 On behalf of the World Affairs Council, I am Anpreet Singh Anand, a trustee of the World Affairs Council and your moderator. It is now my pleasure to introduce today's distinguished guest. Dr. Steven A. Cook is Hasib J. Sabag, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics, as well as U.S. Middle East policy. He has published widely in a variety of foreign policy journals, opinion magazines, and newspapers including foreign affairs, foreign policy, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Cook is also a frequent commentator on radio and television. Prior to joining CFR, Dr. Cook was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and a SOARF research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He holds a BA in international studies from Vassar College and MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and both an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cook speaks Arabic and Turkish and reads French. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Dr. Steven A. Cook. I'm here to talk about the momentous events in the Middle East and my new book, The Struggle for Egypt from Nasser to Tahir Square. I thought I'd do tonight. We'll start out with two anecdotes about what has happened to me in actually the run-up and during the uprising and then get into what has happened in Egypt since the uprising and what is happening now and what may or may not be happening. Let me start out telling you about a meeting to which I was invited, along with a number of colleagues, outside experts, traditional academics and think tankers like myself. We're invited by an organization called the National Intelligence Council to come and spend a day talking to them about the Middle East. Now the National Intelligence Council is one of a myriad of intelligence agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community and the National Intelligence Council is generally made up of people who are quite experienced. There would be senior faculties on political science and history and sociology departments and their job is to do long-range thinking about the world and as I said I was invited along with a number of others and if you live in Washington and you do what I do from time to time you will be invited to do this kind of thing and from the perspective of the intelligence community we provide an external check for the things that they are thinking so that they don't get infused with group thing. And the topic of the day's discussion were the prevailing and dominant trends in the Middle East for the foreseeable future and roughly speaking the foreseeable future is the next three to five years. Well after a very, very interesting day of discussion and debate and dare I say even argument the general conclusion was that the prevailing, the dominant political trend in the Middle East for the foreseeable future was political stability and that the barriers to collective action for generally weak and divided oppositions were so great that leaders in the region really didn't have much to fear over the course of the ensuing three to five years. The date of that meeting December 13th 2010 three days before the Tunisian uprising began. Fast forward five weeks and I am in Cairo I had just finished the first draft of the struggle for Egypt I was feeling pretty good and it had been a struggle I wanted to call it my struggle for Egypt but my editor didn't think that was a good idea and I found myself on January 25th in Tahrir Square with 25 to 30,000 predominantly young Egyptians demanding an end to the Mubarak regime demanding that the president of Egypt join his colleague the former president of Tunisia in Jinnah Saudi Arabia and demanding a more democratic future for Egypt and one of my many reactions upon entering Tahrir Square after spending about two hours trying to get in was I have it on very good authority that this is not happening I just attended a meeting with the National Intelligence Council and told me that the dominant trend in the region was political stability how in fact is this happening and that is a great question how did this happen and and why did it happen now I can't tell you why it happened on January 25th other than the fact that the instigators of the uprising chose January 25th because it is police day in Egypt it actually commemorates a moment in a very important moment in the run-up to the coup d'etat of 1952 although police day is a relatively new a new holiday in Egypt I suspect it won't be celebrated ever again but nevertheless I do remember after being in Egypt at the outset of the uprising and coming home on the on the fourth day I caught one of the last direct flights from Cairo to the United States before the airport closed I had intended on staying but my wife told me that I wasn't allowed to so I came home and I remember the chairperson of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence a senior senator from the great state of California stating that she wanted to conduct an investigation into the intelligence community for having missed the Egyptian Revolution my reaction was somebody hand senator finds nine a book about revolutions by their very nature they are unpredictable all that being said it does not absolve people like myself and others who have been looking at the region for quite some time of our responsibility for mostly getting it wrong although in my first draft of my book I did have a short epilogue suggesting that perhaps that this country was not as stable as people had made it out to be and in that meeting at the National Intelligence Council my my final words were if I was a betting man which I'm not but if I was a betting man I'd count on stability but that I was not a technical term but I had a hinky feeling about what was going on in Egypt in particular well well why did we get it wrong which is very important in going forward and understanding what's happened in Egypt and what's likely to happen in Egypt and 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 14th 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 happen too late too late for them to be analytically useful what we were really looking for were 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 societies organized producing cracks within the regime so essentially we had the narrative backwards our expectations were backwards the other problem was how many people here at buy a show of hands have ever purchased a mutual fund raise your hands okay and you know how when you purchase the mutual fund you get a prospectus in the mail or buy email these days and the first thing you do is either throw it out or delete it which you're not supposed to do you're supposed to read it if you do read it somewhere buried on page 39 in the smallest possible font you can see there's a line that all of these things have and what does it say it says past results do not guarantee futures returns well we made the mistake of expecting that past results would guarantee futures returns because leaders in the Middle East had had this seeming capacity to muddle through what one would think would be regime ending crises uh go back to june 1967 we're very very polite in the united states we call the june war a six-day war well on the egyptian front it was three days israeli forces ended up on the east bank of the show his canal on june 8th that was a three-day war yet the egyptian regime never faltered uh faster order more contemporary example in early 1992 uh a group of 60 algurian military officers canceled the country's first free and fair elections which plunged the country into a decade of civil war killing upwards of a hundred thousand people yet the regime in alguria never faltered uh a rock uh sudam hussein survived the hundred-hour war forget the 46 days of bombing beforehand in march 1990 or early 1991 and then the subsequent 12 years of sanctions yet his regime never actually faltered yes there were challenges but they came out on the other side and so outside experts and academics and government officials uh engaged in a whole research project trying to understand why this was the case uh and examining the ostensible uh strength and suppleness of uh institutions in in countries in this part of the world but their ability to somehow deflect and manage challenges to the machine this all proved to be not really true because uh ben Ali fell in 18 in a month mubarak fell in 18 days oh it took a little longer in libya uh but he fell uh and it's certainly taking longer in syria we don't know what will happen here but nevertheless uh these regime challenges seem to be quite serious and everything that we expected about the middle east turned uh on on its head 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 uh either elicit the loyalty of their people or establish control over them one is vision to have that that was a george bush who first george was that vision thing uh 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 uh that's a very jargony geeky social science way of saying something along the lines of the american dream um 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 for 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 uh freedom of association the freedoms the 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 it 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 uh think about cutler cutler 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 country with no politics i once i was just as a side 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 that you want he said dr steven i'm happy but i could be happier which just proves my case that um this you know check at the end of every fiscal year buys a certain amount of uh political quiescence is it any coincidence that king of bill of saudi arabia opened up the coffers uh just as mubarak fell and invested 130 billion dollars in his own uh society and for good measure through and 10 billion dollars for the omanis and another 10 billion dollars for the bahrainis which are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the kingdom of saudi arabia um the third way the third way in which uh leaders elicit well actually don't elicit establish control over their people is through either the threat of force or the actual application of force this is uh the most expensive the least efficient and riskiest way of establishing control as you 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 wear the financial wear with all of the amir of katar the king of saudi 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 uh he certainly didn't have a vision the coda 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 and in fact to make matters worse the development that there was over the course of almost 30 years that mubarak was in power was not shared by the vast majority of egyptians and 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 were sitting on the fence who supported what they were saying but were too afraid of the police that the costs 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 if any of you are listening to the forum this morning i use that line too so i apologize for the for the reaping 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 its place in the world important questions about egyptian identity that has been debated for the better part of the last hundred 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 and the first step in that is not just the conversation but it's been the recently completed elections for the lower house of the parliament the people's assembly we're now upon the upper house elections which began on sunday and we're moving into a constitution writing period which should be a time in which egyptians are trying to answer these questions in a way that makes the most sense for the most egyptians now previously egyptian leaders have tried nasser tried to answer these questions through a series of ideas and principles that we came to know as nasserism and for a brief period in the 1950s and mid-1960s it worked egyptians were experiencing expanded economic opportunity expanded educational opportunity egypt was more powerful on the world state having seemingly shrugged off foreign domination which were things that egyptians wanted and nasser seemed to be providing until the disaster of june 67 revealed these things actually to be hollow his successor anwar sadat charred tried to fix the problems of the nasser period and he talked about a state of institutions which was a euphemistic way of talking about a more democratic egypt he talked about prosperity through economic infita or opening and he reoriented egyptian foreign policy towards the west well by the end of sadat's reign egypt was no closer to becoming a democracy only very few people prospered under him and the reorientation of egyptian foreign policy made no sense to egyptians mubarak didn't even try as i said it was all about stability for the sake of development now egyptians are getting that opportunity and they are mobilized just as an aside as i've gotten older i've grown less patient for standing online when i get through chiro to have my passport stamp so okay i'll admit i hired a fixer to come and get me at the plane and get me through and drive me to the airport etc etc and for years for years i've been trying to engage these two guys in conversation about politics on the way to my hotel invariably we would have passed the presidential compound and i'd make some sort of snide flip remark about president mubarak and whether he was going to live forever or something like that and these guys are stone-faced on it stone-faced on it now in the six times that have been back to egyptians the other president i can't shut these guys up about politics all they want to do is talk about politics all they want to do is how all they do is argue about politics so this is all very very good news it's exhilarating to watch it's exhilarating to watch well that's the good news now let me lay some of the bad news all of this for all of the exhilaration about the debates that egyptians having and the opportunity the opportunity they now have to really write their own history it's coming against the backdrop of a collapsing economy egyptians have burned through 15 billion of 34 billion dollars in foreign currency reserves the sues canal tolls are down because of the global economic downturn something like 10 percent of international trade flows through the sues canal tourism is down sharply from the almost 16 million people who visited egypt in 2008 the last year that statistics were available in fact i have waiters who are fighting over who can pour me a cup of coffee in the morning because there really is no one in egypt and egyptian workers abroad are holding on to their remittances because of there's so much uncertainty in egypt they're not sending money back which has all had collectively a devastating effect on the egyptian economy the next challenge is the ongoing protest 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 and 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 percent 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 right 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 um 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 week long uh battle between revolutionary groups and the military and the police forces in late november in the run-up to uh the beginning of the people's assembly elections when i was in kairu the last time in mid december uh i was witness to the battle of kassar alayni 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 uprising to me this was a warped bizarra 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'd 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 uh they were pushing mubarak from power uh what became uh the current military leadership in the form of the supreme council of the armed forces something had existed before but in its current iteration in executive authority in egypt said that they supported the legitimate demands of the egyptian people but 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 uh if you drink sappy 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 is that this economic conglomerate is beyond public oversight and enjoys subsidies and benefits uh but remains beyond the accounting of uh 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 authority and legitimacy and i think this sets up three struggles in egypt and i'll go through this quickly and then i'll do my last bit on the united states and then we'll go to q and a 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 department 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 is and this isn't just book marketing because the book is called the struggle for egyptian 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 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 percent of the egyptian people who turned out to vote eligible voters who turned out to vote that's about 52 to 60 percent 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 year 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 elis gober 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 deal 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 uh had wonderful programs for rural farmers uh healthcare 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 in the middle east than one that has perceived to be nothing more than as i said a client of the united states we've seen kind of a popular uprising to be very successful in a short amount of time of overthrowing a government that's been in power for a very long period of time but very quickly we recognize that there are huge challenges in not just governing but creating institutions to govern um and i know you've written about this so maybe you can talk a little bit about what are some of the the milestones we should be looking for uh or some of the things that we should be watching out for in the in the short to medium term to see whether or not this is going down a path that was perhaps envisioned by by the popular uprising to begin with well a couple of reactions to the question which is a great question i don't know whether it was yours or or someone else's but it was it's a terrific question i think the first thing that we need to recognize is that you know in a rational moment we're all preaching patience and egyptians are preaching patience but we don't have any it's only been a year since they brought down mubarak and the regime that he led had been there for 60 years it's going to take a very long time to uproot the egyptian national security state and build something else and this is a struggle that is going to take not months we we're not going to get together january 30 2013 and we'll have this conversation say well everything's great in egypt now this is a multi-year thing three five a decade maybe more there's a reason why i called the book the struggle for egypt and maybe by the time they get things right i'll be on the 15th edition but the the point is is that we should be cognizant of the fact that this is something that is going to unfold over many many years and that they're going to be exhilarating steps forward and depressing steps back and a lot of going sideways in between i think in the short run the things that we need to look for are the handover to civilian government which is supposed to happen in june and july which was supposed to happen in june july 2013 but the revolutionaries put enough pressure on the military leaders to move that up by now that seems like a good thing but it's we're on a very short time frame here we've got to write a constitution elect a president and hand over power to civilians the constitution writing process will be another marker for how things happen and then what happens in the people's assembly i think will be extraordinarily important i think that there's a there's a sense that egyptians don't know how to do politics i think they do know how to do politics but we'll have to see what kind of coalitions are formed what kind of issues the fringes force on that moderate center that that occupies the parliament right now it is not going to be easy it's not going to be pretty but there are some things on on foreign policy i think we will see what we are seeing in the evolution of egyptian foreign policy an evolution of egypt's relationship with hamas for example what's going on now between the united states in egypt and what will happen with the aid package that we have been giving egypt since the early 1980s are important markers for foreign policy maybe we can stick around there for a bit particularly on the domestic politics and maybe you can expand on on your remarks about how is all of this going to work the the the muslim brotherhood the salafis the the more liberal coalitions that are forming what what should we be expecting about how they can all work together how that might impact the constitutional drafting process and then and then there have been a lot of questions if you can roll this and on what this means for religious minorities what does this mean for the jews and the in the bahais and the and the coptics that that reside in egypt and what can they expect going forward well uh if the first procedural session of the people's assembly or any uh any guide it's not going to go well because it promptly broke into a fist fight so um it's going to be a problem uh like i said i think egyptians know how to know how to play politics but uh this is very new for a lot of people if you do the math between the the party of the muslim brotherhood the freedom injustice party and the salafis and nor party some strain of islamic control 66 percent of the policy which just has people's hair on fire but i think it would be a mistake to suggest that the parliament is going to be dominated by an islamist block uh the people from and nor don't love the people from the muslim brotherhood and vice versa and i think there are going to be some issues where the muslim brotherhood may be forced to take uh positions that it might not want to out of sheer pragmatism over this intense battle over who speaks for islam and who's a good muslim which is always framed by more extreme elements in which there is no it is very difficult uh to argue against and then i think there are going to be other issues where the brotherhood or even the salafis line up with liberals to box out maybe the brotherhood or or others i think what are some of those issues well i i think on uh pragmatic issues related to for example foreign policy i don't think that the brotherhood immediately wants to breach the egypt-israel peace treaty i think they want changes to it uh and i think that uh salafis may have a different view of it on the question of minority rights i think for purely pragmatic reasons the brotherhood may not be interested in striking a more uh a tougher line on this so that they may line up with more uh liberal elements i do think however that um it's unclear where the brotherhood actually stands on some of these critical issues related to minority rights the role of women uh and i do think that those are issues that the salafis are going to try to outmaneuver them and force them to take positions whether they agree with them or not um by and large though i think that we can expect egyptian domestic politics to change some for the better some that will in some areas it'll be unnerving and without a doubt egyptian foreign policy is going to change because the arrangement between mubarak and the united states was so deeply and profoundly unpopular and the peace treaty between egypt and israel was so profoundly unpopular made egyptians feel weak uh render them a secondary or second rate power in the region to egypt to us when we think about the egypt-israel peace treaty we think of that iconic photo of president carter president sedat and prime minister beggin all shaking hands together but for many egyptians it is a separate piece and therefore a shameful piece um they do recognize the benefits of it but they see it as having sidelined the egyptians so both the united states in egypt and the united states in israel can pursue their interests unfettered in the region and they can enumerate and i go into some detail about this in my book all of the things that the israelis have done since the peace treaty that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do had it not been for the peace treaty i think that maybe you can also talk a little bit about the foreign policy within the region you're you're a noted scholar of turkish issues as well are there some lessons there uh that would correspond between turkey and egypt both having long histories and in military rule in in the political sphere as well what what can we draw from the turkish experience that might inform what what might happen in egypt you're asking turkish model question yes yes um i'm glad you're all sitting down except for those of you who are standing up the model for egypt get this is egypt um i don't think that we can have a lively discussion about the turkish model and in fact my first book teases out the important similarities between egypt turkey and algera particularly stemming from uh military domination but let's say for argument's sake that we all decide here we're all of us for various smart people we decide turkey is a model for egypt then what what is the implication of that do we start on some massive international social engineering project to make egyptian speak turkish uh you know there's really doesn't seem to me to be much to this idea of a turkish model other than as a filler for us to say something when we're dumbfounded by reality and in fact we build models we build models to simplify to simplify a reality that we don't quite understand and that's in that way political scientists like myself really want to be economists because we can build models and make inferences about them you know i'm not i'm not trying to be too flip i do think that there are things um that uh egyptians in this transition period look to turkey for particularly they they admire the the foreign policy independence of turkey and they admire that the turkish parliament is a real parliament but ultimately egyptians are going to want to uh develop a new political system in keeping with egyptian history and egyptian society after all this is a proud country 81 million people inheritors of a great civilization they should be able to do it without having to look towards some model from some other country that used to be the colonial power there uh was a foreign domination something that egyptians have been responding to for the better part of i don't know how long but certainly in the realm in the struggle for egypt more than more than uh more than a century so i think it's it's interesting to talk about while the uprising was going on i i i did a blog post in my blog um which is called from the petomic to the euphrates in which i said you know the egypt the turkish armed forces as a model beware of false analogies and in fact in turkey turkey made great democratic strides some of which they are now reversing uh by the way uh not because of the military but despite the military and i think uh we should be cognizant of that when we talk about models when when you looked at the the the the protests in tharier square last year you found as as you noted a lot of young people uh which is comment a lot a lot of young people were frustrated uh didn't have opportunity uh wanted not just a political voice but a better economic life for themselves going forward this is still a challenge obviously uh there still persists uh a youth bulge and in egypt and frankly across the middle east but how how are these issues going to be addressed how are these socioeconomic issues do you think are going to be addressed by the incoming government is are they cognizant about the the scale of the of the challenge here and if so what what are they thinking about how to address it you know this is something that i've heard a lot about um about you know what top of your square was about and and and i'm not so Marxist about it i don't i don't think this was at least in its initial stages an uprising about economic opportunity um when i was in tharier square there were a lot of young it seemed to me upper middle class and middle class people with you know cell phones that i would be loved to have um cool droid stuff and iphone and things like that that i don't have um and what to me was uh most important was their demands for things that make us feel warm and safe when we go to sleep at night um and his ideas about freedom and justice and democracy and and and governments that are responsible and responsive to their people there is a a genuine mechanism in which to change uh leaders certainly a very very tough economic environment for the vast majority of egyptians created an environment of misery that helped make this uprising happen but in fact it it wasn't until a number of days later that labor really got engaged because labor was something that was one not quite a constituency but was one group that mubarak was actually afraid of and he kept buying them up and kept buying them up and kept buying them up until this uprising where they married up their economic grievances with a perverse political order that gave a lot of energy after the first five days or so of the uprising in fact you know uh on even the second day i remember that it was this pitched battle between the troops of the central security forces and the revolutionaries and then on galastry the battle of galastry and which is adjacent to a to a middle you know a blue collar neighborhood and was amazing all of a sudden this whole neighborhood joined in to defeat these central sphere and that was the beginning of the secretion of average egyptians joining this upper middle class group of kids and i'm not saying i can't not everybody who was there on the first couple nights were upper middle class kids but it was certainly organized and instigated by by these people so it's hard to say it was about economics ultimately it was but i think this was really an uprising about ideas and about democracy and wanting to live in a better in an under better political system but looking forward of course oh yes the second part of your question um i spent all that time debunking the the marxist myths about economics driving politics um i think that um this is as i pointed out in in my remarks going to be a tremendous struggle because there is a sense that you know in a way in the abstract in a vacuum the neoliberal economic reforms that mubarak pursued over the course of his last eight years in power did produce macroeconomic results very very impressive macroeconomic results it was a perverse political and legal order that made it possible for the corruption and the crony capitalism and all of the things that people complain about and in fact if you look at the world bank data which is a bit suspect because they were based on egyptian numbers but if you take it at face value the delta between rich and poor did didn't actually increase during those years unlike in russia or china or india other high growth countries which suggested that maybe egyptian economic reformers were doing the right thing or they were cooking the books one or the other um but uh in the abstract these these reforms seem to have worked the problem is this revolutionary narrative about these reforms and and that bringing the average egyptian to his knees about impoverishing the country in order to become an emerging market featured in business week and and i think that there is going to be again i think labor in the left you know the berlin wall fell and everybody thought well the labor and left for i don't know how about here in berkeley but it's still or here in northern california but um you know it's very very strong in egypt it's actually strong in other parts of the region as well and there is this narrative and there is going to be a lot of political pressure to invest in things that egyptians can't afford right now and i think they're banking on the fact that nobody's going to let this leaky boat sink turning to uh u.s relations you you spoke quite a bit about um your thoughts on u.s relations uh with respect to egypt maybe you can give us your evaluation of the obama administration um pre terrier square during now post um what would be your recommendation if you were sitting in the oval office with the president saying what the u.s posture should be towards egypt you know i know you lived in washington dc for a bunch of years i'll tell you why because the the great parlor game post uprising was can you please grade the obama administration's handling of the arab uprisings and does this have anything to do with the bush administration's freedom agenda that was going to be my next yes of course so my answer to that is na not applicable and be very unlikely um i think that um look i think that they were clearly behind the curve at the beginning you know the calls at the beginning for the time for performers now if you're on the ground you saw how hollow this was but how would they know i mean the embassy was on lockdown um they didn't know we don't do the kinds of things that we we often do and i think that prior to the uprising the administration was resigned to the fact that mubarak was there seemingly stable this is someone that they had to do business with and that the problems that the bush administration encountered with mubarak uh were problems that were unnecessary uh and that uh of course they didn't like the fact that mubarak was seemingly grooming his son in the corruption but this is what it was when it came to the uprising i think they were there was no precedent for this no playbook this had never happened people want to make this 1989 1989 it's got nothing on this people in eastern and central europe wouldn't want to be part of the west president george hw bush had partners in margaret thatcher and helmut call and france what's meter on to help with a soft landing in in eastern europe by and large the people in the middle east don't want to be a part of the west they want to be a part of they want to write their own history they want to they want to be themselves and and who are president obama's allies in in a in a in a soft landing prime minister netanyahu of each uh of israel he's he doesn't look kindly upon democracy in in the middle east because of the perception of what that means for israeli security king abdallah of jordan who is on the run himself uh king abdallah of saudi arabia uh not i mean a progressive in saudi terms perhaps but i don't think that i don't think the Saudis want Egypt to be too democratic um and and and type erdogan of turkey who only wants to be gamal abdelnasar so this is not really an all-star cast to help with a soft landing in in in the middle east so the administration is essentially on its own and given that there's no precedent in no playbook they're making it up as uh as they go along as one would expect i think the administration has an aspiration for a more democratic middle east to emerge yet recognizes the tension that the people that they currently do business with are not necessarily progressive liberal democrats and um they are feeling their way there have been struggles within the administration about how to pursue it my answer to them and the answer that i give although not so explicitly in the struggle for egypt is we need to take a historical view of this we need to situate what is happening now in the broader sweep of egyptian and middle eastern history and my message is be mindful of that history be mindful of the fact that while this was not an uprising about the us-egypt relationship it wasn't uprising about dignity and self-empowerment and the relationship with us made egyptians feel weak and made them feel collectively like they had no dignity and as a result they're going to want to pursue an independent foreign policy and as a result we should take a step back and as uncomfortable as it may be as we may not necessarily like the outcomes we have to let egyptians work out these key antecedent questions about their identity on their own we may hurt ourselves if we weigh into a debate that we don't really understand and that we don't have any kind of historical appreciation for that's one of the reasons why i wrote the book was because a lot of the debates and arguments and policy discussions in in washington and elsewhere to be honest with you happened in a vacuum there are these a historical things what are you talking about if you understood the history you wouldn't be saying things like this now my friends who served in the current administration who have served in previous administrations said to me look this is very wise but you clearly have never served in government um which is true what do what do people do in government they sit around the table in the policy process and they fight over their resources because in the government you don't get rewarded for saving resources you have to spend your resources to justify your existence and most of the time that becomes the goal because you want to get the same budget or more the next year and so on and so forth regardless of what the implications are because you need to justify your existence so now you know why we sometimes make mistakes let's let's end with this um if you were an investor investing in egypt uh would you invest now would you be investing in six months a year are you a bull or a bear what's going on this is a bad question to ask me i've had one good investment in my life i i i moved to new york in 2004 and i said either may or mike has given these things out or the ipod is the greatest invention on the face of the earth and so it motivated me to buy apple at 66 other than that i've been a disaster so i i i don't know i don't know it literally one you know a clock a stop clock is right twice a day look i think that over the long term egypt has a lot of promise if you look at human capital and what the potential is for egypt and the history of egypt and the fact that there is it's not rich but there were protodemocratic institutions in that egypt has been a center of cultural production and knowledge it has also been the font the intellectual font of transnational jihadism uh as well as all these these nice things that you know on balance i wouldn't put my you know entire retirement my children's uh my children's education funds into egypt but if i had a little bit of play money and i'm willing to tolerate risk i certainly would invest in egypt i think it has a more promising future than people think but it's going to be a multi-year struggle you're gonna have to be able to fasten your seatbelt and deal with the bumps that come along the way there's going to be a fair amount of uncertainty a fair amount of instability and potentially marked by spasms of violence like we saw in late november in mid december going forward but um over the long run i think egyptians have what it takes just because they don't have a rich tradition of democracy doesn't necessarily make it impossible for them to become a democracy but their democracy is not going to look like our democracy or a swiss democracy or turkish democracy or whatever it's going to look like egyptian democracy whatever that is anyway thank you very very much it was great pleasure to be with you tonight