia in the middle of North Africa, and then Egyptians emulate the Tunisian example, and then from there, Egypt becomes this sort of role model that other countries want to mimic. And you get uprisings in Yemen, Libya, and eventually Syria as well. So those are really the, and Bahrain, of course, So you get basically six cases of uprisings, but only four cases of regime change, or really, I think I would now call it leadership change, not so much regime change, in only four cases. And if you think about the authoritarian Arab regimes of the Middle East, that's a minority of cases. It's a pretty small number. We count in total 14 countries that are sort of, can be grouped in the same family as non-democratic regimes in Arab states. So we leave out Israel and Turkey, which have elected governments, also Lebanon and Iraq, which have kind of quasi-elected governments. We leave out Iran as well, because it's not an Arab state. But of the remaining set, you can see from the chart that you have more cases of continuity than of change. And in some of those cases of continuity, Bahrain and in Syria, you did have uprisings, it's just the uprisings were not successful. And then in the case of Libya, we have a significant caveat here because although the uprising was ultimately successful in the sense that Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and he was killed, and so you did have a change of leader there, that outcome was unlikely to occur and probably impossible without NATO intervention. So this is why we call the case of Libya a foreign imposed regime change, which is a kind of in vogue metaphor in the scholarly literature of FERC. And so if you leave aside that, where foreign intervention was pivotal for the leadership change, you really only have three out of 14 cases where you have domestic uprisings that succeeded in changing leaders. So this raises a question for us. How do we explain this kind of variance? Political scientists love variation. That's why we turn to our theories, because there's something, there's some kind of difference that calls out for a reason. And so our questions are two. When did and why did these uprisings take place? And then why did we only get three cases of leadership change? Now, there are a lot of answers floating out there. A lot of literature already looking at the Arab Spring and trying to explain these types of variations. Mainly, these answers focus on two different factors. One is social media, new technologies. So the ability of, say, SMSing or Facebook to overcome collective action problems and help dissidents and activists organize more effectively than they had in the past. And this is what Howard and Hussein, in their 2012 book, called connective action. So that's on the activist side, on the opposition side. factor that people point to is on the regime side, and that's the role of the military. If you look at these cases, there's a clear pattern. Whichever side the military took when an uprising occurred, whichever side the military took, that side ended up being victorious. In Tunisia, the military went with the protesters. They broke away from Ben Ali. In Egypt, to a great extent, they broke away from Mubarak. In Syria, they have stuck with Bashar al-Assad. In Bahrain, they stuck with the monarchy there. And in Libya, they basically stuck with Gaddafi, but then they were defeated by NATO. So the military was a pivotal actor. We... are not fully satisfied by these answers. Thus, we have a book and an article that goes beyond them. And the reason is that these variables are very proximate. They're very close to the outcome. And when we're trying to theorize about an outcome, we want to identify factors that we could have kind of discussed and identified and observed prior to the uprisings taking place. And with respect to militaries, it's hard to know which way the military would have turned in 2010. There are those who say, well, it was the professional militaries that broke away from the regimes, like Eva Bellin in a scholarly article that came out in 2012. Well, the Tunisian military was more professional than, say, the Syrian military. But That's a hard argument to apply to Egypt, where the military has kind of gone back and forth between helping civilians or oppressing them during the past few years. And then, so that's one problem, kind of explanations that are too close to the outcome. The second problem is kind of explanations that may correlate with the cases of change, but then also correlate with the cases of continuity. In other words, kind of factors that are present all over the place And therefore, they don't help to distinguish the cases of Tunisia in Egypt and Yemen, the three main domestic leadership change cases, from the rest. And this is what we would say about the kind of internet and social media explanation. There's social media all over the place in the Middle East, and in fact... Egypt and Yemen are not kind of the most connected, most wired countries of the region. So if it was really about this kind of connective action that Hussein and Howard discuss, we should have seen more successful uprisings in other places. So unsatisfied with these explanations, we develop our own theoretical framework. And our ambition is to kind of get the most explanatory punch out of as few variables as possible. And we find that there were two variables that we could have observed before the uprisings occurred, that we could have observed in 2010, or even in the year 2000. So years back, we could have looked at these variables and sorted out the cases based on whether or not they were vulnerable to domestic uprisings. And these two variables are basically wealth and personal loyalty. So with respect to wealth, we're talking specifically about oil wealth. Many of the Arab states benefit the regimes, many of the Arab regimes benefit from tremendous oil export revenue. This revenue allows them to to kind of buy off the population, to sort of cultivate social quiescence because they have extensive social safety nets that they provide. So, for example, Kuwaitis who can go to universities, Western universities on the government's dime, basically free college education, significant guarantees for employment, and other benefits from these states that have such vast oil resources So that's one thing. The second is, and this helps to explain, both of these things help to explain the military, but the second one in particular is about personal loyalty. It's been observed that none of the monarchies, none of the official monarchies fell during the Arab uprising. So, and not just the oil-rich ones, but also the ones that don't have oil like Jordan and Morocco fell. So there does seem to be something going on about hereditary rule. But we take that idea of hereditary rule and extend it and argue that any regime in which the current ruler has inherited power from a family member has already demonstrated and already generated extensive bonds of loyalty between themselves, and the repressive apparatus, which is to say the security forces and the military. And so in this respect, Syria proves just as resilient as Bahrain or the other monarchies. Because Syria in 2000 had a hereditary succession from Hafez al-Assad to his son, the current president, Bashar al-Assad. And our logic here about thinking about personal loyalty and hereditary succession, our reasoning is if the Syrian military had problems with Bashar al-Assad, if they had objections to him, if they weren't willing to stand next to him in a crisis, they could have voiced those objections and taken power themselves over a decade ago, when he was at his weakest, which was when he was inheriting power from his father. They didn't have to go along with the succession plan to begin with. Having gone along with it in 2000, and in the years leading up to 2000, as Hafez al-Assad was grooming Bashar, having already done that, when you get to 2011, when the Syrians start rising up against Bashar, the military has already kind of dedicated itself to the regime. It has already kind of ensconced itself on the side of Bashar. And so it is, one can explain the military's posture, not in terms of their professionalism, but in terms of their commitment to the regime as demonstrated in a prior hereditary succession. Now notably, rulers in Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia all had, especially Egypt and Yemen, but to a lesser extent Tunisia, all had some type of ambition of passing power to family members. Saleh was grooming one of his sons. Hosni Mubarak was grooming his son Gamal. But they hadn't pulled off the succession. And there was significant grumbling in the military against that succession. And so in that respect, the kind of prior precedent of hereditary succession significantly differentiated Syria from the Egyptian and Yemeni and Tunisian cases. And in that sense, separated it from the other Arab republics when it came time for the uprising. So when we take these two variables together, we're able to sort our 14 Arab authoritarian regimes into four different groups as follows. Note that either one of our variables, hereditary succession or oil wealth, is sufficient. You don't need both of them. But as long as you had one of those, and you were an Arab autocracy in 2011, you would survive the year. It's when you don't have either of them, at that juncture, the top right quadrant here, minor or non-oil exporters that were also non-hereditary regimes, that you got uprisings that removed rulers from power. Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. And then in the other cases, Bahrain had both oil wealth and hereditary succession. Syria had hereditary succession, but not significant oil wealth. It does export some oil, but it's not on the level of the petro-states. And then Libya had not accomplished hereditary succession, but did have oil wealth. And we argue that is why Gaddafi was so hard to dislodge, why the Libyan uprising by mid-March of 2011 was not looking like the Tunisian or Egyptian uprising. And in fact, the argument for intervention that Obama made in March of 2011 was that Gaddafi was closing in on Benghazi, the city of Benghazi in the eastern part of Libya, and if it if NATO didn't act, there would be a massacre, that he would basically storm through that city and crush the opposition violently. And so the very argument made for foreign intervention follows the logic and supports the logic that we're making in this argument, which is counterfactually, that is kind of the other road would have been one of regime continuity if you didn't have a foreign intervention. So in that respect, Libya defies the trend. You get leadership change outside of the top right quadrant here, but it defies it for a reason that kind of fits with our overarching argument. So the process, thinking about these variables and how we could have observed them prior to the uprising, the causal process looks like this. You sort out the regimes, you could do this in 2010, you could do this in the year 2000, into non-hereditary regimes without oil, and then all the rest. Hereditary regimes, oil-rich regimes, or regimes that have both. Then you have the uprisings, beginning really in December of 2010 and then continuing, as a sort of shock to the system that's hitting all of these regimes across the region. And you have two different outcomes after that shock, two different kind of reactions to that shock based on the existing capacity of the regime, really the repressive capacity of those regimes. Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen follow the top arrows, where you get elite defections and the breakdown of despotic power. Despotic power is a sort of technical term for repression. It means what a ruler can do without engaging in political negotiations with society. So if you want to modernize your country, if you want to get economic development, you need more than despotic power. But to survive an uprising... to defeat opposition through physical violence and coercion, despotic power can suffice if you have military forces that are loyal to you. And that is what Ben Ali and Mubarak and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen did not have. So you get the breakdown of despotic power and then you get This is kind of an old version of the argument. You get what we used to call regime change, and I would now call leadership change or authoritarian breakdown. Then in the other track, which is all the rest of the cases, the regime coheres, whether it's Bahrain and its crackdown or Syria and its crackdown, and the leadership remains in power. There are a few implications that follow from this for research and just for practical discussions about the Arab uprisings in the Arab Spring and what could happen over the near term. So first, we argue against those in the literature who are saying that Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen, the rulers fell because they were corrupt and personalistic. Actually, on the spectrum, we find they fell because they weren't personalistic enough. They weren't corrupt enough. They had not corrupted the security forces by winning their loyalty during a prior process of hereditary succession. If you're really corrupt and you've really penetrated the security forces and gotten them on your side, then you end up with an outcome of leadership continuity like Syria. Second, we have very durable authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. And that comes from the kinds of structural factors that we talk about in this project. And in some cases, like Iraq 2003, like Libya 2011, Foreign-imposed regime change may be the only way to, in kind of the short term, to override those domestic factors, those domestic structures that are bringing about regime continuity and authoritarian resilience. Yes, those are the factors that, as we say, produced a severe imbalance between oil-fed security states and long-repressed dissidents. Now, I would hasten to add on point two here, that does not mean that a FERC is going to deliver an outcome that is better for the people in the country than the authoritarian regime it overthrew. Certainly, the situation in Libya right now looks a lot like, in basic ways, looks a lot like the situation in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Over the past decade, really, the aftermath of a foreign-imposed regime change has been a breakdown of the state, a situation in which you replace the rule of a single despot with the power of militias that proliferate across the country. And so you end up with another kind of violent regime. It's just a sort of fragmented, localized violent regime, or multiple violent regimes at the local level. But in terms of removing some of these entrenched autocrats so far, that has been the only way that it has occurred. If you have oil wealth, which Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi both had. And then finally, basically we think the low-hanging fruit have been picked. If you go back to this two-by-two, The most vulnerable cases, according to our structural theory for the Arab Spring, the most vulnerable cases have experienced leadership change. There's some people who have been saying for a couple of years now, there are so many pressures on Jordan. It has this tremendous refugee population. It's not oil rich. It has other disadvantages. somewhat vibrant political life and civil society, the Jordanian monarchy will be the next regime to fall. We don't think so. We think that Jordan, Morocco as well, basically they are outside of the trend The Jordanian and Moroccan kings will benefit from the same types of loyal, coercive apparatuses that their fellow monarchs and also the Syrian president have benefited from. So if there was a major uprising in Jordan, we don't expect that King Abdullah would be flying off into exile the way that Ben Ali did. These regimes will now respond to future uprisings by turning in on themselves, packing the autocrat off, and renegotiating the dismantling of the old order. So that's the kind of sober forecast. All right, and that's what we've come up with for sort of understanding the Arab Spring with what we in political science call a parsimonious framework, having a couple of variables that we could observe before the uprisings broke out, and they'd give us a lot of leverage in sorting out the cases, even though there are numerous other factors one could point to. These are the ones that we really believe are salient. Okay, so that was a sort of kind of dry and abstract overview of the uprisings. Now I'm gonna move toward Egypt via a discussion of this public opinion data, which I think is so instructive. We're often in American media, we often sort of get, encounter the question especially after 9-11 because Bush asked it before when he gave that address to the joint session of Congress just days after the attacks. Why do they hate us? Which just raises so many other questions like who is they and who is us. But that idea and the kind of superficial policy campaigns to address it tend to presume that there is some kind of irrational animus on the part of the people living in the Middle East toward the United States. It's a kind of question and framing that that sort of caricatures what people in the region have been thinking and saying, and it actually also kind of shuts them out of the conversation and denies them much opportunity to represent themselves and speak for themselves. Now, certainly, I am not going to claim to be a spokesperson for people in the region, but I think it is useful to turn to – and so often in the media, you basically get – if you listen to NPR or watch PBS NewsHour, which would kind of be considered – some of the more well-informed of mainstream American media sources, you're typically going to get someone kind of like me, American, academic, talking about what's going on in the Middle East. You don't often get people from Egypt, from Iraq, talking about the situation there. So looking at public opinion, polling, I think, is one way for us to get closer to what people are thinking and saying. And the picture that we get is quite different from the portrayal that you would hear from the Bush administration or from the Obama administration. If you recall, for those of you who were kind of following the news back then, in the second term of George W. Bush's presidency, he sent one of his assistants, Karen Hughes, who had worked at the White House, as an ambassador to not just the Middle East, but to the Muslim world overall. to sort of help clear up misunderstandings and help people in the Muslim world better understand the United States. So the presumption here was that people in the Middle East and in other regions with Muslim majority countries somehow didn't, they didn't get what was really behind US foreign policy. They were misunderstanding. And, and At other points, Bush had talked about how people in the Middle East are distrustful of democracy or don't want democracy. Anyway, those attempts at public diplomacy, which was a sort of marketing campaign, basically, were unsuccessful, as demonstrated by Barack Obama's June 2009 speech from Cairo, Egypt, which he delivered at Cairo University, and the name of the speech, the title of the speech was A New Beginning. So the idea was that George W. Bush had sort of soured relations between the United States and the Muslim world, and it was up to this new president, Barack Obama, to kind of patch things up, repair the relationship. And so Obama gave that speech, where, again, he was sort of trying to counter some presumptive misunderstanding on the part of Muslims in the Middle East and in other parts of the world. What I'm going to show you from the public opinion data runs counter to the underlying assumptions of both the Bush and Obama PR campaigns. It indicates that the problem is not people abroad misunderstanding U.S. foreign policy. The problem for people in Washington is that people who live in the Middle East or live elsewhere, other regions with Muslim majority countries, they understand U.S. foreign policy quite well. Basically when you poll them and you ask them what are American priorities, they will say exactly what I teach my students in class. And I'll show you that in a few slides. So pretty clear, pretty solid understanding of U.S. foreign policy and how it operates actually, probably because they're on the receiving end of U.S. foreign policy, and so they have a good idea of what the real priorities are. So the problem for Washington is not a misunderstanding, but actually a clear understanding and a clear disagreement with those priorities. So let's turn to that. The context overall is this modest harvest that I've already spoken about, and a clash of priorities on areas of interest for the United States. All right, the source for this is Shibley Tohami, also Zogby polling, and it shows the US doesn't have a public relations problem, and there's no clash of civilizations. Rather, it's a problem of conflicting priorities. United States and the Middle East. Generally speaking, is your attitude toward the United States very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable? And notice here we're going 2009 to 2011 right to left. All right, so it doesn't look good to start with. And substantial majorities are in the unfavorable path. Okay, and it's even, it's fluctuating a little bit, but it's pretty solid unfavorable, even after Obama's New Beginnings speech. How would you describe your views of President Barack Obama of the United States? So negative, majority, neutral, or negative, especially in 2010. Large negative. Now this is one of the most useful slides. So there's a lot of people in Washington who talk about how the US is into promoting democracy abroad or defending human rights. when you ask people in the region, what do you think is really driving U.S. foreign policy? And these are consistent over time. I mean, the polling data is robust. You don't see wild fluctuations from year to year. So what are the two things driving U.S. foreign policy? Controlling oil and protecting Israel. Which, I don't know about controlling oil, but basically, when I've looked at U.S. foreign policy, including archival work in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library for my book on US-Egyptian relations. Yeah, this is what comes up. Basically, the two main goals of the US and the Middle East since the 1970s have been protecting the security of Israel and projecting American power to the Persian Gulf toward doing what Carter said was ensuring the free flow of oil. This is, again, this is not a misunderstanding. It's a pretty well-informed understanding of U.S. foreign policy. Note that spreading human rights and promoting democracy as well as preventing the spread of nuclear weapons basically all come in in single digits. Fighting terrorism isn't even seen as a real priority of the U.S. What could the U.S. do differently to improve your opinion It's not more democratization, proselytism, or sending more economic aid. It's an Israel-Palestine peace agreement and stopping aid to Israel, followed closely by withdrawals from the Arabian Peninsula and withdrawal from Iraq. When you look back at the past year of the Obama administration, what are you most disappointed with? You can see where these are going. There's a trend. It's a consistent focus on geostrategic issues. rather than on the kind of issues that get a lot of rhetorical attention in State of the Union addresses and inaugural addresses promoting democracy. And then another big conflicting priority. I mean, people in the United States talk about Iran as a strategic threat and there's been very slow movement towards any type of meaningful rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. And oftentimes U.S. officials will say people in the Middle East are really afraid of Iran. The Arab states are really afraid of Iran. That may be true at the elite level, like if you're talking to the monarchs of Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, but at the mass level, at the popular level, Arab publics do not share American anxiety about Iran, which is pretty informative, given that they are living right next to it. Do you believe that Iran is merely conducting research for peaceful purposes, or trying to develop nuclear weapons? Well, majorities say, nope, they want nuclear weapons. So people are not naive here. They're not naive about how Iran may want nuclear weapons. But then you ask, does Iran have a right to its nuclear program? And majorities also support that. Which two countries do you think pose the biggest threat to you? overwhelmingly people are more scared of Israel and the United States than Iran, which, you know, if you're familiar with the history of the region, makes sense, because if you think about countries who have actually aggressed beyond their borders, if you're just kind of looking historically and strictly in those terms, You've got Israel invading Lebanon, Israel bombing Iraq at one point, bombing Syria at one point, obviously 1967 war. You've got the United States invading Iraq. Iran, historically, has not been an aggressor. And so I think that may be part of this perception. If you ask... Americans, what are the scariest countries in the region? Or what are the countries that pose the biggest threat? I expect that Iran, for your typical American, would top the list. So views towards the United States midway through the Obama administration. Who do you prefer to be the next president? This is coming from Brookings, and this is from Egypt. Only basically three-quarters of Egyptians were rooting for Mitt Romney. going into the 2012 election, and over two-thirds viewed the United States unfavorably. Now, just a comment on this, because I've been going to Egypt for nearly 20 years. When I just casually speak to people, not close friends, but just people on the street or cab drivers and such, and ask them, you know, who's your favorite president? Oftentimes, it's whoever was president before the current president. So I was there when Bill Clinton was president. Oh, it was George H.W. Bush. He was good. Madrid Peace Conference. Then George W. Bush was president. Oh, it was Clinton. He was good. He tried to get a peace deal at Camp David in 2000. And now, it kind of surprises me, but now that Obama's president, people say, oh, George W. Bush was so much better than Obama. It was just... Whoever is the current president is considered kind of the worst. And there's also a lot of fondness for Jimmy Carter in general. But so, you know, here, I mean, this is pretty... telling that Obama, one of the few US presidents to make a personal visit to Egypt, a very high-profile visit, delivered this global address from Cairo in the first year of his presidency. Three years later, he's viewed so unfavorably. The takeaway here for the second part of the lecture is that it's not It's not about a clash of civilizations. It's not an issue of people in the Middle East not being somehow misled. The administrations, especially I think George W. Bush's administration, would blame Al Jazeera for putting a negative spin on what was happening in the region. That's not the problem. You get the same Opinions represented in the data from people who watch Al Jazeera as those who don't watch Al Jazeera. So it's not an image problem. It's a substantive problem. It's a policy problem of people just disagreeing with the fundamental thrust of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for basically the past 40 years, going back to the wake of the 1973 war. So it's not that they hate us, like this kind of irrational thing, it's that they understand US priorities, but they disagree with them. All right, now this last part, I want to, kind of in this context of a lot of continuity around the region, but also some countries that have experienced significant change, like Egypt. I want to home in on the U.S.-Egyptian relationship and talk about what has been going on and why actually there is a tremendous amount of similarity between the way the U.S. is operating with Egypt now as it had been doing actually before the uprising when Hosni Mubarak was in power. So for this part, I'm going to go back a little bit into history to give you a sense for why Egypt matters to the United States. Egypt has historically been the second largest aid recipient after Israel. Now it might be easy to understand why Israel would be the largest aid recipient. I mean there are tremendous ties between the United States and Israel going back to its founding. Significant flows of people and trade and all kinds of strategic cooperation. With Egypt there are not a lot of levels to the relationship. You don't have compared to Israel, you don't have a lot of American students going to Egypt. You don't have a lot of Egyptians coming to the United States relative to the size of the country. It's a country of upwards of 80 million. So why is it that Egypt matters so much? Why Obama would choose to make it the site for his 2009 speech? Why does Egypt receive $1.5 billion in American aid each year? and why has it been kind of such a focus of attention. So for this we have to kind of go back to the Carter administration and the context in which Carter announced his doctrine. So the Carter Doctrine was announced in 1980 and we're still living with it. Basically US operations in the Middle East are still governed by the Carter Doctrine and I will come to that doctrine in a moment. 1979 was a calamitous year for the Carter administration because of the loss of Iran as a strategic ally. The Shah of Iran, who had been ruling Iran since World War II, when his father was deposed and he was installed instead, was really the pillar of U.S. power in the Persian Gulf. He was seen as the policeman of the Persian Gulf. He fell in the Iranian Revolution, and then later in 1979, Carter let the Shah enter the United States for, the Shah had been ill with cancer for years, he let the Shah enter the United States for medical treatment, and some Iranians were concerned that there might be American plans to reinstall the Shah. The US had been involved in a, had executed a coup against the democratically chosen Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, and to put the Shah back in power. And there was a thought that the United States might try again to do that kind of operation. So the reception of the Shah in the United States provoked a lot of concern in Iran, and it led to a hostile seizing of the U.S. Embassy and the taking of hostages, most of whom would remain in Iran in the U.S. Embassy for the remainder of the Carter administration. They would only be released after Reagan's inauguration in January of 1981. So that was a tremendous setback. And then, to top things off, the year ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. So the Shah being overthrown was not just the loss of an ally, it led to the creation of basically a new adversary. So Iran flipped. I spent some time in my class on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East talking about how during the Cold War, the United States kind of put countries into one of two columns based on their foreign policy, not based on their domestic policy. Basically, the moderates were the ones who were anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and the radicals were everybody else. So, you basically, with the Iranian Revolution, you have this large, oil-rich state with very large military moving columns, flipping completely from the moderate column to the radical column. You have, and it, The experience of the hostage crisis becomes a kind of national scar on the American psyche and it stays, it remains with Americans to this day, I mean the Americans who lived through it. It was during the hostage crisis that the show Nightline began and the anchor Ted Koppel really launched his career and I show my students just a brief video from from one of the days that they were covering the hostage crisis. Basically, each night, Ted Koppel would come on and say, it's day 26 of the hostage crisis, it's day 50, it's day 77, it's day 200. And so every night, Americans were living this and experiencing it and being connected to it. So you had this kind of accumulation of crises between the Iranian Revolution, the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, and then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and it prompts a major address by Jimmy Carter. He announces in his State of the Union in 1980 what is known as the Carter Doctrine. Here's what he says, the key quote. An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. So with the Carter Doctrine, the administration was shifting from decades of indirect American intervention in the Middle East, where the U.S. relied on proxies, allied countries like Turkey and Iran and Israel, to a posture of direct intervention, saying, we will go there ourselves, we will send our own military forces, whether it's Iran or the Soviet Union, if they appear to be limiting the free flow of oil. And this entailed a kind of huge logistical leap for the Pentagon, for the Department of Defense, in terms of getting American troops and vehicles and materiel into the region if they were needed in some type of crisis. It led to the creation of something called the Rapid Deployment Force, which later became Central Command, which we still have today, CENTCOM. It's based in Tampa, Florida. It's one of the combatant commands, but one of the few that is, in fact, I think it may be the only one that is based outside of the region that it's assigned to, because no Arab country would host it. It also led to something called Operation Bright Star, which continues to this day, although it has diminished in significance, which are biennial, basically war games, joint military exercises between the U.S. and Egyptian militaries and other foreign militaries that can join in. Just a kind of way of demonstrating... U.S. military prowess in the region, and also role-playing for future military deployments. Bright Star in the 1980s kind of paid off with the first Gulf War Operation Desert Storm in the sense that it had given U.S. soldiers an opportunity in Egypt to operate in a desert environment somewhat like what they ended up doing in Kuwait. So this new posture, this Carter Doctrine posture, is really what kind of expanded Egypt's role in American strategy. I mean, that and the Iranian Revolution, which got rid of the Shah. So prior to 1979, under Nasser, Egypt had been more or less in the radical column. Then Sadat, Anwar Sadat, who was president of Egypt from 70 to 81, brought the country into the American orbit, took it away from the Soviet Union. And when Sadat signed the treaty with Egypt in 1979, then he kind of really cemented Egypt's place as an American ally. And for the Carter Doctrine, Egypt would prove to be a really important auxiliary and supporting country. Because if you think about... I'm just going to check my slides here because I think we can skip through a few of these. But if you think about how... This is the beginning of U.S. cooperation and operations actually in Egypt. But there is a logistical problem for Washington. If you think about it, trying to project power into the Middle East as opposed to, say, trying to project power in Latin America. Or if you compare the United States to the prior, the previous great power that was operating in the Middle East and kind of this sort of foreign hegemon, which is Great Britain. I mean, so if you're in, you know, if you're based in Great Britain and you're trying to send ships to the Middle East, the distance is not that vast. But if you're in Washington, it's pretty far. And so you basically need a network of friendly countries between you and, let's say, you know, the Strait of Hormuz, the sort of choke point of the Persian Gulf, if you're going to be able to get this rapid deployment force or these units from Central Command over to the region to intervene and make good on the Carter Doctrine. So you need countries like Portugal. And you need Egypt. You need Egypt for overflight rights. You need Egypt for passage through the Suez Canal, unless you're going to circumnavigate Africa. And you need Egypt, if possible, to locate vehicles and soldiers for pre-positioning of American troops so that they can be in the region and able to move in more quickly. So US-Egyptian cooperation brought significant benefits for the United States, both strategic and economic. So one was this assistance in the projection of power for the Carter Doctrine. A second was that Egypt, with the American aid dollars that it was granted, could buy some of the weapons that were previously destined for Iran. When Khomeini came to power in Iran after the Iranian Revolution, he canceled the Shah's weapon orders. And there were billions of dollars of weapons that the Shah was set to buy from the United States. So that leaves a backlog in the US for American companies. And Egypt and other US allies in the region could step in and buy up these weapons. So there's a significant commercial benefit for the US. Now I have a few slides about the past Egyptian regimes, but we don't need to spend too much time on that. Basically, the main thing I want to point out here is that when it comes to Egyptian politics for the past 60 years, really since the 1952 coup, it has been the military that has been ruling the country. And so if the U.S. is interested in kind of relating to the country of Egypt, it has mainly seen the institution of the Egyptian army as its primary interlocutor. So the relationship between Washington and Cairo has largely been a military and security relationship rather than a kind of a cultural or educational or economic relationship. So even though civilians have become more prominent in domestic government in Egypt over time, and so the regime kind of has a civilian face and has civilian technocrats in important ministerial positions, the power behind the presidency has remained the military's. These are Egypt's rulers. Here are the pictures of them. So you have Abdel Nasser from 52 to 70, followed by Sadat, followed by Mubarak. Mubarak was overthrown on February 11 of 2011. And then his defense minister took over, led the transition. In June of 2012, Mohamed Morsi becomes not only Egypt's first elected president, because the transition allowed for free and fair elections, but also Egypt's, so far, only civilian president, in the sense of when presidents have actually been the ones in charge. He was overthrown in a coup on July 3rd of last year by the sixth man shown here, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was Morsi's defense minister. So Morsi had appointed al-Sisi, and then on July 3rd of last year, amid huge anti-Morsi protests, al-Sisi died. put Morsi under house arrest, and now Morsi's in prison and on trial. Assisi retained the title until recently of defense minister, now he's a presidential candidate for elections scheduled for next month, and everyone who kind of follows Egyptian politics expects him to win. It's not really a level playing field. And he actually enjoys some, he has a lot of state support. He'll have significant support from national state television, official media. And in addition to that, he has some genuine popularity because by the time Morsi was overthrown, he had become very unpopular. And so what Assisi did was celebrated by many. Those are the presidents. I can say more about this later. Basically, authoritarianism in Egypt is not a kind of 24-7 repressive police state like North Korea. Rather, it's a system in which there are boundaries on the kinds of collective dissent and organization which people can participate in. So long as people don't cross the red lines, they might live a kind of a life in which the state doesn't bother them that much. But if they want to get involved in politics, if they want to really affect national policy and contest the direction the government is in, then they could face repression, especially detention. So US-Egyptian relations, as I mentioned, is very much at the elite level. And although in US media, the relationship is often described as one in which Egypt is dependent on the United States. It's kind of taking away resources from the United States in the form of $1.5 billion in annual aid. There's really a mutual dependency. In fact, if there's one side that's benefiting more from the relationship, it's the United States. The U.S. really gets more out of the relationship than Egypt does. And since it's the more powerful of the two countries, both economically and militarily, I don't think that should be that surprising. If this was kind of a bad deal for the United States and Egypt was really kind of cheating the U.S. out of resources, the U.S. could easily rearrange the partnership or renegotiate the terms of the deal. But it's a favorable deal for the United States, and that's why it continues, even though you periodically hear complaints from congressional representatives about how Egypt is not doing enough for the aid that it's granted. So here's how the U.S. helps Egypt, and then I'll tell you how Egypt helps the U.S. Well, there's the aid, which began So economic and military aid, which actually began as loans after the peace treaty was signed in 1979. Initially, most of the aid was money that Egypt had to pay back to the United States with interest. And the interest rates were market interest rates from the late 1970s, which were quite high. They were double-digit interest rates around 10% to 12%. So you can imagine, I mean, at at that rate of interest in just a few years, you kind of doubled the cost of what you were initially provided. And Egypt had trouble actually paying back the loans because the interest rates were so high and the program was converted to grants in 1985. In addition to that, the U.S. does provide some kind of external security assistance in the sense that Egypt was on been on the side of the United States and so countries that might aggress against Egypt, like potentially Libya under Gaddafi during the 1980s, would be deterred by the United States. And actually, after Anwar Sadat's assassination in October of 1981, there was some concern that Libya might launch an attack on Egypt, and the U.S. provided aerial-borne radar, which is known as an AWACS, to help make sure that Libya couldn't launch a surprise attack. If you're in the Egyptian police, you benefit from the relationship in the sense of getting equipment and training. These are actually the same police that the State Department regularly criticizes in its annual human rights reports for abuses like torture and just kind of arbitrary arrests and mistreatment of Egyptian citizens, but they get training and they get equipment from the United States. And also, police and Egyptian military officers regularly visit the United States, sometimes for training. So there are some benefits to Egypt. They tend not to be benefits that the Egyptian public overall enjoys, but rather certain pockets in the Egyptian government would enjoy. Now what does the U.S. get from the relationship, and why Is the U.S. so invested in maintaining a strong relationship with Egypt, even as the country goes through this sort of political rollercoaster and has these multiple leaders after Hosni Mubarak? Well, the U.S. gets a whole lot. So, starting off with intelligence cooperations. So when the U.S. is concerned about fighting Islamic militants, whether it's al-Qaeda or other groups, it gets a tremendous amount of information about them from the Egyptian intelligence services, basically the Egyptian equivalent of the CIA. And in fact, the American CIA had its largest overseas base in Cairo in the 1980s. And this was a critical point for operations during the Afghan Mujahideen's struggle against the Soviet occupation, because the Reagan administration wanted to give these Afghan fighters weapons so that they could attack the Soviet Union, but they didn't want the weapons to be traceable back to the United States, so they provided them with old Soviet rifles that were in the Egyptian arsenal, were in Egyptian warehouses, and that operation would send the weapons from Cairo through Pakistan to Afghanistan. The second point. The Suez Canal, obviously a crucial waterway from moving from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, has certain rules that govern passage. I mean, by international treaty rules, Egypt could not stop the U.S. from going through the Suez Canal. It's supposed to be open. But Egypt does far more than just allow American military vessels to go through the Suez Canal. It lets them jump to the front of the line. It lets them sort of move to the, jump the queue. And this can have significant operational benefits for the U.S. military in expediting U.S. passage back and forth between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. It really came in handy in the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Turkey, which was actually a member of the so-called Coalition of the Willing and had a democratically elected government, when Turkey refused to allow American ground forces to pass through Turkish territory into northern Iraq. At that point, the Pentagon had to recalibrate its plans and think about how to get those troops and their equipment to Kuwait so that they could move into Iraq from the south. Well, the troops could just fly over by plane, but getting their equipment, their equipment had to move by ship. and Hosni Mubarak facilitated the passage of that equipment through the Suez Canal in a brisk manner, so that there would be as little disruption of the invasion plans as possible. So, Mubarak, who was not a member of the Coalition of the Willing, came through when Turkey was uncooperative. In addition to that, overflight rights. Another example from Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2005, Egypt granted the United States an average of 20 overflight permissions a day. That's 20 a day for five years. which not only testifies to Egyptian cooperation with the United States, it also gives you a sort of image of how much American aircraft are moving through the territory and moving through the region. So 20 a day, on average, crisscrossing through Egyptian airspace. So critical assistance there. There's been diplomatic support on regional diplomacy whenever the Arab-Israeli peace process is moving, Bright Star, and consumption of American goods. So Egypt is one of the few countries with which the United States enjoys a trade surplus. So actually Egyptians are buying more things from America than Americans are buying from Egypt. Whereas with a lot of countries like China, you hear about a trade deficit. With Egypt, the U.S. actually has a trade surplus. The Obama administration's response to the Morsi presidency. Now the Morsi presidency only lasted a year, but for those of us who are students of American diplomatic history in the Middle East, it was surprising, actually, that the Obama administration was willing to kind of get behind an elected Islamist government in Egypt. This was kind of a new thing because prior administrations, specifically both of the Bush administrations, the father and the son, had expressed a lot of misgivings and distrust about Islamist movements, including through elections. So we have this kind of surprising acceptance. By contrast, in Algeria, there was an election in Algeria, 91-92, in which Islamists were about to win elections. control of parliament, which would have given them legislative power. And the Algerian military took over in a coup, and the U.S. supported that coup. And then in 2006, there was an election in the Palestinian Authority, which the Islamist movement Hamas won and was allowed to form, empowered by the election to form a government to occupy the prime ministership and then also staff the cabinet. And the U.S. opposed that outcome as well, and that was the beginning of the current situation with the embargo on Gaza and the division of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into two different political entities. Long story there, but basically you have two cases in the recent past in which the U.S. was uncomfortable with Islamist movements coming to power. Now with Egypt... arguably a place that is more strategically significant than Algeria and as strategically significant as the West Bank and Gaza, the Obama administration went along with it. So what explains this? What explains this difference? And my explanation gets back to this thinking of countries and actors in terms of moderates and radicals into those two columns. So bear that in mind as I move through here. So it is the second point here. Washington's acceptance of Islamists is not so much about their domestic policies, That's not what gets a group labeled in the minds of policymakers as moderate or radical, but it's rather their foreign policies, specifically their policies toward Israel and toward the projection of U.S. military power in the region. And if they're willing to sustain those policies, which we know from the public opinion polls tend to be domestically unpopular, if they're willing to sustain those policies, then they will be classified as moderates, and they will be deemed as acceptable to the United States. So it's really not so much about the Islamists per se as about the Islamist foreign policy. And so the difference between the Algeria and the Palestinian cases on one side and the Egyptian case on the other is that in the Egyptian case, the Islamist figure in question, Mohammed Morsi, had signaled that he was willing to sustain a Mubarak-style foreign policy. Yeah, and this is just kind of what I've already said earlier in the talk. There's been this mantra of kind of, we believe in democracy, but we don't believe in one man, one vote, one time, or one person, one vote, one time, and so we're going to oppose Islamists because they're going to shut down elections. You know, that really, that argument, the sort of like Islamists are going to be bad for democracy, does not hold up to scrutiny. Because if you look at U.S. relationships with two of the most influential countries in the Middle East, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, you see how little domestic politics means to that relationship. During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. had far more strains in its ties with Turkey, a democracy, a country with a freely elected government that has had for the past decade an Islamist government in power then it had some more difficulty with Turkey than it has with Saudi Arabia, a country which not only doesn't have any elections, it's an absolutist monarchy, and a theocratic one at that. So this thing about one person, one vote, one time is not really the issue. The strains with Turkey and the cordiality with Saudi Arabia had to do with the foreign policy positions of these countries. I've already mentioned one of the examples where Turkey wasn't going along with Washington. I mean, there were other moments as well. In 2010, Mohamed Morsi gave a speech in which he said, The peace process, the peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians were pointless. The only way to liberate Palestine was through violent struggle. He made some anti-Semitic remarks as well. You can see the video on YouTube. It was well publicized a few months after he had been elected. And yet, having made those statements in 2010, Here he was two years later, sitting with Hillary Clinton. So what changed? What got the U.S. to be comfortable with this guy becoming president who had denounced Israel and talked about the need for a kind of violent struggle against Israel? Well, what had changed was mainly Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. which while out of power and in the opposition was kind of taking, had a lot of kind of vitriol in its rhetoric and was taking sort of extreme rhetorical stances. But then when it came close to actually gaining power after the uprising and after Mubarak was ousted, the Brotherhood bent over backwards to signal to the United States that it would be essentially maintaining Mubarak's foreign policy. So that this rhetoric was not going to be translated into kind of a different government stance in Cairo. So it's what I would call extreme pragmatism on the part of the Brotherhood. There were reassurances in public and in private that the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty would be honored and also that other aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East would be maintained. The Morsi administration, I remember coming to power in June of 2012, immediately showed that, in practice, that it would uphold Mubarak's foreign policies, securing the Sinai, isolating Hamas, which is actually a sort of sister movement of the Brotherhood, but it was turning on Hamas and helping to isolate the Gaza Strip, just as Mubarak had done. continuing the very incremental normalization that goes on of ties between Egypt and Israel. And then there was a response by U.S. officials, including the ambassador in Cairo, that the Muslim Brotherhood could be just as strong, if not stronger, a partner than Mubarak or Sadat. Because here he was, he was going to maintain the Sadat-Mubarak foreign policy, And yet, unlike those two figures, he was actually gonna have domestic legitimacy. I mean, he had 151.7% of the vote, so he had actually come out on top in a competitive election. And so, you know, whereas Sadat and Mubarak, you had very little of a meaningful popular base, and then they were kind of executing this foreign policy, that was deeply unpopular as we know from the polls, Morsi had some kind of popular base and was gonna maintain those foreign policies and maintain those priorities. So I think that is, that's what explains this kind of significant moment in US foreign policy history of actually going along with the election of an Islamist movement. And I think I'm on my last slide here. And so I'll just mention that in June of 2012, I was with the Carter Center in Egypt watching the elections. And our concern at that point was was that Morsi would get a majority, but the military would not allow him to take power, and the US would support some type of military coup. Maybe we could say we were kind of 13 months early in our concern. But at least at that moment, I was pleasantly surprised that Morsi was allowed to take power, and that the U.S. went along with the outcome. Subsequently, let's move into the Q&A now, but I'll just pose one question to myself. Well then, what about July 3rd of 2013? What about this coup when Assisi deposes Morsi, and you basically still get a maintenance of the aid, a maintenance of the U.S.-Egyptian alliance. If the U.S. had supported or was fine with Morsi and actually supported him to some extent as president, why has the United States also gone along with Assisi and gone along with the coup and the deposing of Morsi? And in my sense of the... the past year's events, or really the past three years events, since January 25th of 2011, is that the US has basically, US officials, especially the White House and the National Security Council, have been, they've taken a sort of wait and see attitude, and they have followed events. They don't know what's going to be around the next corner, and they have worked with whoever they see at the moment is the strongest bet for political stability in Egypt and stability of U.S. interests. So before January 25th, it was Mubarak. And even on January 25th, as the protests began, Hillary Clinton said, our assessment of the situation is that Egypt is stable. And later that week, Joe Biden, Vice President Joe Biden famously said to Jim Lehrer on the news hour that he wouldn't call Mubarak a dictator. You roll forward a couple of weeks as the uprising was gaining momentum, the administration was hoping that Mubarak would pass power to his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. And Omar Suleiman would then become the next president in the next presidential election. Well, that handover was botched. It didn't go down the way people had wanted it to, mainly because of how Mubarak delivered his third speech on day 17 of the uprising. And so Tantawi comes out on top, Defense Minister Tantawi comes out on top, and he's going to be the person at the helm of the transition. So at that point, the Obama administration says, okay, fine, it's going to be Tantawi. So first we were okay with Mubarak. We would have been fine with Omar Suleiman. It's Tantawi. Fine, we'll go with Tantawi. Then June of 2012, a slim majority of Egyptians have picked Morsi. Okay, great, we'll go with Morsi, especially since he's gonna maintain the same foreign policy. Then he gets deposed in a coup. Well, we probably would have preferred that a coup hadn't happened, but the country was sort of unraveling on Morsi's watch, so there's been a coup. Now who's in charge? Assisi. Okay, fine, we'll work with Assisi. So kind of agnostic about the, the mechanism that brings the leader to power, so long as the leader is willing to preserve Egypt's foreign policy alignment and continue to defend U.S. priorities in the region. So I think with that, I'll close and open the floor. So the question is, with respect to the structural framework about explaining the outcomes of the Arab Spring, how well it would travel beyond the Arab world. I would say that our scope conditions, our parameters, we limited the cases to countries that had Arab majorities, and also that were not fundamentally non-democratic in the sense that they did not already have an elected leader. Even one whose credentials for public accountability might be called into question like in Venezuela or Ukraine. Even in Venezuela and Ukraine, those were elected leaders. If there's an elected leader, we think there might be... a more complicated relationship between the repressive apparatus. I guess I would say that elected regimes would be more likely to fall in the top right quadrant, like with Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen, than authoritarian ones. We're open to people taking the argument and testing it in other cases. Certainly, I guess you could say in Ukraine, the most recent uprising was successful in Ukraine, didn't have vast oil resources, and Yanukovych hadn't come to power through hereditary succession. So in that sense, I suppose it would work. The question is, what do I think U.S. priorities should be in terms of Egypt, in terms of other countries in the Middle East, and what could we be doing to improve U.S. relationships with Egypt and other countries? Well, I think one of the key ingredients for any type of improved policy would be to take the opinions that people are are articulating from the region seriously and really bring those into the policy discussion. So people are consistently, poll after poll, bringing up Israel, Palestine as a concern, bringing up American military presence, US military presence in Iraq and other places as a concern. And so I think if Washington was getting serious about improving relations, not just doing a kind of PR blitz, but actually improving relationships with the people of the region, then it would need to weigh the trade-offs between persisting in a kind of lopsided approach when it comes to Arab-Israeli issues and persisting in an oversized military presence in the Persian Gulf with all of the downsides for public perceptions of the United States that that carries with it, or instead really looking in the mirror and adjusting these policies in order to gain more support from people in the region. And I think this extends also to other to other issues like anti-terrorism. One of the things that I teach my students about is this concept of blowback, which is basically when Americans get hit by some type of attack by people from another country, that can be traced back to some extent, in terms of the motive or the impetus, can be traced back to prior US policies perhaps covert policies that Americans are not familiar with. So, for example, the embassy seizure in Iran in 1979 is connected to the 1953 coup, which Americans are less likely to be familiar with. Because in that sense, with the 1953 coup, they were on the side of the perpetrators, not on the side of the victims. And so, you know, with this concern of blowback and getting back to the question of how we should change our policy, I worry about, I'm not really an alarmist. I tend to think when it comes to sort of life in the United States, we are far safer, far more secure than prior generations, generations that lived through things like the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I do have a concern about blowback from programs like Extraordinary Rendition, these people that are basically abducted by U.S. and foreign intelligence forces and detained, tortured, sometimes executed without any type of trial. The Extraordinary Rendition program and the drone program, the unmanned aerial vehicles that can carry missiles and have been associated with substantial civilian casualties in Yemen and Pakistan over the past few years. So I think the drone program in particular, which Obama has addressed publicly, but I don't think candidly, should be front and center in any type of serious reconsideration of US foreign policy right now. I think that is and I think that is a very likely suspect if we're thinking about what a prequel to the next blowback might be. So yeah, we could take public opinion seriously and bring that into the equation in a serious way, and we can really look at these drone strikes and these other covert programs. Yes, I would say that to some extent, Egyptians, like Americans and like people in most countries, They can have strong views on foreign policy, but if the government is performing well in terms of domestic policy, dealing with things like unemployment, inflation, the economy, basically, that the government can enjoy a significant amount of domestic support and even popularity. The way that prior Egyptian presidents have sort of managed this balancing act and the way that I expect Assisi will do it, is to be publicly critical of the United States on foreign policy issues, but privately cooperative, privately supportive. And that has tended to be the case, especially under, I mean, under Mubarak, we had years of evidence of this. where basically in public he would say, this is during the Iraq War, during also the war in Afghanistan, during George W. Bush's support for Ariel Sharon's policies in Israel, which were highly unpopular, and then also during the war in Lebanon in 2006, the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, Mubarak would rail against the United States, and he would say, Americans have never been more hated in the region than they are now. And he would just be intensely critical of it, because there were major demonstrations against U.S. policy in the streets of Cairo, demonstrations against the Iraq War, demonstrations against Israel's attacks in Lebanon. And then at the same time, he was providing the overflight rights. He was providing the preferential Suez Canal passage rights. So operationally, he was completely cooperative. And I think we've seen this during the past year from both sides, a kind of rationing up of the rhetoric to appease domestic constituencies, even while operationally things are proceeding smoothly. What are the sources for hope for thinking about improving images of the Middle East in American media, in American culture, and in American policy? You know, actually, in terms of American... popular kind of public awareness of the Middle East. On this, I'm actually more optimistic than maybe some of my remarks suggested. I mean, I think that, I mean, maybe paradoxically, the sort of post-9-11 generation has... been more interested in the Middle East and more kind of attentive to the Middle East beyond just kind of the cultural consumption of Aladdin or 24 or whatever you could get on TV and the movies. So I think there is more of a serious engagement. You see this in the study of Arabic, for example, in universities, which UT Austin is a real hub. The study of Arabic has exploded, greatly expanded during the year since 2001, and I think that is a tremendous opportunity for people to be listening to and reading the ideas from people in the region directly, and then also as conditions permit, you know, traveling to the region, studying abroad in the region. I mean, really, it's the, you know, kind of, ironically, it's the Arab uprisings which provided a lot of democratic opportunities that have somewhat hampered student engagement or student visits to the Middle East. But overall, I would say the answer to your question is kind of, generational change as people don't grow up with the same kind of stereotypes. And people just have more opportunities to form their own opinions about the region. The biggest flow of contact right now between the United States and the Middle East is veterans, people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. That's far more than the number of students who will study abroad from U.S. universities. I think it's something like a million Iraq war veterans now at this point. But I don't feel like the Iraq war has led to an increase in anti-Iraqi stereotypes. which is kind of interesting if you compare it to the, and maybe it's because the soldiers actually were over there for an extended period, and they spent some time in the country, they got to know people, as opposed to sort of the Desert Storm, which was a kind of brief, pretty brief battle with Iraq, where there were all kinds of, I just remember in pop culture, all kinds of Iraqi, anti-Iraqi stereotypes and negative portrayals. So yeah, that may be quite different from what was happening after Vietnam. Right, okay, so stereotypes about Americans. You know, I think that there may be some, yeah, generalizations or stereotypes about Americans, American culture, that it's, really kind of permissive, and especially when it comes to issues of sex and alcohol consumption, things like that. Generally speaking, people, when talking to me, have been intensely critical of U.S. policy, and then they have hastened to add that they differentiate between the U.S. government and the American people, so that they don't... They're really against Bush's policies toward Israel, but they understand that government is one thing and the people are another. Which is a pretty generous position to take, given that in the U.S. the government is elected by the people and is supposed to be representing public views. But I appreciate them not... not saddling me with George Bush's policies. But generally, yeah, people have been very generous and welcoming and kind, and I really haven't experienced any type of hostility or stereotyping. I mean, I think people... not just in the Middle East, but in Europe and other regions, if you think about American geography, the whole we're flanked by oceans kind of thing, we tend to be one of the, we can afford to be far less cosmopolitan than people in a lot of other countries. And I think that shows in the number of congressional representatives that don't have passports and that just never travel. I mean, that's inconceivable for parliamentarian in most Middle Eastern countries or in European countries not to have a passport. So there's just a kind of more, there's more of an awareness of other countries and less kind of narcissism when it comes to one's own country. That's kind of the impression I get when I'm traveling abroad.