 He is a journalist, specializing in the Middle East and American foreign policy. He is a fellow at the Century Foundation. And he also writes a column for the Boston Globe called The Internationalist. He's a correspondent for The Atlantic, truly my favorite journal, by the way. I think it's brilliant. And he contributes regularly to other publications, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The National Interest. He is the author of two books. His first book is on Hezbollah, and it's called A Privilege to Die. And we are gathered today to discuss his second book, Once Upon a Revolution. He also teaches at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and at The New School's Graduate Program in International Affairs. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so excited to hear about this very central country in the Middle East. And we'd love maybe to start by you telling us about this book and your journey with the book for maybe 25 minutes or so. And then we'll open for discussion. Sounds great. Thank you all for coming. And thanks for your interest. I'll tell you a little bit about the story of the book and sort of where I see Egypt going today. And then we can turn it over to your questions so I can talk about the things that you're most interested in. I've been covering the Arab world in the Middle East since 2003. And by the time the eve of the Arab uprisings came, I had grown, I think like many, quite cynical about the prospect for really systemic structural change, about the potential for real politics to take place, and about the idea that any kind of course correction whatsoever could take place. So I had gotten pretty, I won't say complacent, but quite comfortable with these assumptions that whatever shifts we saw in the Arab world, whatever shifts we saw in American policy, we're going to be incremental at best and that probably they'd be dissatisfying. And during those years that I spent as a reporter in the region, I of course always sought out the people who were idealists or dissidents or dreamers or activists. And they're often the most insightful and interesting people to interview in these societies and great sort of windows into the things you don't learn from the official record and from the governments and from the kind of people who like to talk to reporters. And this tiny group of inspired folks had quite low expectations. In the summer of 2010, I was in Egypt and I met with young Muslim brothers, young secularists, young human rights activists. Every single one of them felt like their society had reached a nadir and they felt like at best they might begin some tiny, some tiny catalytic public awareness shift among the citizenry. The incredibly low expectation. The dream of the people who began the Khalid Said protest in the summer of 2010 was at a minimum to get people to start talking a little bit about public abuses of power and abuses by the judiciary. And then a really, really ambitious remove if they were being crazy was to maybe get Mubarak to fire his interior minister and replace him with someone a little less abusive and a little less corrupt. This was the era of incrementalism and era of modest and realistic expectations in a region under the Yoke of police states that most of whom had the backing of the US government. When the uprising began in Tahrir Square in 2011 in January, it turned a lot of these assumptions on their head. It really broke down one of the basic assumptions about human nature that drove everyone's understanding of what would happen in the Arab world. And then this was the assumption that people, as actors are passive and easily manipulated and that individuals and individual courage and action can never create systemic political change. We also, I think we're operating under this sort of same assumption I was describing a minute ago that if and when some change did come, it would be incremental. It would be from within the system, it would be some kind of dialectic within very narrow constraints. Half a million people suddenly were in Tahrir Square and they were working class, bourgeois, right wing, left wing, Islamists, secularists, people who came from families that were with the regime, with the security forces, people who came from marginal places in the countryside. People had zero education in political rhetoric and people who had been taught for 60 years that the right way to show your patriotism was to shut up and listen to your government and work within the system, played by the rules and you'd be allowed to do okay. They'd been taught this and they'd been taught this with quite occasionally violent lessons like during the bread riots of 1977 and during the low grade Islamist insurgency of the late 80s and early 90s. And yet despite this and despite the incredibly high price that individuals would pay for public dissent, half a million people or more, depending on whose count you believe, poured out into Tahrir Square and put their lives and their bodies on the line, many of them were killed in those first two major protests, January 25th and January 28th. And despite that high price, more and more people came out and demanded bread freedom and social justice and demanded the fall of the regime. This was an exhilarating and inspiring turn of events for anyone who had spent time in Egypt in the Arab world. And it carried a lot of promise because what we're talking about here is a pretty profound act of political courage and political imagination because these people who came out on January 25th and in the 18 days that followed and they occupied Tahrir Square, they were articulating very to them powerful and clear idea of an indigenous Arab and Egyptian human rights and political accountability agenda. They wanted to reform their government, they wanted to build a new state, they wanted a head of state who was accountable to them, they wanted civilian rule in the best interests of the people, they wanted real elections, they wanted real politics and they wanted them on their own terms. They didn't want to import and bring in wholesale some Western template of democracy and crucially, nor did they want to carry over the stale and rotten rhetoric of the regimes that had ruled them since 1952. This was sort of category bending and history defying. And I was actually in New York at the time this began and I went crazy. It's sort of the kind of event that I had dreamed of covering and never thought would happen. Like all the experts who had confidently predicted that something like this never could happen, that it was impossible. So I hopped on a plane, I went directly to Tahrir Square with some detours put up by the state security services on the way. And when I got there, I sought out the core group of organizers who were at the center of the uprising. Because even in the middle of something as spontaneous and chaotic seeming as the occupation of Tahrir Square, there's always some kind of infrastructure. There always are leaders and people who are catalyzing and running things. And my interest was to find those organizers and those leaders and see what they were doing to translate that historical moment into some kind of lasting political idea. I wanted to see how the revolutionary moment transformed and matured into politics. And then I wanted to follow that political struggle because it was clear to me from the first day of the uprising that whatever legacy this revolt was gonna have was going to be a political one. It would be one or lost, a change would occur or fail to occur on the plane of politics. And I knew from years of previous reporting that there were people, dissidents and other activists who were thinking in political terms and with political platforms about how to change the society. I wanted to see what they would do. What kind of politics they would create, how they would go about seeking power. And my plan was quite simply to stick by them for as many years as it took until either they succeeded and put a civilian president into power and moved on to securely waging the struggle for Egypt on the level of politics or until they were defeated and undone and there was a new military coup. As it happened, I got both those endings in the last four years. And during that time, I was able to follow the people who established the Revolutionary Youth Coalition and tried to bridge the divide between the Muslim brothers and the secular activists. I got to watch the people who established all the new secular revolutionary political parties come in and contest the first parliamentary election, work in the presidential campaign. And ultimately, I watched them fall prey to very bitter internal divisions. Some of them ego-driven, some of them very substantive and on a real level of belief in ideology. And I watched them sometimes try and fail to articulate political views, sometimes try to avoid it. And ultimately, I've watched them in the last year and a half try to find ways to continue their struggle in a period of re-revived and sort of re-energized authoritarian rule in Egypt. The 12 people that I initially focused on spanned, I think the whole gamut of dissident Egypt. There was a Coptic woman, there were communists and socialists who came from family backgrounds where people had been involved in labor strikes and encouraged their kid to go into politics. There were Muslim brothers who had grown up in families that, going back three generations, had been active in the underground society. And there were people who had avoided politics their entire life and had finally been drawn in by the sheer twin indignities of governance failure and quotidian humiliation that characterized life under Mubarak's rule. And the sort of diverse group of people came together initially in Tahrir Square under the umbrella of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. And they tried to provide a sort of leadership and agenda, revolutionary agenda, that could unify all these disparate threads that had come together to form Tahrir. From the beginning, they were beset by a couple of very sort of root problems that were baked in by the way Egypt had been ruled one was the very profound mistrust of the idea of politics. And this is something that had been encouraged by the military regime since Nasser in 1952 who very cleverly created this idea that politics is the selfish pursuit of the egomaniac and serving the national interest was the cherished duty of the public servant usually someone who came from the military and was always putting the state above himself. This 60 year propaganda cornerstone successfully polluted and contaminated the very idea of politics. So the minute someone from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition would say, hey, now we have the square, the regime is scared, what should our core demands be? They'd say, someone would say to them, what, you wanna play politics now? We're not gonna play politics. We're fighting for the needs of the people. And this far more than just a rhetorical stumbling block, rhetorical talking point became a huge stumbling block for revolutionary forces. The other problem baked into the foundation was the aversion to leadership. So we had initially a semi spontaneous leaderless revolution by necessity because the regime had worked so hard to dismantle any kind of established political or independent organization. So by necessity, the only way to resist was through various decentralized collectives that were operating in offline networks or in networks that the state didn't pay attention to. But once the regime was frightened and once the regime wanted someone to negotiate with about how to calm down the situation, the revolutionaries into our rear square were anathema to appoint something like a leadership committee, someone to speak for them. And this is one of the early reasons why the Muslim Brotherhood, despite not playing a critical role at all in beginning this uprising, was able from the first months of the transition to play such a pivotal role. The generals who took over Egypt when Mubarak stepped down, they wanted someone they could talk to, someone who they believed could control the street and give them demands to negotiate over. And the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was unable and unwilling to play that role. So the Muslim Brotherhood stepped in, even though they did not represent the majority of the forces that had begun this uprising in the first place. The uprising was the product of individual Egyptians who had reached a breaking point because of those forces I referred to earlier. And really crucially, they came from demographics that were not supposed to think and behave as they did beginning in 2011. One of the characters I ended up focusing on in the book because he's so representative of this trend was a 40-year-old architect named Basim Kamal. Now, because we're talking about Egypt, 40 is young. You can be a youth leader at 40. You don't get old until you're 60 in the Egyptian gerontocracy. So this guy was raised by a secular apolitical family. His father had actually spent time in prison because he had been a member of the Boy Scouts and Nasser was cracking down on the Boy Scouts because they had lots of Muslim brothers in their ranks. So even though this guy was a secular person who hated the Muslim Brotherhood, he ended up spending almost three years in prison under Nasser, and he liked Nasser. He was a supporter of Nasser. And so the lesson he passed on to his kids was be quiet. Don't ever say anything about politics. Don't ever say anything about the leader of this country. It can only go wrong. And he was a supporter of the sort of militaristic rule that Nasser brought to Egypt. And he taught his kids sort of a ratio-algir approach. Work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps as my father did and as I did, and you'll do fine. And that's kind of the deal that the Egyptian regime has made with its citizens. So Basim followed that dictate. He worked tirelessly. He worked 16-hour days, became an architect. Eventually founded his own company, employed his siblings in it, used it to support his parents, his brothers and sister and their kids, and found himself almost 40 and realizing that his standard of living was worse than that of his father's. That he was bequeathing to his children a degraded life and a degraded ability to support themselves and a sort of personally and spiritually humiliating experience of living a life with no freedom, no outlet, no ability to express oneself. And crucially, I mean, because it's not about the luxuries of human rights, constant daily abuse by the police. Even for a bourgeois guy like Basim, regular encounters with police like the time when one of his young female relatives was sexually assaulted and they went to the police for help and the police laughed at them, took no interest and said, if you arrest the guy yourselves, we'll lock him up. And that was sort of one of the better kinds of interactions people would have with the Egyptian police. So this is not about, oh, we're lacking freedom. It's about being constantly mistreated in really fundamental ways. This drove this completely moderate, modest, apolitical guy in the year before the uprising to join an underground dissident movement and risk his livelihood, his liberty, and the well-being of his kids not because he was ideologically committed to some political project, because he could no longer bear to submit to the sort of humiliating collective failures of the regime that was ruling him. And I take so much time to describe this because those conditions all pertain today again. So all these core grievances and failures that drove the most unexpected types of people to risk their lives and rebel against their government are all either the same or worse today as they were four and five years ago. And that is a really key fact to keep in mind as we analyze what might happen next in Egypt's trajectory under its new strongman ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The years, I'm only gonna talk a couple more minutes so that I'd rather have time for questions, but I just wanna touch on a few of the key lessons, I think, from the four years since the magical 18 days of Tahrir Square. In that period, a couple of critical things happened. One is that the revolutionary forces really tripped themselves up over their inability to put common political demands ahead of their very real divides, especially the divide between secular and Islamist activists. So even though all those people in the activist sphere agreed that torture is wrong, that there should be accountability for the police, that there should be civilian control over the military, a whole raft of quite ambitious and well articulated demands that could have formed the platform for any kind of transition, including a full on transitional government, because of their root mistrust for each other over questions of Islamism or secularism, they either failed or refused to unify over a political agenda. Equally, if not more importantly, we have to look at this period and realize that it wasn't so much that the revolutionaries failed as it was that they were defeated. This wasn't a case where they got the keys to the castle and then they screwed it up. This was a case where they created enough uncertainty that the old powers that be felt insecure, and especially in that first year, 2011, early 2012, the forces of the old regime weren't quite sure how and whether they would get their old privileges back and how and whether they would negotiate their own internal struggles between the military types, the police types, the old ruling party types. But by dint of their tremendous resources and ability to infiltrate movements and lock people up arbitrarily and rely on capricious runaway courts and violent security forces that were unscrupulous in their willingness and ability to manipulate the public and kill people in order to reinstate the privileges of the old order, they slowly, shrewdly, cannily, and persistently made a comeback and won a power struggle which was heavily mismatched in their favor. And that's very important for understanding how these things was turned out. And it's also very important for understanding why the current order is not as stable as it might appear at first glance. The personal trajectories of Basim and the other characters I described in this book is very important because it's ongoing to this day and it is the struggle to articulate a new political vision for Egypt and then the struggle to seize political power. Now, struggle is continuing today. I'm not highly optimistic about its prospects for victory. I am optimistic, however, that the process that began with so many millions of people breaking through the wall of fear and taking charge of their own political identity and destiny, that that process can no longer be stopped by rank repression. And we see today 40 to 50,000 people in prison in Egypt. We see regular massacres beginning with the enormous one in August 2013 and Rabah and Nada squares in Cairo. And yet, despite that, a whole host of political actors is continuing inside Egypt as well as in exile to voice dissent, challenge the military and the judiciary, speak out in public with their names, and they're trying to organize, and more importantly, they're trying now to do the hard, unsexy, dirty work of articulating a real political vision for what to do the next time the regime teeters. And so this very personal and sometimes abstract and sometimes boring process, although I'm in Washington, so I think maybe in this audience, you guys, like me, won't find this boring at all, is a process of political authorship and it is underway. It is, it can't anymore be intimidated into silence, which was the process by which Arab dictators for most of the 20th century kept their dominion. And it's quite inspiring just on an emotional level to see individual people riding from prison, agitating from exile, even like Basim who's been a little bit comfortable with the return of military power, but he's running for parliament this spring as a dissident. All these different political demographics continuing to voice a vision in defiance of the lockstep script set forth for them by the state-controlled media and a very violent, and domineering autocratic government. So we're in an early chapter of a process of generational historical change. It has long antecedents and it began with real momentum in late 2010. At a minimum, we're talking about a 20-year process. We have nearly a century that was shaped in the Arab world by an argument between the ideas of Arab nationalism and a certain idea of Islamism. And both those ideas are long past their prime. Neither of them addresses the core grievances of people living in poverty or powerlessness in the modern world and people who have learned in their own lives to square questions of faith and patriotism by recipes other than those advanced by secular, militaristic nationalists or by the Muslim Brotherhood. And there will be political ideas that reflect political movements rather that reflect those new ideas and those new identities. And they will take quite some time to take shape and translate into movements with actual power and actual force. Having watched up close the attempt of those thousands of visionaries and those hundreds of thousands of people who for a time were willing to respond to the call, I can safely predict that they will continue to grapple with these questions and they will continue to try and seek change in power. I have no prediction and no unwarranted optimism about how that might turn out. I don't think what I just said guarantees that there will be a free pluralistic Egypt 20 years from now. I do think however that we will not see Egypt or the Arab world ruled statically and passively as it was for the previous 60 years. So I think I'll leave it at that and turn it over to your questions. And I will tell you the book is written like a historical thriller or like a novel. It's not a work of policy analysis. It is a work of contemporary history built around a pair of characters, the secular architect, the Muslim brother who gets expelled from the brotherhood and their efforts to lead a movement and ultimately their efforts today to continue finding some way to keep the ideas of the original revolution alive. So if you're a student of history or if you're interested in this question of how and within what limits individual action and courage can affect the development of a political system, it's a good book for you to read. And I encourage you to take a look at it after the talk. So I'm gonna start with a couple of questions and then I'll open it to the floor. But I first wanna reiterate that it really feels like a novel even though it's loaded with historic accounts of what happened and historic facts both dating back to Nasser and before but also at the same time how individuals shape these historic events and how they made them happen or how they reacted to them. So you just said eloquently that the youth do not have any real political training and in her biography, Secretary Clinton noted that when she went to Egypt, the youth were not only completely oblivious to how the political process takes place but they were not even interested, she said. It's really, one wonders, I know that Egypt started to crack down on all foreign organizations and I believe right now from my talking to some of my activist friends that there is an awareness that we have to learn the game of politics. So if there are no international organizations allowed to train people on democracy and election and organizing, how are these people to learn these skills? Well, I'm quite jaundiced about the view that international organizations or American groups are really well positioned to teach anybody in contexts like Egypt or elsewhere, useful and applicable lessons about how to engage in politics beyond certain basic technical training which you don't need an American expert to give you. I don't think there's actually all that much that they have to offer. That's a separate thing. I'm so glad you brought up that Clinton anecdote because I was there when that happened. It was actually one of the funniest illustrations of how Washington fails to understand the world. So in the spring of 2011 or early summer, Hillary came to Egypt and she told one of her aides, I want to meet with the revolutionary youth leaders. And of course, the revolutionary leaders said, we're not gonna meet with Hillary Clinton. The last thing we're gonna do is have a public encounter with the American Secretary of State at this point in time. No, we reject America. We reject American meddling here. We won't meet with Clinton. So whoever was in charge of finding someone to stick in the hotel conference room with Clinton rounded up some nobodies. I mean, literal nobodies, buffoons. So a group of buffoons go in there and they said a bunch of stupid stuff to Hillary Clinton. Now, the people who were actually, the revolutionary youth activists also say a lot of stupid things. And you can read some of them in this book. They're not geniuses. They're not, I mean, sometimes they are inspiring and creative sometimes they're stupid and knee-jerk nationalist or reductionist or completely unimaginative politically. But they were whole-throatedly involved in a political struggle that they understood as political and they were talking about politics all the time, all the time, how to get political power, how to define their political agenda. They were talking about politics morning, noon, and night. They wouldn't shut up about politics. So to misunderstand what was happening at that moment and think, oh, these activists don't care about politics. No, they're not good at politics always. They have some really bad ideas about politics but the problem is not that they're not interested in politics. Now, these random folks who showed up, I guess weren't interested in politics but that's why they weren't part of the scene. And it's easy to pick on that because it's like a silly moment but it does speak to something deeper which is that in the real field of politics on which these activists were taking part, they were unbelievably naive and unbelievably tactically stupid. Not in a way that NDI and IRI training would have somehow prevented them from being. But when you had, for example, there's a long history of boycott as a way of expressing dissent. So in the time of Mubarak when there's a rigged election for a powerless parliament, it was viewed, and I don't even think this is a great idea but anyway, this is a tradition. It was viewed as one viable way to respond to that as a political party to show your dissent would be to boycott the elections. So if you boycott, you don't run and you don't vote, you're at least depriving the Mubarak regime of the ability to say, see, we had a real election and two dissenters got into a parliament of 500. So it was a weapon of the week and there's a long tradition of it. There's a long tradition of the walkout and the boycott in Arab politics as a way of voicing dissent going back to the year of the 50s and 60s. So this tradition ends up getting deployed over and over in the transitional period of 2011 to 2012 in a completely ineffectual way. So at the one moment where there actually is flocks in transition, the one moment in which the military ruling class doesn't have all the power in its hands anymore and isn't sure how and whether it's going to get it back. You regularly saw not the Muslim brothers but the secular, moderate, liberal, that sector of the political sphere saying, I refuse. I will not be a party to this meeting or that conference or this thing and walking out and leaving the playing field open to generals and Muslim brothers. And we saw this writ small in the revolutionary milieu where people would disagree, Moaz and Basim would disagree over, like the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, the one fragile institution to come out of Tahrir Square, the one place in which religious and non-religious MB, non-MB people were working together even ineffectually, even minimally, even on the margins, working together, talking to each other eventually over the solvable and somewhat petty question of which new members to admit to their executive council, they just dissolved. They said, you know what, forget it, let's just break this thing up. And at the time that was happening and this was right when Morsi was elected, I remember talking to all of them and asking, don't you think there's a danger and risk in dissolving this thing since there's no other body of any sort anywhere in this country in which people who oppose dictatorship but come from different backgrounds will sit at the same table? And they said, no, not really, we'll form something else, we'll form something new and better. And of course they didn't, nothing else was ever formed. And this was, the short-lived parliament had already been disbanded. And yet, without a second thought, these, and these were the princesses and princesses of activism, these were the politically savvy folks who took this decision, which was a fundamentally, I don't know if I can say catastrophic because maybe things would've turned out just as bad as they had anyway, but it was a terrible decision. And they didn't, I mean, they were thinking about politics, they just made a bad call. And today, they're still trying to overcome the damage of that era. There still are April 6th and socialist and Muslim brotherhood and independent activists in Istanbul still fighting, still mistrusting each other, still accusing each other of being secret agents for the state or secret agents for the brotherhood or secret agents for the Saudis or whoever. And still to this day, not being able to have a sort of civil discourse through which to try and come up with a core political agenda. So this revolution has been called the Facebook Revolution, the Twitter Revolution. So I feel like a question on technology and the internet is due. So I monitor a lot of Egyptian activism online and I see that it's still actually working but in different ways. So for example, it seems that there's a campaign by so many different parties against the curriculum of Al-Azhar and producing ISIS-like fighters. So what role do you perceive for the internet going forward? Well, I mean, I sort of thought by now that the sort of techno triumphalism with which the uprisings were greeted by fans of Twitter and Facebook had sort of disappeared and that people understood that the internet played an important role just like the telephone and the newspaper play an important role as a communications platform for people who are doing real things in the real world. The key innovation of Facebook primarily and to a lesser extent Twitter is that it created a space that allowed a conversation to go on in societies in which there isn't actually public space. And mutual, I would add, don't you think? Yeah, yeah. I mean, people are making their own channels and videos and everybody has their own channel and it's... I think actually less, I don't think YouTube is as important for the thing I'm talking about because YouTube is like your bullhorn where you put something out but the thing that's actually has had, so I don't care about techno triumphalist BS, I care about things that change the way real relationships occur in the real world and with regards to that, you see Facebook and Twitter playing a very important role because you have... So in other words, the way in which YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are used today by the Egyptian regime or the Syrian opposition to advance certain propaganda is interesting but it's not very determinative to anything people actually do. However, the conversations and mobilization that have been occurring on Facebook and Twitter during that same period, both among pro-regime forces and anti-regime forces, that is very important because it's like a lot of the networks of people who then have proceeded to go out and be, whether they're demonstrating, whether they're campaigning for military rule or campaigning against it, they are creating their networks online and they're deepening their relationships online and a lot of the political discussion and debate that did occur and does occur today is happening in Facebook threads and that is very important because it's real dialogue, idea creation, network creation. And individuation, but you have an opinion even. Yes. I mean, it goes against the whole sheet mentality you count. You have an individual, it is really enormous, I believe. The thing you just brought up is really the, if I'm optimistic today, it's because an irreversible process of individuation and ownership of citizenship has taken place and it cannot be reversed. So today in Egypt, there's such a sort of propaganda bonanza around love of Sisi and his cult of personality and the military being great and for people who liked the prospect of change, it's so depressing. They look at this and they say, how can it be that these millions of people who just a few years ago were so attractively bold and utopian are today cheering this dictator? And I say, first of all, remember the historical vantage point. I mean, this is not, this is not saying it's gonna take place on a semester cycle or on a news cycle. It's gonna take place on a generational cycle. And if you look at the amount of political expression and individual thinking and talking that's going on in public today, even under these levels of oppression, you realize that that process that happened, the Egyptians called it breaking the wall of fear. Academics would call it individuation or sort of realization of agency, but it happened and once it happens, even if an individual then goes quiet for a while, they don't become, once again, a passive receptacle for an authoritarian state. And that means, and that's something that I think the regime has either misunderstood or has forgotten. They're gonna have to contend with that. They don't necessarily have to contend with it by liberalizing or reforming, although that would be one nice option, but they do have to take it into account. For questions, please, yes, sir. And if you could just wait a second for the microphone. Thank you. Yeah, is that on? Yeah, okay. I'm Jed Schilling with the Millennium Institute and I've got a two-part question looking forward. One, the Sisi regime is apparently trying to make some economic reforms on energy policy, renewables, housing, providing and things like that, which will make life better for many more people as been the case in the past. Do you think that it's likely this will have much success and go forward and get the support of the existing elites and those who've been in power for so long? And the second point is given the threat of ISIS throughout the Middle East. Do you think it's important to maintain a very strong government in Egypt to protect its longer-term interests from that kind of extremist violence that seems to be going on? So it's sort of two paths looking forward. Great, great questions. I think like any hopefully decent human being, I want Egypt to succeed. There's 90 million people who live there, most of them in abject poverty. I hope they have secure, stable, better, prosperous lives. So I'm rooting for success, even if I am not a fan of the pathway of the current government came to power. So that said, C.C. is younger and more vigorous than his predecessors. He's done a couple of things, what you mentioned as well as some actually pretty good ideas on subsidy reform or the way in which bread and food subsidies are distributed. I hope these things work because they're sorely needed. Why I'm not optimistic? I'm not optimistic because this man is ruling from an incredibly narrow circle of military men who have a proven track record of incompetence even in their core area, which is running a military. So in a nation of sort of decrepit institutions, the military in Egypt is the most popular one and it's a functional one. That has led people to exaggerate its competence. And so I think from an analytical point of view, it would be foolish to expect the Egyptian generals who've given us many of the biggest bungles in the last 60 years to somehow using the same mines and the same insular cloistered and autocratic approach, the same indifference to good ideas that come from elsewhere, and the same indifference to scrutiny and accountability in just the technocratic realm. Why would one expect that? And sorry, we've come to power with billions of dollars of direct handouts from the Gulf. Why should we expect them to be economic geniuses? Because the problems are very complicated. The problems would baffle an economic genius. So I just don't think the smart money is on betting that they'll somehow have success. I hope they do. The security issue is a great one to bring up because the security problem that we now all agree in the buzzword of the day, we have to get together to counter violent extremism. Well, let's make sure we're aware of how much of that violent extremism has been created by the very government that we're now gonna empower to help us fight it. That is the Egyptian regime is a big part of the problem. And we're not gonna see the end of ISIS and al-Qaeda offshoots in the Sinai and in Egypt by a regime whose one of whose political platforms is to eradicate not just Jihadis but the entire Muslim Brotherhood, which has been around since 1928 and is actually probably impossible to eradicate. So I'm not highly optimistic on either of those two fronts. Hi, my name is Carrie Evans from the National Democratic Institute. My question's really about the revolutionary individuals that are in your book and what type of entry points you think are available to them now. So you said Basim was running for the parliamentary elections. Something I guess we've kind of seen through my work and my team at my Egypt team at work is that the local council elections might be more of an entryway for these types of individuals. What we found from parliamentary election, the coalitions that have been set up, it's kind of even with the quotas, you need to pay to get on one of these lists. So that was my question if with the 50,000 seats that are open for local council elections, if maybe this is the long-term game is played at that level for the type of people in your book. Yeah, I mean, that's starting to get into really, really, really long-term. The powers to be are not interested in sharing power with anyone who doesn't agree with them. So I mean, the local councils have been corrupt patronage and enforcement mechanisms for the entire modern era. I don't see why that would change any more than CC would let there be a parliament that had any real political power and dissenters in it. So I know lots of Egyptians have talked about using local councils as a path forward, but none of them have the money where with all are reached to actually meaningfully do that and just as much pay to play on that level as it is on the local council level as it is on the level of parliament. And I fully expect those structures to continue to be unresponsive and corrupt and authoritarian as they were in the past. I think if you go look at a local council in Anashweyath or in an Egyptian village in a year's time, you will find it being an enforcement arm of patronage or regime control, not a venue for a local accountability and self-improvement. And that's by design. That will be by design of the regime, not by failure of Egyptians who don't want it to be that way to change it. Now, what are the entry points? They're few and far between, but they're being taken. We have activists who are some of them working within the political system, Social Democratic Party, the Distur party, Abdelmanem Abou Foutou's strong Egypt party. Those, not all of them are contesting the parliamentary elections, some are, some aren't, but they are still operating in Egypt. Their reach is limited, no one will put them on TV anymore, but they're commenting on developments, they're issuing statements, they're meeting and coming up with policy platforms and ideas for the future. That's a limited impact entry point, but it's an important one. There are the opposition groups, April 6th, Muslim Brotherhood, revolutionary socialists who continue to have very small street protests, which are, again, symbolically important, but not very effectual. And you have the exiles who are appearing in the media, writing things, drafting policy ideas. That's about it, that's the space that exists today. And that's important for the long run. None of these activities are going to topple a regime. None of these activities are gonna corner CeCe and the ruling generals into deciding to share power or change the way they approach things, but they will result in a much better prepared and well thought out opposition when the next explosion forces a renewed opening in the political space. There's a gentleman right here on the menu. I'm David, I'm a graduate student at George Mason University and I wanna say first, thank you for the book. I was also lucky enough to be in Egypt when the revolution started and the narrative that you tell confirms my intuition for why the revolutionary youth didn't seem to go anywhere after a really hopeful beginning. But I had a really generic question. It seems like it's easy to lay a lot of the blame on the US because of our close ties to the military and our persistent support of the military, but at the same time, how much could we really do to influence CeCe and what's happened? So what's your opinion on how much blame you lay on the US, if any, for what's happened in Egypt? Well, I think we've learned quite clearly that the US has much less direct influence and power than maybe some people thought before the uprisings. So I have a long critique of the US policy and lack of strategy towards the Arab uprisings and in Egypt. The strategic incoherence and drift and reactive approach has cost a lot. And I won't take the next hour going into detail on that, but I don't think... If the US had done it right, it wouldn't have created freedom in Egypt because we were not in the driver's seat. It certainly wasn't the US that put $12 billion in the Egyptian Central Bank in the summer of 2013 to enable a military coup. So that was Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. So we were not in the driver's seat. That said, boy, have we made a hash out of everything and it didn't have to be that way. Somehow the US has managed to leave every single faction in Egypt feeling betrayed and abandoned from the generals who get billions of dollars worth of aid from the US down to the revolutionaries and to the Muslim brothers and everybody else. That takes some real doing. And had that been done right, I'm not sure whether I think it would have changed the outcome. I don't think the US could have forced all the coup. I don't think the US could have made the Muslim Brotherhood govern decently. I don't think they were gonna do it. And so we have to recognize the limits of US power. But I do think in general, if the US had some kind of a strategic vision and some kind of ability to be honest about what it's real core interests there were, so there wouldn't be this incoherence between the pretend values and the real security interests, things would maybe be a little less volatile. And possibly the US could be a force for some kind of real stability in the region. And the key thing I would like to see the US do is redefine this honestly used term stability. Everyone wants stability, everyone likes stability. And the US has made this now a load star with Egypt and with a lot of the countries in the region, which is we want stability. Well, Egypt today is inherently unstable. It is represented by a government that relies on a fundamentally dishonest reading of what it's doing and what its own people want and is endemically abusing them into quiescence. That is not stable. That's not the recipe for stability. Every single condition that led to the unpredictable and unpredictable series of explosions in 2010 and 2011 is still present today. And we say, well, we need stable allies like these corrupt nepotistic violent tyrants who aren't really great allies, it doesn't, I mean, it's not gonna work. Forget about what you're, you know, maybe you find that distasteful, maybe you find that just the necessary way of doing business, okay, fine. If you're analytically clear headed, you should be able to see that it's not a safe bet. It's not stable. Let's redefine stability as systems democratic or not that have safety valves built in, some kind of accountability, some kind of pluralism when it comes to policy ideas and some kind of pluralism when it comes to the rights and dignity of the citizens. Because otherwise you're hitching yourself up to systems that are, you know, manholes on a steam valve. I mean, it's not architect, the political architecture is not sound. I'm so glad you said that. Could I totally agree? Here. And my name Middle East news agency, Egypt. First of all, I highly appreciate your understanding of the Egyptian culture and the Egyptian people. Second, I want to ask you that you have said that these dissidents that you talk about them that they are still stupid in politics. They still don't know politics very well and they are not taught of politics in a sense, in a good sense, in a sound sense, you see. So I think, don't you think that if we start by teaching these people or the people in general of good politics, of how to handle politics, how to play politics first before talking about democracy. And I think this is jumping to conclusion if you talk about democracy before people know how to practice democracy. People, as you said, that they try to boycott elections and this becomes a tradition for the Egyptians. Now, unfortunately. So do you think that we have to start by teaching people how to play politics before talking about democracy in Egypt? No. Actually, can I add one more question relating? Thank you for your question. My sense is people are learning. Do you think they are learning how to do it very organically, very so? So first of all, I don't think is that all of them are stupid and everything is politically stupid. Some, some, okay. And look, I think I understand your question. It's a good question. I think it betrays a sort of misunderstanding of politics. Even that question, I doubt you mean it this way, but that question is built on a misunderstanding of what politics is. Politics is the process by which people try and figure out how to divide political power and how to rule themselves. No one in Egypt is in a position to teach anybody else what is good politics, least of all today's Egyptian regime, which knows nothing about politics, which is allergic to even its own internal politics. There's politics ever. There's politics inside the military of Egypt and because they don't know how to manage their own politics, we have leaks of private conversations between the president's chief of staff and other powerful generals that are incredibly compromising to the regime. These things happen because there is no politics allowed. So it leaks out in other places. So no one's in a position, least of all, leadership to teach anybody else politics. Politics is learned by doing. Straight and simple. You look at a country like America, sometimes the politics are just a wreck. They're terrible, and you wouldn't say, hey, let's teach someone else in the world how to do politics the way we do it. But on the other hand, you wouldn't want someone to come in and teach us how to do politics either. Politics is how a society negotiates these things. If that process is not allowed to take place, which is the case today in Egypt, you have retardation in sort of all possible areas. If you allow it to take place, people often do stupid things or take stupid positions, but by nature of the negotiations over what to do about that, you get change, progress, and dynamics. So if Egypt ever has a better form of government, which I hope it does, it's going to happen on a distinctly Egyptian path. No one, at least of all, would I purport to suggest what that path should be. It's going to happen because of Egyptian aspirations that are then negotiated by Egyptian power centers. And partly it will be because of aspirations for freedom and for ideas. And partly it will be because of failures by the people who have power to deliver the things they have to deliver in order to stay in power. And so because of that, not because of moral reasons, but because of that practical concern, they'll gradually be willing to share some portion of their power with someone else. And that is how politics will develop. And what we'll see, for sure, is this generation, this young young, and as you know by different standards, young is a very wide term. These youth, the 40-year-old youth will soon be 50. And the 18-year-old will be 40. And those people are going to be part of the political elite. Some of them will be, as Basim is, will be branded sell-outs for being willing to work within the system. But they will be part of the elite. They'll be part of the decision-making process. And they're going to bring into it one way or another politics as they define it, not as you or me define it. And politics is a process, not as a specific agenda of demands. When that happens, which will happen over a generation at least, maybe two, we hopefully will see differences not just in outcomes, but the differences in how people are willing to tolerate dissent and discussion. One of the big failings in Egypt, and it's really the saddest one, is the reversal of free discourse. Because for about two years, there was this great nonviolent flowering of debate. And it mostly took place on TV, on these talk shows. And you had old regime people, and Islamists, and youth, and academic experts. Like the whole panoply of people who had an opinion about police reform, grain reform, substitute reform, whatever, out there. And again, a lot of them said inane stuff. A lot of them said smart stuff. But they were saying it to each other and fighting about it. And people were watching and listening and learning. And that process has been completely shut down since the summer of 2013. And what CC's regime has said is that that kind of discussion right now will hurt security and the national interest. And so now is the time for everyone to shut up. And if you want to fight terrorism, you better not go on TV and say something is wrong with the health ministry's approach to hospitals, because somehow the terrorists are going to get us. And we're familiar with that kind of discourse in America, because that's what it was like after 9-11 if you wanted to say that you thought torture was a bad idea or you thought that invading Iraq was a bad idea. So these are not pathologies that are somehow endemic to Egypt in which mature democracies are immune to, but they are unhealthy and unhelpful in all these cases. And in a pre-democracy like Egypt, they stunk a lot of potential development. Thank you. That was thanks for writing the book. And I follow your writings generally and Twitter and all the other ways that you broadcast. And I find a lot of the stuff that you write to be interesting. I thought the piece you wrote on Mosul and sort of identity issues, I've told a lot of people about that article. So I think a lot of what you've written has been really insightful, so thank you. My name is John Iskander and I work at the Foreign Service Institute, which is out in Arlington. But I guess the question I was going to ask you is about the Muslim Brothers and sort of your read and take on the future of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt based on sort of your time in Egypt over the past years, but also over the time since the revolution. And one of the things that is striking, I mean, I've hardly been back to Egypt since the revolution, since the uprisings. But clearly in terms of sort of the visible space, the Muslim Brothers, of course, have lost their perch, as you said, through forcible means as much as anything else, but also through the sort of the campaign, the public relations campaign against the Brothers. And that's one of the things then that I wonder, both between that and the fact that they did so poorly when they were in power to the extent that they were in power under Morsi. I wonder if this has in fact sort of dented the sort of the long term arc. I mean, I find interesting your comment in your original comments about both Arab nationalism and Islamism having failed. And I think we wouldn't have said that before the uprisings. I don't think at least the latter part of that. We all said that about Arab nationalism clearly as a project that it had failed, but that Islamism was still perceived to be the future. Is that something then that, in a sense, as a result of the uprisings and sort of the various actions that have taken place by all the different actors, how do you see that? And do you see sort of what is the role then medium long run for the Brothers? It's a great question. I'll make a couple of points because I could talk a lot about that. Just conceptually, what does Islamism mean? I asked a lot of self-defined Islamists to define it. And they can't define it because it doesn't mean anything. It's not, I mean, a country like Egypt, you've got a 10% Christian minority, and then you've got 90% Muslims, most of whom are religious, and who run the gamut from Ghamaslamiyah, jihadists to secular state Arab nationalists or secular liberals. And they're all, are you an Islamist? Sure I'm an Islamist. I'm religious. And I come up with a lot of my political ideas because of what I read in the Quran. Who's an Islamist? Morse an Islamist? And that incoherence was skirted for such a long time because they didn't have to answer any questions. As soon as they had to answer even the first questions, what's the difference between the Salafi Nur Party and the Muslim Brotherhood? What's the difference between this Islamist and that Islamist? It is meaningless. So once they were forced to say, what do we believe in while we believe in our movement having total control over the Ministry of the Interior? Well, I don't think that's a good idea, said a lot of Egyptians who had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood. And it's very, very, very important that I make clear. I think the Muslim Brotherhood was horrifying in power. They were not, it wasn't that they made mistakes in their government. They were totalitarian, authoritarian, power grabbing. They did all of the same bad things that the predecessor did. Now they had less power. They didn't control the military. But when they could, they would torture people. They would shut people up. They would manipulate the media. They incited sectarian hatred. They fanned the flames of anti-Christian, anti-Shia, pro-Jihad. I mean, they were, they did all these things in the public sphere, in open view, inside. Didn't it lead a lot of their members? I mean, I've read a few biographies of people from within the party while they were in power, dissenting and writing memoirs that this is just as bad as Mubarak. I'm not sure that there were inner members of the brotherhood that lots of, lots, lots of. Absolutely, even like the head of the legal council, the head of the women council, including also some foot soldiers. But certainly all their soft support evaporated over these things. So I mean, Islamists won 70% of the vote in the parliamentary elections and 50 plus a bit in the presidential. Most of those people weren't Muslim Brotherhood members. They were soft support, break that down how you will. That evaporated very quickly when the brotherhood was revealed in power. Now, what about going forward? The brotherhood is stuck in a rut. The brotherhood has not learned any lessons from the failed presidency and from the coup. So I've actually, I recently happened to interview some brothers in exile, some official brothers in exile in Turkey. And it was, I mean, it would have been funny if it weren't so serious. They want Morsi reinstated. That's their starting demand. They want a national dialogue and they want it to begin with the reinstatement of Morsi. Well, that's lunacy for a variety of reasons, including that no one in Egypt wants him to be president again. He was a failed president. You haven't admitted any of the mistakes he made. It's never gonna happen. So you're just taking a completely maximalist position. It's absurd. And they are sending and encouraging some of their members to go and die in Egypt in protests whose demand is the reinstatement of Morsi. That's their approach. That's not the approach of an organization that's learning lessons from the transition period. Now, like the Egyptian army, I guess, they're doubling down. But I think a lot of Egyptians, when this period of CC euphoria fades and probably most of the systemic problems remain, we're gonna find a lot of, I mean, Egyptians are fundamentally pragmatic, sort of flagmatic people who are, have a high sort of allergy to BS. They see it, you know? And when the inflection point ends, CC's not gonna have this cult of personality that he had a year ago. He doesn't even have it today, like he did six months ago. And in the lee of that sort of the period of exhaustion and the period of trauma from the coup and Rava passes, people are gonna draw on Islam and draw on the experience of secular political life to articulate something. I don't know what it'll be. I mean, it could be something worse, you know? But it will be something. We have time for one more question. The gentleman there. I'll tell you what, darling, let's take the three questions and then- Yeah, let's take all three. If you haven't listened to it, technically, you don't wanna get the question. Thank you. I'm Jack Inman. You're on. Jack Inman, I'm in Consular Affairs, actually, in the State Department. In fact, my son and I have both been in Egypt. I haven't been back there since the revolution. My son may have been, he was four years in Amman, and now he's in Tunisia. By the way, we saw a great headline at the height of the revolution, it was saying Cairo and New York Anarchy, and we were saying, what's the news? But we were, he and his wife are both starting three-year tours in Tunisia now. And I was just wondering if you got any, I wanted to, is that a whole other forum you don't wanna get into, or do you wanna say anything about Tunisia, or from that matter, about the role of the Coptic? I know that's about three different forums there, but if you wanna say anything about that- There's all three questions, and then I'll touch on some of those things. Yeah. Thank you. Mohamed Monsour, former journalist. I just have a comment. First, about the title of your book. How did you think about, what do you mean by once upon a revolution? Second, about the, now we are given the fact that there's crackdown on media, on lots of human rights abuses, lots of people in jail, lots of many massacres happened. They're a way to get out of this. I mean, you will find two sides in Egypt. Muslim Brotherhood, who want to overthrow, like the solution is to overthrow what they call the military coup, and reinstate Morsi, and other people who just accept the status quo, and organize groups, able sex, Muslim Brotherhood, they are all in jail or fled the country. So my question is about a solution. They're a way to change the regime from inside, in a way to pressure the regime to accept the human rights, and release people who are in jail, and have better performance in terms of the economy and everything. Thank you. Okay, give him the microphone and then to the gentleman in the front. Hi, I'm Diyar Wajde, I'm a Syrian lawyer. Speaking about the history and the experiences that the lady mentioned about the youth. In Syria, in Egypt, in the Arab country, the people were prevented to participate in the government, in the policy, in general speaking. So I think it's an intellectual dishonesty and intellectual dishonesty to say that people are stupid or not. All people, I think, need to work more to improve their capacity to participate in the government, to participate in the policy. And in particular, in the Arab world, people were prevented for many decades and we cannot just ignore the external factors and speak about the internal factor. All your statement was focusing on the internal factors. We know we have in Egypt a bureaucracy, 40 years old state, even the CC, he, I think, depended on the bureaucracy to overthrow mercy. And that's happened, created the bread crisis, oil crisis, gasoline crisis, people got anger. So even here in the United States, we saw in Wall Street lack of experiences, lack of political vision, people in Wall Street in DC. So we cannot just say people are stupid or not. We need to participate more, to study more, to learn more, and then we can join and do the impact that we want to achieve our plan. On the other hand, speaking about ISIS, it's the edge of globalization. So I think ISIS played a role in the Middle East to create a new conflict. We have another vision about the Middle East, how the regime now, in the international context, rapidly changing. I think the solution was adequate. Last month, it's out of date now. So I think ISIS created a new crisis in the Middle East, and now the international community need to support even the dictatorship to fight against ISIS. This is my view. Thank you. Okay, last question. My name is Middle East Policy Council. So recently, in Egyptian, the People's Court overturned convictions, corruption convictions against Mubarak. Do you think this is a reflection of Mubarak's continued influence in the government, or is there something else at play here? I think it's a reflection of a sort of revanches judiciary that's in service of of the new regime and the old regime. I don't think it's Mubarak's influence. I think Mubarak is no longer calling shots, but much of his regime remains intact. I mean, it's sort of incorrect to understand C.C. as a reconstitution of Mubarak. Okay, he's a part of the old regime, but not all of the old regime. I mean, Mubarak in some ways had a much more diverse, civilianized ruling clique, including the corrupt oligarchs and the crooks around Gamal, along with his long game of balancing the military by beefing up the ministry of the interior. So it was a sort of complicated coalition of actors that undergirded Mubarak's rule. C.C. has risen out of a much narrower sort of institutional base in the military. And I don't think anyone knows exactly whether what the courts are doing is sort of voluntarily in service of the new regime, but also the way of showing their power so that if they chose not to be in lockstep, they could, or whether it's at the request of C.C. Now, C.C. has worked very hard to spread the idea that the courts are independent and they're doing these things. And for example, oh, it says poor me, like I didn't want these jazeera guys arrested like this, but it happened and who am I to tell the courts what to do? And then we hear these phone calls where he's telling the courts exactly what to do and they do it. But I don't think that means that he's the marionette and every judge does what he says. I mean, it's a complicated thing. I don't think it shows Mubarak in any way, sort of coming back or pulling the strings. But when you look at power in Egypt, there's power in the presidency, there's power in the staff and the army, in the ministry of the interior, in the judiciary to some extent among the oligarchic elite that had coalesced around the old ruling party. And those aren't the only power centers, those are just some of the main ones. And there's an ongoing political struggle between those centers for control of the state. And that's unresolved as now. And I mean, a big part of what C.C. is gambling on is on somehow being able to use, he's independent of these other power bases. He didn't come to power, the old NDP network didn't put him into power, the courts didn't put him into power. He came to power with one very strong base within the military. That's a weakness that's also potentially, he thinks of strength. I'm not optimistic about this, but it's a worthwhile possibility that because of that, he'll be able to implement certain kinds of reforms because he won't be beholden to certain constituencies to which Mubarak was beholden. And we'll see how this plays out with the subsidy reform and some of these other questions. Obviously, external actors play a huge role in this, most notably, Gulf money. And I did, I talked about a lot of external actors that affect Egypt, so maybe I wasn't clear, maybe you've misinterpreted my comments, but I don't think I could have been clearer in saying that the outcomes in Egypt were determined not by failures of revolutionary youth, but by the successes of the old regime in reasserting its prerogatives. And that one of the key reasons they were able to do so was because of the unconditional financial support of the Gulf monarchies. So I'll state that again, hopefully, you know, I don't think Egypt is messed up because the youth weren't creative enough. I think the youth failed in certain ways that they will eventually come to succeed in and that will enrich political life, but they're not the ones who were in control. So hopefully you understand that is sort of a guiding principle of my analysis here. The questions about, you know, what could happen next and, you know, what are the possibilities that... This is where I'm just as sort of pessimistic as anybody else. I mean, I think the thing I find encouraging is when I hear the current leaders of April 6th in Cairo talking in a very sophisticated way about coming up with a long-term alternative to military rule. So they're tiny, they're in battle, there's not many of them, they're organizing in secret, but they've learned a lesson from the last four years and so they are still calling for the fall of the regime, they're still calling for protests, but they are also spending a lot of time feeling responsible for describing what it is they think should replace that old regime, which was not the case four years ago. People were like, it's not my job to figure out what comes next, it's my job to push them out of their chair. That I find heartening. So I hear that among the Social Democrats, among the Distur Party people, I hear that among the April 6th folks and the Fatou's people, I hear that among some independent activists. I don't hear it. So the elite, the ruling elite was terrified for a couple of years. They thought they were done for it. This thing happened that they couldn't control and they thought, oh God, we're done. They're gonna string us up because we're criminals, a lot of us, and we did horrible things. And then they won. A couple of years went by, they won. And so today a lot of these folks, instead of saying, wow, that was a close call, let's think long and hard about how we can maybe address some of those things so that we can stay in power for decades to come. Instead they're saying, we crushed you and now we're gonna humiliate you and take revenge on you and you see it in the completely unnecessary persecution and humiliation of dissidents. You see it in leaked phone calls that are personal phone calls from people in the activist community that are being aired on TV just to make them look crappy. It's straight out revenge behavior from the old security services and when I meet with Egyptians who are sort of had a stake in the old regime and who are now happy the way things turned out, I see no sense of humility, no sense of lessons or no sense of, oh, you know what? We've gotta at least do better at, yeah, we don't care about rights, fine, but we've gotta do a better job of making sure that the police don't abuse and torture people all the time. We've gotta do a better job of making sure that people aren't capriciously subjected to their homelessness, poverty, and hunger. You don't hear that. And so if you ask me, what do I realistically think is gonna be the next change point? It's gonna be another breaking point created by rank incompetence or mistreatment of the public. It's not gonna be because of some brilliantly organized, you know, I think the last thing I expect to happen is for the dissident political class to somehow coalesce under an unbelievably well-thought-out unified manner in which Islamists and secular Egyptians together have come up with 10 core demands and have a president of their movement. I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon, but what is likely to happen is a kind of collapse or inflection point caused by fracture. So on that... And there was Tunis. Two IO blasts. Yeah, I mean, Tunis and the Cobb, those are great questions and it's a long thing to try and compare why Tunisia has worked out better to why Egypt is not, but I don't think I wanna start after that. All righty, we'll conclude here then. Thank you so much for joining us and for this great welcome. And thank you for your questions.