Obama Bets That With Egypt, Democratic Values Are Strategic Interests

ANALYSIS

As President Barack Obama and his advisers prepared his response to the resignation today of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, it is easy to imagine that they took as much care with what he wouldn't say as what he would.

Less than 24 hours after Obama called on Mubarak's regime to give way to the "representative government the Egyptian people seek," the U.S. president appeared before reporters to mark "the history taking place" and pay homage to the "Egyptian people's hunger for change."

He urged the generals now running the country to shepherd through a transition toward the "genuine democracy" Egyptians want and expressed confidence that Egyptians can peacefully work their way there as no Arab country has before.

But Obama said nothing to or about what were likely his two his most attentive audiences: the leaders of Egypt's mostly autocratic neighbors, including many allies of Washington who just saw the U.S. abandon one of the region's closest American partners for the sake of democratic values; and Israelis, who risk losing their most important foreign partner in the world after the Americans.

Those omissions speak volumes.

The Obama administration has been in close contact with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and others throughout Egypt's tumultuous popular coup d'etat.

Judging from the White House descriptions of those talks, the American tone alternated between reassurance and explanations of a mounting determination to set U.S. policy that measures up to values U.S. presidents always espouse: a respect for what Obama today described as "the power of human dignity."

The administration has been in even closer contact with Israel.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the White House this week, while senior Israeli security officials were meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg at the same time Obama was preparing to speak.

But the White House said little about those discussions.

And yet, as much as today's events are all about the lives of Egyptians and the "blinding pace" of historical evolution for their country, as Obama put it, to the U.S. they carry significance for a much broader spectrum of American interests.

For decades, Egypt has been a U.S. partner so important to Washington it has been the second biggest recipient of foreign aid.

Even before the 1979 peace agreement with Israel, Egypt had become a key Western ally in a region heavy with Soviet influence, and its coexistence and cooperation with Israel have made Egypt an indispensable participant in more than a generation of U.S. ambitions for Middle Eastern peace.

The Mubarak regime's cooperation with American counterterrorism efforts has been nearly as important, even before 9/11.

For the sake of these endeavors, administration after administration has ignored the dissonance between each president's rhetorical promotion of democracy and the remorseless grip allied autocratic rulers had on their people, including Mubarak. It is a practice followed by nearly every other Western democracy in the world.

But not today.

And as much as American pundits in recent weeks have talked about the clash between American ideology and American Realpolitik, it appears Obama may be betting that, at least with Egypt, these principles are converging.

A cliche of foreign policy debates in the years since 9/11 holds that the anti-American resentment that feeds Islamic terrorism is closely tied to perceptions of U.S. support for autocrats in the Muslim world.

Obama's speech in Cairo in June 2009, titled "A New Beginning" and all about the "universal rights" he spoke of again today, was aimed at countering those perceptions.

On Thursday morning, when many thought (incorrectly) that Mubarak was on the verge of announcing his resignation, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper expressed optimism to the House Select Committee on Intelligence about what he described as "truly a tectonic event" in Egypt and "across the whole Mideast."

"And there is potentially a great opportunity here to come up with a counternarrative to al-Qaida and its franchises and what it is espousing," Clapper said.

It may be that a gamble on that counternarrative -- the notion that the U.S. stands with the Arab street as much as or perhaps more than Arab leaders -- that has driven Obama's decision to side with the crowds in Tahrir Square rather than with Mubarak.

The White House certainly isn't abandoning its other allies in the region, especially democratic Israel. Nor is it renouncing partnerships with the less savory U.S. allies that further American interests even as they treat their own people in distinctly un-American ways.

But under the influence of the Egyptians who made their own gamble for change, the Obama administration's strategic approach to the Middle East may have shifted. And over time, that could prove to be a tectonic event as well.