Thursday, February 20, 2014
Egyptian historic breakthrough with Russia, not a strategic shift yet
By Nicola Nasser*
The recent two-day first official visit in forty years by
an Egyptian defense minister to Russia of Egypt’s strongman Field
Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, accompanied by Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, was
indeed an historic breakthrough in bilateral relations, but it is still
premature to deal with or build on it as a strategic shift away from the
country’s more than three-decade strategic alliance with the United States.
The US
“Egypt
The United States, which has been waging, by military
invasion and proxy wars, a campaign of “regime changes” across the Middle East,
was miserably hypocritical when Marie Harf invoked her country’s “democratic”
ideals to declare that her administration “don't think it's, quite frankly, up
to the United States or to Mr. Putin to decide who should govern Egypt.”
However, Pavel Felgenhauer,
writing in the Eurasia Daily Monitor on this February 13, described the visit as a “geopolitical shift” that “could, according to
Russian government sources, ‘dramatically reorient international relations in
the Middle East ’.” The People’s
Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, on the following day
described it as an “historic breakthrough” in Egyptian-Russian relations and a
“transformation in the strategic compass of Egyptian foreign policy from Washington to Moscow
The main purpose of al-Sisi’s and Fahmy’s visit was to
finalize an arms deal reportedly worth two to four billion US dollars, al-Ahram
daily reported on February 13. The joint statement released after the meeting
of both countries’ ministers of defense and foreign affairs in Moscow on the
same day announced also that the Russian capital will host a meeting of the
Russian-Egyptian commission on trade and economic cooperation on next March 28.
This is serious business; it
is vindicated also by the arrival in Cairo
In the
immediate proximity, this “new concern” has been “preoccupying Israel Egypt into collision with
the state of Israel
Nonetheless, two former Israeli cabinet
ministers of defense, namely Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Ehud Barak voiced support
for al-Sisi. The first publicly supported his bid for presidency. Barak said
that “the whole world should support Sisi.” However, their voices seem to fall
on deaf ears in Washington D.C.
Both men’s support is consistent with Israel ’s instructive official “silence” over the
developments in Egypt
Within this context can be interpreted Israel
The Litmus Test
Herein is the litmus test to judge whether
al-Sisi’s eastward orientation and his supposed “Nasserist” loyalties indicate
or not a strategic shift that trespasses the Israeli and US red line of Egypt
Senior associate of the Carnegie Middle East
Center , Yezid Sayigh wrote on August
1, 2012 that the United
States
These are the bedrocks of Egypt ’s strategic alliance with the US
Preserving or discarding these Egyptian
commitments is the litmus test to judge whether Egypt
Other indicators include the financial
and political sponsorship of al-Sisi’s government by none other than the very
close Arab allies of the US ,
like Jordan and in Saudi Arabia , United
Arab Emirates and Kuwait ,
who had already together pledged twenty billion dollars in aid to al-Sisi and
reportedly are funding his armaments deal with Russia
Saudi Al Arabia satellite TV
station on this February 13 quoted Abdallah Schleifer, a professor emeritus
of journalism at the American University in Cairo, as sarcastically questioning
President Barak Obama’s performance: “What an extraordinary accomplishment President Obama will
take with him when he retires from office – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which
provided (late Egyptian president) Anwar Sadat with both moral and financial
backing to break with the Russians in the early 1970s and turn towards the
United States – may now finance an Egyptian arms deal with the Russians,” Schleifer said.
Al-Sisi’s supposed “Nasserist” and “pan-Arab”
orientation could not be consistent, for example, with inviting the defense
ministers of the United Arab Emirates ,
Iraq , Bahrain , Morocco Syria
was Egypt Egypt and its
pan-Arab ideology, but more importantly they were and still are strategic
allies of his US-led enemies and peace partners of Israel
US Aid
Counterproductive
US whistleblowers
warning of an Egyptian strategic shift are abundant as part of blasting Obama for his foreign policy blunders. For
example, US foreign policy scholars Tom Nichols
and John R. Schindler, quoted on this February 13 by The Tower.org
staff, who agree that they rarely agree on anything, are
agreeing now that Obama’s administration is undermining “nearly seven decades”
of bipartisan American efforts aimed at “limiting Moscow’s influence” in the
Middle East.
It can be argued that Egypt's flirtation with Russia does not
mean a shift in the country's foreign policy away from the United States as
much as an attempt to induce the United States to shift its Egypt policy back
to where it was before … in order to pressure the United States and to arouse
concern among American politicians about the prospect of losing Egypt,
encouraging them to amend unfavorable policies.”
The Obama
administration welcomed al-Sisi’s assumption of power by calling off the
biannual joint US-Egypt military exercise "Bright Star" and halting
the delivery of military hardware to Egypt, including F-16 fighter jets, Apache
helicopters, Harpoon missiles, and tank parts and when Last January the US
Congress approved a spending bill that would restore $1.5bn in aid to Egypt, it
was on the condition (emphasis added) that the Egyptian
government ensures democratic reform.
Le Monde Diplomatique in November last year quoted veteran
arms trade expert Sergio Finardi as saying that
the US aid money “never leaves US banks, and is mostly transferred not to the
target country but to US defense manufacturers that sell the equipment to
Egypt.”
More important, US aid money is attached to Egypt ’s commitment to the peace treaty with Israel
Either the provisions of the peace treaty
are amended, or the American conditions for aid are dropped altogether or at
least reconsidered to allow Egypt to fully exercise its sovereignty in Sinai,
or Egypt would look elsewhere for alternative empowerment, for example to start
“a new era of constructive, fruitful co-operation on the
military level” with Russia as al-Sisi told his Russian counterpart Sergei
Shoigu, according to the official Egyptian news agency MENA on last November
14.
All the
foregoing aside, Egypt wants to modernize its military-industrial complex per
se. Shana Marshall,
associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies and research
instructor at the George Washington University, quoted by
http://www.jadaliyya.com/ on this February 10, called this “Egypt’s Other
Revolution.” The thirty five-year old arrangements with the United States
All these and
other factors indicate that al-Sisi is in fact pursuing vital Egyptian national
interests and not seeking a strategic shift in his country’s alliance with the US Washington decide not to repeat its
historical mistake when it refused to positively respond to similar Egyptian
military and development aspirations in the fifties of the twentieth century,
which pushed Egypt into the
open arms of the former Soviet Union .
‘Abject Failure’ of US Aid
For Egypt
to look now for Russian armament and economic help means that the Egyptian – US
Thirty five years on, during which a regional rival like
Iran stands now on the brink of becoming a nuclear power with an ever expanding
industrial military complex while the other Israeli rival is already a nuclear
power and a major world exporter of arms, Egypt’s military stands weaker, seems
stagnant, underdeveloped and pushed out of competition while its population
have become much poorer.
Nothing much has changed since the US Middle East Policy Council in its winter edition of 1996
published Denis J. Sullivan’s piece, “American
Aid to Egypt, 1975-96: Peace without Development,” wherein he pointed out that
“the
reality is that Egypt is far from a "model" of effective use of (US) foreign
assistance.”
The country, despite the fact that “the
US aid program in Egypt is the largest such program in the world” and that “in
21 years, Egypt has received some $21 billion in economic aid from the United
States plus over $25 billion in military aid,” Egypt “remains poor,
overpopulated, polluted and undemocratic … In short, Egypt in 1996 continues to
exhibit virtually all the characteristics the United States has claimed to want
to change since it began its massive economic aid program in 1975,” Sullivan wrote.
Seventeen
years later David
Rieff, writing in The New Republic on this February 4, described what Sullivan said was a “failure” as an “abject failure” of “the US development aid to Egypt.”
Militarily, Carnegie’s Yezid Sayigh’s
paper of August 2012 quoted an assessment of US embassy officials in a 2008 cable leaked by WikiLeaks
as saying that “tactical and operational readiness of the Egyptian Armed Forces
has degraded.” He wrote that “US officers and officials familiar with the
military assistance programs to Egypt
US Back Turned to Egypt
The Tower.org on February 13 reported that the
“White House two weeks ago pointedly declined to invite Egypt
That was not the first indication that
the US foreign policy has been alienating Egypt since Field
Marshal al-Sisi assumed power early last July in response to a massive popular
protest on last June 30 against the former president Mohamed Morsi.
Since US Secretary of State
John Kerry’ visit to Egypt
last November, who in this capacity toured the region more than eleven times
and seems to spend more time in the Middle East than in US, Kerry has been
dropping Egypt Saudi Arabia next March, receive Israel ’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu early
in the month and had received King Abdullah II of Jordan
on this February 14, had no reported plans either to receive al-Sisi or to visit
his country, which was previously a regular stop for US
Is it a surprise then that
al-Sisi’s first visit abroad was to Moscow and
not to Washington D.C. ,
to meet with the Russian president and not with his US
Al-Sisi in an interview with the Washington Post early last August accused the
US
However, al-Sisi does by no means dream of disturbing the existing
political order in the Middle East, or coming to loggerheads with Israel or the
US, but it seems obvious that he’ is fed up with the preconditions attached to
US aid that have rendered his country’s military and economy backward in
comparison to regional highly upgraded rivals. The US
did not help Egypt
Pavel
Felgenhauer wrote on February 13 that, “It is clear Egypt is ready to accept Russian aid and
weaponry as it did during the Cold War in the 1950s–1970s to show the US it has
an alternative source of support.”
Indeed, al-Sisi thanked his Russian
counterpart for “giving the Egyptian people economic and defense aid.” Putin
said that he was “sure we can increase trade to $5 billion in the future.” Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said: “We agreed to speed up the preparations of
documents that will give an additional impulse to the development of military
and military-technical cooperation.” It is noteworthy that all is without
preconditions, political or otherwise.
The Associated Press on February 13 quoted Abdullah el-Sinawi, whom the AP identified as “a prominent
Cairo-based analyst known to be close to the military,” as saying that al-Sisi
“wanted to send a signal to Washington Egypt needs an
international entrusted ally that would balance relations with America Egypt will be open to other centers of power
without breaking the relations with the US
Abdel-Moneim Said, another Egyptian analyst,
wrote in Al-Ahram Weekly on last November 21 that Egypt is “merely seeking to
expand its maneuverability abroad” and that “the Russian
‘bear’ that had come to Egypt has had its claws clipped”: “Soviet Union has
collapsed, the Warsaw Pact is dead, and the Cold War is over … (and) the US GDP
… is eight times more than Russia’s;” moreover the US-led world alliance
accounts “for 80 per cent of global gross production and a larger percentage of
the world’s modern technology.”
True, Egyptian Foreign Minister Fahmi said on last October
18 that the “Egyptian-American relations have changed after 30
June for the first time in 30 years to a peer relationship” and that “Egyptian decision making is now independent from any
state.” A day earlier he told the state-run
Al-Ahram newspaper that the
bilateral relations were in “a delicate state reflecting the turmoil in the
relationship.” “The problem,” he said, “goes back much earlier,
and is caused by the dependence of Egypt
on the US
Therefore, “Egypt
is heading toward Eastern powers,” Saeed al-Lawindi, a political expert
at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told Xinhua on February
14, but Talaat Musallam, a strategic and security expert and a former army
general, described al-Sisi's Russian pivot as “a kind of strategic maneuver.”
Musallam was vindicated by Fahmi’s repeated assertions that “Egypt ’s closeness with Russia
is not a move against the US ,”
i.e. not a strategic departure from the United States
However,
international relations are not static; they have their own dynamics. Should
the US passive sensitivity to
Egyptian aspirations continue to be hostage to the 1979 Camp David accords and
the Russian opening continue to cater for Egypt
