Egyptian Democracy

I think that Yglesias and Atrios were a bit quick in calling the warblogging right out on the issue of democracy in Egypt. Though I won’t favor him with a link, I hear that the Man from Tennessee has already taken credit on behalf of his brotherhood. However, Matt and Duncan are right to wonder why the blogstorm hasn’t been as violent as, say, when Libya gave up its nuclear program. The question is even more pertinent given that you can actually draw some plausible causal connections between Bush administration policy and movement in Egypt, as really isn’t the case with Libya. I think that there are a couple of answers.

First, as Atrios points out, democracy really isn’t the first thing that most conservatives think about when they turn their minds to foreign policy. Indeed, the whole democracy thing is rather new to the right. They like to believe that the Reagan years were all about democracy promotion, and have engaged in some vigorous revision to make that seem plausible. Democracy promotion, however, does not sit easily on the minds of foreign policy conservatives. I recall that when I taught my first American Foreign Policy course in Autumn 2000 the conservatives were of one mind on American policy; isolation. I remember a conservative student patiently explaining to me that the problem with liberals was that they wanted to intervene all around the world to save people, were driven by emotion, and did not have a sufficiently dispassionate and realist understanding of the international system. This sentiment was echoed (and I do mean echoed) by the rest of my conservative students. Of course, that all changed a couple years later. It’s not surprising, however, that the Bush administration made the case for the Iraq war almost entirely on old fashioned national security grounds, and not on democracy promotion. The willingness of Americans, especially conservative Americans, to see their sons and daughters die on behalf of the political liberty of distant foreigners is notoriously limited. They’ll go along if the leftists hate it, but saving people doesn’t turn them on so much.

I think there’s another reason, specific to Egypt. Authoritarian Egypt has, for the last thirty years, been on speaking terms with Israel. This is not, I am to understand, a popular position among the Egyptian people. This distinguishes Egypt from Saudi Arabia, where the authoritarian government has been consistent in its anti-Israel sentiment. I’m sure that some of the people at the Corner know this, and understand that real democratic change in Egypt may threaten the relationship with Israel. As I’ve noted previously, there’s already some nervousness on this score with respect to Turkish democracy.