I have grown accustomed to hearing the following question, generally towards the end of almost every lecture I deliver in the US: “So, what can the US do?” Most frequently I would begin my answer by referring my audience to a musical most Americans are familiar with: “Fiddler on the Roof.” To those unfamiliar with this operetta, it is based on the book, Tevye the Milkman and Other Tales, by Joseph Stein. Tevye the milkman had five daughters, each of which had a tale to relate of circumstances and events that led them away from the Jewish customs and traditions that the father believed formed the bedrock of family equilibrium and survival. At the same time, the new social customs that were developing in Tsarist Russia in 1905, in which the events of the book are set, lead the state to take actions that would further turn Tevye's life upside-down. The operetta, whose lyrics were written by Sheldon Harnick and the music by Jerry Block, was very popular in the US, especially after it was adapted to film in the early 1970s. The reason I referred my audience to this musical was to remind them of the line, “may God bless and keep the Tsar… far away from us!” My point was that we, in Egypt, wish the US all the best, but that the best thing the US could do for us was to stay away and not do anything at all. This applied in particular to times of crisis when the chances were that a US presence would turn the crisis into a horrible tragedy. My answer always stuns my American listeners. Americans tend to believe that the world needs them in some way or other. After all, was it not the Americans who saved the world from the tyranny of the German Kaiser in World War I and from the terrors of Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism in World War II? Was it not the Americans who lifted Europe and Japan out of the wreckage of World War II, thereby not only salvaging these countries but also rescuing the global economy? Americans recall this history very clearly and it informs the commonly held wisdom with respect to Egypt, a recipient of US grants and aid since 1979. Although the size of this assistance has shrunk over the years, the American perspective remains unchanged. It holds that the Egyptians are living on American handouts, regardless of the fact that the ratio of US aid to Egyptian revenues from the Arab world, exports, remittances from Egyptian workers abroad, tourism and other such sources has fallen to less than 10 per cent. Therefore when some Egyptian comes along and says that the greatest thing that the US can do for Egypt is to keep a good distance, and that Egyptians can manage their own affairs or that it is their right to engage in their own historical experiences without foreign meddling of any sort, this comes as a shock to your average American interlocutor. But there is another side to this coin. It is also a fact that Egyptians, as well as the Arabs I know, firmly believe that everything that happens in their countries is manufactured by the US and Israel, and masterminded in Washington. When revolutions erupt, the Americans must somehow have had a hand in either their success or failure. If revolutions do not erupt at all, then this is because of the American desire for “stability” or stagnation. The “deposed” president Hosni Mubarak was an American agent and, in like manner, the “dismissed” president Mohamed Morsi was an American tool. Egyptian liberals have a long list of evidence to prove that Muslim Brotherhood-US relations set the course for the past three years. The Muslim Brotherhood has another list of evidence — the same that was used by the National Democratic Party under the Mubarak regime — to show that the US had funded Egyptian NGOs and trained Egyptian youth in Serbia and Georgia on how to wage the “jasmine”, “lotus” and other revolutions of the Arab Spring. Yet, as I have always pointed out in Egypt and the Arab world, whenever circumstances permit, the fact is that the role of the US in our internal developments, especially when developments escalate to revolutions and great popular uprisings, is very limited. I generally rest my case on two arguments. The first is that such major historical changes are so complex and multifaceted that the superpower cannot possibly derive an accurate enough reading of the situation in order to formulate a decision on whether or how to intervene. It is not just that Egypt has a population of 92 million. These millions are divided into northern and southern, urban and rural, coastal and inland, and riparian and Mediterranean or Red Sea-oriented. There is a multiplicity of social classes, however you want to define them: low, middle, upper and in between, or agrarian, industrial, working, public sector, merchant, entrepreneurial, etc. We also have the political left and right, which are filled with dozens of political parties, as well as thousands of NGOs and millions of intellectuals of every sort. With such an intricate demographic fabric, Egyptians, themselves, find it hard to understand their own country. Why should the US fare any better? My second argument is that all this talk about power and successfulness of US intervention gives the US an intellectual and political invincibility it simply does not possess. Egyptians and Arabs have this image that the network of American think tanks, research centres, great universities and formidable intelligence agencies must have the ability to know and understand what we cannot. Yet somehow such capacities could not save the US from constant failure. In fact, sometimes they were the very cause of failure. One has only to read Your Government Failed You by Richard Clarke — former national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter-terrorism under George Bush senior, Clinton and George Bush junior — to realise the full extent of the American public's disappointment in the dismal performance of their government abroad, in which American think tanks played an instrumental role in the collective thinking that led a string of failures from the Bay of Pigs disaster to the inability to predict and handle the revolutions and uprisings of the Arab Spring, in which dust storms were far more prevalent than flowers. The US has failed in the majority of its interventions since World War II. Even its few successes, such as the CIA-engineered overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mosaddegh in 1953 and the US-lead international coalition to liberate Kuwait, soon turned sour, at considerable cost to the US itself. The former intervention helped pave the ground for a theocratic revolution in Iran and the latter paved the way for the dismantlement of the Iraqi state in which Iran, now, enjoys extensive influence. In short, the US always has very little that it can do and the instruments it uses have sometimes been a cause for its failure. In addition, its few successes were actually preludes to major disasters. Was the fiddler on the roof wrong to pray for a long life for the Tsar as long as the Tsar stayed away?
