Letter From Cairo: Egyptian Foreign Policy After the Election
Many things are up for grabs in this month’s Egyptian parliamentary elections: the role of religion, the power of the military, and the emerging shape of Arab democracy. But one thing is not: Cairo’s foreign policy. Washington believes that a secular victory would be good for U.S. interests and an Islamist win would be problematic. But no matter which party picks up the most seats in parliament, the new Egypt will be less compliant to U.S. demands and cultivate warmer relations with Iran.
Egypt’s spring revolution was largely directed at former President Hosni Mubarak’s failed domestic leadership. But Egyptians were fed up with his foreign policies as well. To maintain good ties with the United States and Israel, Mubarak had been reflexively hostile toward Iran and its allies — Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria. In recent years, his hostility was ever more apparent. According to WikiLeaks cables released in 2010, Mubarak had even said that “Iranian influence was spreading like a cancer from the [Gulf Cooperation Council] to Morocco.” He also reportedly gave Israel a green light to conduct its 2008 bombing raids on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It is telling that the Iranian regime named a street in Tehran in honor of the assassin who killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Egypt’s alliance with Washington unnerved the Egyptian public. They felt that their country’s standing in the Arab world was slipping, and that Mubarak was to blame. This grievance, however, remained largely hidden from view during the Tahrir Square protests. Demonstrators burned no foreign flags, for example, and they refrained from chants against the United States and Israel. They wanted Mubarak out, and that meant relentlessly harping on domestic issues, such as Egypt’s massive unemployment problem, poor educational system, and lack of government services.
But now that the elections are approaching, public debate over Egypt’s new role in the world has reached a fever pitch. In interviews during a recent trip to Cairo, activists, experts, and candidates from across the political spectrum agreed that Egypt should seek significantly friendlier relationships with Iran and its allies in order to build influence in the region. A new government in Cairo should also, many said, maintain good ties with Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the United States — but not at the expense of its partnering with the Iranian regime. “There is no reason for us to have hostilities toward Iran,” said Mustafa el-Labbad, the director of the Middle East Center for Regional and Strategic Studies in Cairo, “although there are vast differences between us.”