After the events of the last month, the United States may have far-reaching plans for Egypt.
The war between the Hamas movement and Israel threatens to “shake up” more than one strategy in the regions of the Middle East, even if it can be localized in time and geography, and therefore in terms of the scale of the tragedy.
Competition for Egypt
A serious consequence of this war is the emergence of such a large regional player as Egypt from the peculiar state of political autarky.
Whether the fighting subsides within a month or, God forbid, develops into something more, Egypt will now be forced to engage in the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, both in the humanitarian and military-political spheres, and the stumbling block in relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel in This will ultimately lead to serious competition for Egypt.
At the same time, Cairo itself, as the practice of recent years shows, has tried not to actively involve itself in various “geopolitical projects” and has been focused on itself for a long time.
Another thing is that Egypt will no longer be able to step aside from such projects, as was the case after the Arab Spring and during the Syrian campaign. This is a new situation that will be adjusted to both in Egypt itself and around it.
Since the Sinai attacks in 2015, Egypt has not been an active supplier News. There were, however, some expectations that Cairo would join the negotiation process between the radicals opposing official Damascus and Damascus itself.
As a result, relative to Russia, the visits of the Egyptians were more concerned with the operation of Ka-52 helicopters in combat conditions, testing of new ATGMs and Ka-31 DLRO helicopters, and with Damascus - work within the Arab League and negotiations of the special services.
In terms of military-technical cooperation with Russia, Cairo did not escalate with the United States, preferring to generally adhere to the sanctions regime, but was not included in American regional events.
Egypt made itself known seriously when Turkey decided to consolidate its position in Libya, simultaneously expanding its maritime borders. Things got to the point that Cairo began transferring troops to the western borders, but it did not come to direct clashes with the Turks. But here we were talking about the root security problems of Egypt itself.
Also, from 2014 to 2018, Egypt was engaged in clearing the Sinai of ISIS cells (banned in the Russian Federation), and simultaneously resolved issues of supplying Gaza with Hamas, while taking a rather tough position towards the movement. And again, here priority was given to specific issues of security in Egypt and internal political stability.
In recent years, they tried to drag Cairo into the anti-Houthi coalition in Yemen, but Egypt quickly got its bearings and left it. Cairo did not get drawn into a tough confrontation with Ethiopia over water, taking advantage of the conflict in Tigray; Egypt approached the latest conflict in Sudan in a similarly balanced manner. But with each of these countries, the Nile issue comes first.
Egypt maintained working relations with everyone, without offering itself to major geopolitical projects. But on the other hand, the peculiarity of the situation was that after 2012, Egypt was offered fewer and fewer such projects, understanding that a refusal would follow.
As a result, Cairo actually took care of itself, its own issues, for example, contracts on nuclear power plants and food, negotiations on hydraulic structures on the Upper Nile.
Uniqueness of the situation
If you think about it, the situation claims to be unique.
Firstly, historically, Egypt has always been a major player, without which not a single issue in the region could be resolved. In the twentieth century, it was one of the key players in the Middle East, whether it concerned Israel, Yemen, or Iraq.
Secondly, Egypt is the holder of the Suez Canal - the main shipping artery of the world, Egypt is a 107 million-strong market and one of the largest centralized consumers of grain (in Egypt, most of the contracts are controlled by the state), and an even larger forge of military equipment.
Despite the fact that in Egypt they were going to Tanks "Abrams", produced range of 120 armory systems, for example, counter-battery stations, electronic warfare, etc., no one has heard of the United States even simply asking Cairo to “share” anything with Kiev. But Egypt has something to deliver to Ukraine. But they didn’t ask, because they wouldn’t even consider it, even under pressure.
This unique distancing of Al-Sisi’s cabinet from the main problem areas, while maintaining working relations with all parties, developed as a kind of response to the “Arab Spring”, the peculiarities of the US corruption policy associated with the Clinton family clan, as well as the rejection of the ideas of the so-called. n. "political Islam".
The Egyptian generals did not allow themselves to be drawn into the Syrian war from any side, and this looked very far-sighted, taking into account the fact that other active players like Saudi Arabia and the ideologists of various “schemes” themselves - the United States - ended up getting confused in their combinations. Egypt was not drawn into the schemes and did not become a victim of other people's conceptual miscalculations.
This period in Cairo is coming to an end, but in order to understand under what conditions Egypt will operate further and what will be offered to it, we need to understand how the Egyptian elite came to the concept of autarky in the first place and why they held on to it for so many years.
To figure this out, you need to look back ten years and understand why the United States, captivated by color revolutions in general and the Arab Spring in particular, needed to lead such “record democrats” as the Muslim Brotherhood movement to power in Egypt ( prohibited in the Russian Federation).
The United States has been very active with this movement since the 1950s. In fact, it was a religious core with the help of which the region put a block on the work of secular projects of the USSR and Middle Eastern interpretations of the ideas of socialism and parliamentarism.
It was born in Egypt, developed in Egypt, and in Egypt all these years it was in permanent conflict with the official government, generals and nationalists. Later it gained a foothold in Turkey and Qatar. In the 2000s, H. Mubarak let the street out of control (and the movement is just that, the street), and by 2010 it was already fully participating in official politics, and in 2011 even received 15% of the seats in the Egyptian parliament.
But since the late 1990s, the United States itself began to treat this movement with great caution. The fact is that the Muslim Brotherhood is not just Islamist cells, but an entire political platform, with its own concept of “Islamic democracy”, its own eschatology, the Arab “City of Kitezh” and the “country of Belovodye”, a kind of sectarian hierarchy and discipline , relying on local influential tariqas and part of the Arabian clan elite.
This is mysticism combined with a political concept. And the success, as well as the accompanying problems of this movement, was largely determined by the belated industrial transition of the Middle East.
The success of the ideology is based on the fact that it managed to modernize theoretical principles about the correct state, modernize them, without deviating from the code of Islamic norms and rules. As a result, the base of the movement became the intellectual elite, the top of tribal confederations and the people's street.
And the problems stemmed from exactly the same industrialization, which, both in the version of “Arab socialism” and capitalism, gave birth to strata of owners, the local bourgeoisie. The latter, in conjunction with the generals and relying on parliamentarism, completely objectively opposed itself to the ideas of the Middle Eastern City of Kitezh.
Where industrialization went beyond the oil rigs, this movement ran into a wall, which was built by bourgeois or, in modern terms, business circles. Where industrialization was late, it took root. The only exception here is Turkey, but even then it is a relative exception, since there political Islam comes “from above” and with such difficulty that R. Erdogan always wins elections with very specific percentages and with electoral support not on the industrial layer. But this, in fact, is a Turkish specificity, and our topic is Egypt.
A separate independent geopolitical project
The Muslim Brotherhood is not an al-Qaeda cell (banned in the Russian Federation), which the United States could germinate on its own and then liquidate together with the whole world for more practical purposes - it is a separate independent geopolitical project.
As a full-fledged project, the United States does not need it, it is antagonistic in nature for the United States, but at the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood has learned to masterfully use contradictions in American politics, play on the interests of the sectoral lobby and use corruption mechanisms in the States, if necessary.
If successful in the troubled waters of the “Arab Spring,” this network of political mysticism would potentially cover Turkey, a significant part of Syria, part of Iraq, the entire north and northeast of Africa, and would also gain influence on the Palestinians through close contacts with the same Hamas . She became a pearl for the movement historical homeland - Egypt. With these resources it was already possible to rush to the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The fall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya opened the way for the movement to Central Africa, Tunisia and Egypt. And it was not for nothing that there were heated debates in B. Obama’s office around Operation Odyssey-Dawn. He was warned about problems, and he initially did not want to get involved in it. However, there was an interesting and powerful lobby that prevailed.
Qatar 2008–2011 openly played against the regime of H. Mubarak, and quite harmoniously with the US Ambassador M. Scobee. But M. Scobie was rather a technical figure here, and the controlling hand was the well-known H. Clinton, who directly stated how important it was to support “civilian forces” in Egypt, and before that in Libya.
The Clinton clan advocated an operation in Libya, already playing along with French interests - money associated with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood loomed somewhere on the horizon. This is what these “civilian forces” were like. It was not for the sake of altruism, or even so much in the interests of official US policy, that this clan acted to promote democratization in Egypt.
H. Clinton, like N. Pelosi, is generally such a classic type of corrupt democracy - they implemented the general conceptual strategy of the Oval Office for color revolutions (or something else) in their places, but with regards to attracting specific performers - here the breadth of views extended exactly as far as how many “donations” were collected for her famous family foundation.
In 2011, there were enough donations, and later M. Scobie, after all, a professional diplomat, was replaced in Egypt by A. Patterson, who, despite her formal track record, stood out for such incompetence that one remembers the imperishable: “but excuse me, what about this the man served in cleaning.” So she served while her husband D. Patterson wrote detective novels with B. Clinton (“The President’s Daughter,” “The President Disappears”).
The regime of the “brothers” with leader M. Morsi lasted a year and was swept away by the generals and nationally oriented business circles with quite significant human losses while suppressing the unrest. A. Patterson in Egypt was given an ultimatum to move away.
All this disgrace was superimposed on the upcoming elections in the United States, and the corruption clan, albeit forced, was still given a slap on the wrist, although it did not go away and, like the tail that wags the dog, later influenced the politics of J. Kerry’s team.
Later, Cairo's response would be the active actions of ISIS cells in the Sinai, based on the Bedouin confederations, which Egyptian President Al-Sisi had to cleanse with army operations. Cairo, in turn, chose a tough line against Hamas, demolishing the perimeter buildings from which tunnels were built into the Gaza Strip, and also dug a deep ditch with water to prevent the construction of new ones. The entry control regime into the sector from Egypt has also been tightened.
For the USA and Egypt, all this “experience” was not in vain, and both sides agreed on neutrality. The US focused on the Syrian campaign, then on the Abraham Accords, then on the ideas of the Third Indo-Arabian Pole, which united the Arabian monarchies, India and Israel into one cluster. Moreover, this situation has suited both sides for almost ten years.
However, the very idea of such a “macroeconomic cluster” provides not just a new round of industrialization of the region, but also the connectivity of regional trade, as well as control of the financial sector.
It is logical that transport infrastructure development projects became one of the basic elements of the concept. Today we often discuss the proposal to form an “Indo-European” transport corridor, but this is only part of the overall strategy, which includes a wide transport network.
Another thing is that this cluster’s access to the Mediterranean actually rests on the Israeli coast (there is simply no other way out), where there are also natural resources, such as natural gas. If the concept of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is implemented, these ideas will work, but if it fails, the United States will have to look for a replacement for Israel. Yes, you are forced to search through “I can’t,” but you have to, and the United States has no alternative to Egypt.
This reversal will not happen in the States right away; their conceptual machine, made up of a number of design institutes, will still have to spend some time and generate labor costs to stamp new “punch cards” for the State Department. Another thing is that this will happen inevitably - instead of Israel, Egypt will be included in the idea of the Third Pole.
But what real tools in this case will the United States have in its hands, given that Egypt’s politicians and businesses hold on to their “independence” quite tightly? But these are exactly the same ones for which the Clinton clan was forced to get a slap on the wrist at one time.
And for this, the United States, from old memory and according to old schemes, will have to “shake Egypt a little,” fortunately, in a country of 107 million people, there are a lot of economic problems after wars and a pandemic. It is possible that the United States will, as they say, immediately try to subsume the tragedy in the Gaza Strip under the idea of “normalizing” relations between the Muslim Brotherhood movement and Egypt.
It’s unlikely that Al-Sisi’s office will be “buyed” immediately, but water wears away stones, and the United States, together with some groups of Arabians, can generate enough ideas. Cairo is no longer happy that it will now have to host a conference on the situation in the Gaza Strip, but objectively, all refugees and all humanitarian aid can only go to and from Egypt.
For what today is already called in the West the “axis of evil”, and in our country – the “axis of good”, i.e. the connection between China, Russia and Iran, such an American strategy will be a serious and long-term obstacle, even more serious than the current struggle for Iraq. It may not be worthwhile to fuss ahead of time, but strengthening economic ties and carefully monitoring contacts between the United States and the leaders of “political Islam” is possible and necessary.
It is quite possible that in the wake of current events and taking into account the normalization of relations between Iran and Egypt, it is worth creating some additional tool for coordination between intelligence services and strengthening the exchange of information. And the idea that the United States can, based on various proposals to Egypt, gradually prepare the next “flower revolution” will be brought into the wide public field.
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