 I'm here to talk about the momentous events in in the Middle East and my new book The Struggle for Egypt from Nasser to Tahir Square. I think there are two things that experts got wrong. First we were so obsessed with regime politics. What was going on among the critical constituencies that made up this regime, the military, the internal security services, big business, regime affiliated intellectuals. What they were doing and we were looking at whether they were sticking with the leadership or determining that their interests were better served by joining the opposition or just breaking from the leadership more generally and that really didn't happen. Actually it did happen. It happened in Tunisia on January 14, 2011, the day that the military pushed Ben Ali from power. It did happen in Egypt on February 10th and 11th when the military pushed Mubarak from power but these things happened too late, too late for them to be analytically useful. What we were really looking forward to have these breaks within the regime or cracks within the regime as a signal for society to organize and that would be a signal to us that these regimes were on the ropes when in fact it was the other way around. Society's organized producing cracks within the regime. So essentially we had the narrative backwards. Our expectations were backwards. So what is it? What should we have been looking at? I'll go through this pretty quickly. There are essentially three ways in which leaders either elicit the loyalty of their people or establish control over them. One is vision. To have that, that was a George Bush, first George Bush, that vision thing. And I'm not being flip. I'm talking about a positive vision for the future that is emotionally and materially satisfying for the largest number of people. That's a very jargony geeky social science way of saying something along the lines of the American dream. Think about it. You know you can grow up in a you know bedroom community of New York City. Your parents aren't connected to anybody. You work very hard. You get into a good college. You study languages hard. You get into a good graduate school. You do well. And you wake up one day and you're the Haseeb J. Sabag senior fellow from Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. You're essentially living the American dream. I am living the American dream. In all seriousness this is something and it's not just an economic issue. It's the whole package of freedom of association. The freedoms. The idea that we live in a society where our government is accessible to us. Where people can process their grievances through ostensibly neutral institutions. And this is something that enough Americans have experienced that it makes common sense to them. So this kind of positive vision for the future elicits the loyalty of people. Nobody likes opening up their checkbook on April 15th but this country has been pretty good to us so most of us do. The second way in which leaders well they don't elicit the loyalty this way they establish control over their population is through bribery. Is through bribery. They open up the vaults and they buy political quiescence. Think about Qatar. This tiny little country that has resources for as far as anybody can see. And at the end of each fiscal year. The Amir cuts a check to 125,000 of his cousins in the amount of $160,000. That's pretty good. If you define politics as the control over the competition and distribution of resources, Qatar is a country with no politics. I once I was just as a son I was once in Doha and I asked my house I'd like to meet the opposition. Opposition. Opposition. So they came up with this one guy and we sat down and I said well what is it you want? He said Dr. Steven, I'm happy but I could be happier which just proves my case that this you know check at the end of every fiscal year buys a certain amount of political quiescence. Is it any coincidence that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia opened up the coffers just as Mubarak fell and invested $130 billion in his own society and for good measure through in $10 billion for the Omanis and another $10 billion for the Bahrainis which are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The third way, the third way in which leaders elicit, well actually don't elicit, established control over their people is through either the threat of force or the actual application of force. This is the most expensive, the least efficient and riskiest way of establishing control. As I know if you have this framework of vision bribery and coercion, you can see what the problems are in the Middle East. Hustney Mubarak of Egypt didn't really have enough. He didn't have the financial wherewithal of the Amir of Qatar, the King of Saudi Arabia. He only had just enough to buy off certain amounts of people, certain groups of people, the constituency for his regime who didn't crack until the very very end. He certainly didn't have a vision. The code of the late Mubarak period was stability for the sake of development. That's not exactly something that brings tears to your eyes, makes you want to stand up and sing the national anthem or write a check on Tax Day. In fact, to make matters worse, the development that there was over the course of almost 30 years at Mubarak was in power, was not shared by the vast majority of Egyptians. The stability that they got was at the end of a retan cane and metal truncheon of the internal security services. And that's the key to why Egyptians ultimately overwhelmed Mubarak. I can't tell you why it happened at the beginning of 2011, why it happened on those dates, but I can tell you that this mix of vision bribery and coercion made it inevitable that it would happen because at some point, the Egyptian people were going to determine that they were no longer afraid of Mubarak and the regime. And that's in fact exactly what people were saying. Those first few nights of the uprising when I was in Tahrir Square, not only were they saying that Mubarak should join Ben Ali, not only were they demanding freedom and a more democratic system, but they were saying that they were no longer afraid. And the longer that they stayed in the square, or when they came back when they were chased out, the more convinced those people who are sitting on the fence who supported what they were saying, but were too afraid of the police, that the cost of going out into the streets and demanding change were not as great as people previously believed. And that's when you had the revolutionary bandwagon. More and more and more and more people changed their calculation of what the costs were for demanding change. Until by day 14, 15, 16, there were so many people out demanding change that it was more costly for some people not to go out in the streets than it was to stay home. And that's when everybody started burning their membership cards in the ruling National Democratic Party, which was neither national nor democratic, nor much of a party. This is the key challenge for the post Mubarak period is how to switch that formula, how to have more vision, how to answer the key questions that Egyptians have been asking themselves for the better part of a century in a way that makes the most sense for Egyptians. Now here's the good news about this. Since Mubarak's fall, Egyptians are mobilized. They are asking questions about what kind of society they want, what kind of government they want, what Egypt stands for, what it's placed in the world. Important questions about Egyptian identity that has been debated for the better part of the last 100 years. But for the first time, it's being debated in a relatively freer political environment. And Egyptians themselves have a chance to answer these questions themselves and write their own history as a result. And they are having this debate up and down Egypt, across the socioeconomic spectrum, to various degrees of sophistication, they are having these debates. They are trying to answer these questions in ways that make the most sense to the most Egyptians. The next challenge is the ongoing protests, the permanent revolution in Egypt. Very early on, in March of 2011, there was a referendum that was held on critical changes to the existing Egyptian constitution that would guide the transitional period. And for a variety of reasons, which I won't go into, but I could in Q&A, if you really want to, the revolutionary groups that instigated the uprising were against these amendments and campaigned against them. And the outcome of the referendum was 76% of Egyptians who voted voted for the referendum and the rest voted against. And it was clear to the revolutionaries from that point that they really weren't very good actually at politics. They may have been good at organizing and instigating an uprising, but they weren't very good and they were up against some formidable obstacles, some very seasoned political operatives, and they turned themselves into a permanent revolution. And over the course of the spring and the summer, we had 17 Fridays of. Remember during the uprising, you had Friday of rage, Friday of this, Friday of, well, in the spring and summer, we had Friday of protecting the revolution, Friday of persistence, Friday of persistence too, Friday of persistence of protecting the revolution, Friday of dignity of protecting the revolution. I mean, it became banal. I started naming my own Fridays at the Council on Foreign Relations, we had Fridays off during the summer, so I had Friday of Jiffy Lube, Friday of going on vacation, Friday of picking the kids up at camp. It really became a I protest therefore I am kind of thing, which is subsequently morphed into something more sinister, not necessarily the total fault of the revolutionaries, but things have turned violent. There was a weak long battle between revolutionary groups and the military and the police forces in late November in the run up to the beginning of the people's assembly elections. When I was in Cairo the last time in mid-December, I was witness to the battle of Kosterlany Street and I will tell you there was no political point to this. It seemed like it seemed like gang warfare and having been in Tahir at the beginning of the uprising, to me, this was a warped, bizarre world of Tahir Square where that was peaceful mostly and most of the violence was perpetrated by the regime. This was purposely violent and it was something that I think is going to be an ongoing challenge. That's not to suggest that the revolutionaries are wrong. If I was Egyptian I probably be part of this permanent revolution as well because of I think the third great challenge that Egyptians are facing right now, which is the role of the Supreme Council of the armed forces. You may remember prior to or just as they were pushing Mubarak from power what became the current military leadership in the form of the Supreme Council of the armed forces. Supreme Council of the armed forces is something that existed before but in its current iteration in executive authority in Egypt said that they supported the legitimate demands of the Egyptian people. In fact, everything they have done since suggests otherwise, suggests absolutely otherwise. In fact, what the Egyptian armed forces has demonstrated over the course of this past year is that they have a very different conception of social cohesion and political stability from what a democratic Egypt would look like. At best it looks like a loyal opposition. The second thing that the Egyptian armed forces is after is protection of their rather robust economic interest. Egyptian military is engaged in the economy in big ways. If you drink saffy spring water, you are contributing to the Egyptian armed forces bottom line. When your plane is refueled at Cairo International Airport or any other airport in Egypt, you are contributing to the bottom line of the Egyptian armed forces because the aviation services company that services your airplane is owned by the military. If Egyptians buy a certain brand of kitchen equipment, seriously, they are contributing to the bottom line of the armed forces. If you stay in any number of resorts along the Red Sea coast, the Egyptian military would have reclaimed the land before selling it to a crony and everybody making a lot of money. I'm not even getting into the guns and stuff like that. The key is that this economic conglomerate is beyond public oversight and enjoys subsidies and benefits, but remains beyond the accounting of the civilian leadership and the military would like to hold on to these economic relations. And finally, I think most important, the military wants to remain the source of power, legitimacy and authority in the Egyptian political system. The problem is that in a more democratic system, the people are the source of power and authority and legitimacy. And I think this sets up three struggles in Egypt. Three struggles that will animate Egyptian politics in the next three, six, nine, twelve, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-four months or so. One, over the economy. Everybody agrees that the economy is crashing. What to do about it is a different story. And for the most part, the people who support the neoliberal economic reforms that Mubarak pursued over the course of arguably the last eight years of his rule are either in jail or on the run in Dubai, London or Beirut. Even though the Muslim Brotherhood, which now has a plurality in the parliament, made up of good capitalists, there is a revolutionary narrative that says that these neoliberal economic reforms helped enable the kind of crony capitalism and corruption and the huge gulf between rich and poor in Egypt. Whether it's true or not, this is the widely held perception. And there is going to be tremendous political pressure for the newly elected Egyptian leaders to pursue different economic policies as a result. The second struggle, and this isn't just book marketing because the book is called the struggle for Egypt. I honestly think that these are going to be struggles, is writing the Constitution. They can't even agree on who's going to select the Committee of 100 to write this Constitution that's supposed to be written in the next six months in a deeply polarized society that is supposed to answer some very important questions about identity in Egypt. And relating to this is going to be the relationship between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the parliament. Going into these elections, the military wanted two seemingly contradictory things. They wanted big turnout so that they could say that great mythical silent majority of Egyptians approve of their handling of this transitional period. That they would be vindicated by what they have done over the course of the last year. And they wanted a weak parliament. Well they got the big turnout in the form of 52, anywhere from 52 to 60% of Egyptian people who turned out to vote. Eligible voters who turned out to vote. That's about 52 to 60% better than Mubarak elections held under Mubarak. So the leaders of the new people's assembly can legitimately claim to have a popular mandate. The fact that the leaders of the new parliament are members of the Muslim Brotherhood only raises the stakes for the military. Not because these are totally different organizations and so on and so forth, but actually because they're rather similar. They both make claims about being nationalist par excellence. They both make claims about being good economic stewards of the country. They both make claims about being legitimate leaders of Egypt. And on each one of those scales, actually, actually from an objective perspective, the Brotherhood looks better. The Brotherhood absolutely looks better. Which leads me to this question about the United States and Egypt and the Middle East. Let's face it. In this new era, regardless of what happens in Egypt, whether it's some sort of fuzzy warm democracy on the Nile or some sort of reconstituted authoritarian system, as the political scientist from the University of Washington, Ellis Goldberg calls it, Mubarakism without Mubarak. The party is over for the United States. Public opinion matters in new and different ways, not only in Egypt but throughout the Middle East. And the era of making side deals with regional authoritarians who would carry our very unpopular water in the Middle East with the expectation that they would control their populations is now over, is now over. Egypt, along with Morocco and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf States, was a lynchpin of a regional political order that made it relatively easier and relatively less expensive for the United States to pursue its interests in the Middle East. Well, we, things have changed. Things have changed dramatically. And I think the onus is on the United States to adjust to the new reality. The worst thing we could possibly do is try to manage influence and shape transitions going on in the Middle East. We might do more harm than good. And if asked, and from time to time, people have asked me my opinion, people who count, supposedly. My answer is less is more in terms of future American foreign policy. We need to be mindful of our history in a place like Egypt. We've done wonderful things in Egypt, built infrastructure, made it possible for Egyptians to drink potable water in rural areas, given them electricity, had wonderful programs for rural farmers, health care, etc., etc. But the revolutionary narrative is that we were the primary patrons of a military dominated system whose leaders abused and brutalized their own people. And that's why we need to take a step back, however briefly. I'll end on a positive spin to this. If Egypt is halfway successful in achieving what Egyptians want domestically, and it's halfway successful in carving out a foreign policy that's more independent of the United States, and thereby recapturing at least some of its lost influence in the region. And after all, its lost influence was directly related to the perception by its own people and people in the region that Mubarak was just a client of the United States. So if they're successful in carving out a more independent foreign policy, Egypt will be a more appropriate interlocutor for the United States and the Middle East, than one that has perceived to be nothing more than, as I said, a client of the United States.