“It is not an easy sell in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where King Abdullah was outraged by Mr. Obama’s abandonment of President Hosni Mubarak. (He told Mr. Obama that he needed to support the Egyptian leader even if the protesters in Tahrir Square were fired upon.) Saudi Arabia’s drive now is to stop the threat to established governments — even as Mr. Obama seeks partners in helping integrate a new Egypt into the world economy.”
For U.S., Matching Moral and Financial Support for Revolts Proves Difficult
Ed Ou for The New York Times
Patrons at a cafe in Cairo on Thursday as President Obama spoke. About 10 minutes into the speech, the channel was changed to one showing an action movie.
Published: May 19, 2011
WASHINGTON — After six months of struggle inside the White House to reconcile American interests in the Arab uprisings with American values, President Obama on Thursday sought to portray the region’s revolt in the historical tradition of the American Revolution and the civil rights movement.
But even as Mr. Obama appealed for the people of the region to embrace self-determination as the route to peace and prosperity, he left open how far the United States could go in matching its enthusiasm with concrete financial support for a sustained transformation, in a region where repression has often been the handmaiden of poverty and seething frustration.
The model, the president suggested at one point, was the integration of Eastern Europe into the West after the fall of Communism, urging Congress to create “enterprise funds” to invest in Tunisia and Egypt, and presumably in other places where dictators have yet to fall. “Successful democratic transitions depend upon an expansion of growth and broad-based prosperity,” he said.
But this is not 1989. In global politics, as in life, timing is everything. The Middle Eastern and North African states now in various stages of upheaval have come to democracy in an era of painfully tight budgets in the United States and economic crisis in Europe.
What Egypt was offered in the president’s speech — $1 billion in debt relief over several years and another $1 billion in loans to finance infrastructure improvements — is hardly a Marshall Plan, as the Egyptians have made clear in private discussions with Washington. “The reality is that there just isn’t much money around for this project,” one of Mr. Obama’s top officials acknowledged after his speech.
“This is obviously a very small amount,” Steven A. Cook , a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said after Mr. Obama’s speech. Egypt, he noted, has external debt in excess of $30 billion, and an economy in freefall. “But it’s what the political freight these days will bear,” he said.
The problem becomes more complex because there are no institutions in the Arab world akin to the European Union. The prospect of joining the European bloc became the beacon that drove many of the former Soviet states to adopt the institutions of democratic capitalism. For many, even success stories like Poland, it took years. But usually the goal of becoming integrated with the West ended all political debates about how to proceed.
So Mr. Obama and other Western leaders, when they meet in France next week, will be racing to invent something.
The drive now is to persuade the Saudis and other oil-rich states to underwrite the transitions to democracy. It is not an easy sell in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where King Abdullah was outraged by Mr. Obama’s abandonment of President Hosni Mubarak. (He told Mr. Obama that he needed to support the Egyptian leader even if the protesters in Tahrir Square were fired upon.) Saudi Arabia’s drive now is to stop the threat to established governments — even as Mr. Obama seeks partners in helping integrate a new Egypt into the world economy.
Mr. Obama’s economic team, however, believes there is no need for a Marshall Plan for Egypt. “It’s a misdeveloped economy, not a destroyed one the way Europe was after World War II,” said one of the president’s top economic aides. “They need to privatize, to open the economy to trade, to create jobs.”
The relief Mr. Obama described is largely symbolic, he conceded, an effort to show that the United States was willing to contribute to economic change just as it was willing in the past to help support Mr. Mubarak.
Mr. Obama worded his speech carefully to make it clear that economic support was dependent on letting democracy flourish — code words for a warning that if the Muslim Brotherhood became the dominant force in the country, economic cooperation could halt. But this is more than just the usual economic sticks and carrots.
Six months after a Tunisian street peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in protest, starting the cycle of uprisings and revolution, the president was understandably eager to fill any vacuum forming in the region.
With the fate of Libya, Syria and Yemen still in play, his aides knew he had to align himself more forcefully with the voices for change, and to equate their revolution with America’s, 235 years ago.
He did, declaring: “The United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves. Now, we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable and more just.”
Such an embrace of traditional American values carried deliberate echoes of Mr. Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, his plaintive call for a restart between the Muslim world and the United States. But back then, it was a theoretical issue.
Now, Mr. Obama has hard choices to make. He must find a way to support the protesters in Bahrain without overthrowing the government that houses the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. He must find a way to keep Saudi Arabia in the American camp, while urging reforms that some in the Saudi royal family view as assisted suicide. And mostly, he must create beacons for democratizing states — hard enough in normal times, and far harder in an age of austerity.
