American Leverage Of Military Aid Won't Find Any Takers In Egypt...It Never Has
WASHINGTON: Egypt has entered a dark tunnel, and it is difficult to say when, and in what condition, it will emerge.
Many Americans, in the meantime, are outraged that the Obama administration has not exerted its supposed leverage, in the form of military aid, to pressure the Egyptian army to restore a democratic form of government.
But it is time for some realism about that leverage. A yearly sum of $1.3 billion may seem persuasive, but this money has always been intended to secure foreign policy outcomes, not domestic political arrangements that the United States favors. For $1.3 billion per year, America has ensured peace with Israel, priority access to the Suez Canal and, more recently, counterterrorism cooperation.
This worked under the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak and under the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi, with whom President Obama had an effective enough working relationship to broker a deal to end the latest outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Despite the fact that American military aid to Egypt has always been intended as an inducement to strategic cooperation, successive presidents have been tempted to use it in other ways.
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