As I was following the visit of Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi to Washington, which came obviously to clear and address almost 10 months of what Fahmi called “troubled relations”, among my expectations of the outcome of the visit was that it would announce the establishment of a strategic dialogue between Washington and Cairo. My expectation was based on Minister Fahmi announcing, when giving the introductory remarks for the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs annual conference on 26 January 2014, that he expected the establishment of Egyptian-American strategic dialogue within one or one and a half months. Before that, there was US Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Cairo 3 December 2013 calling for establishing a strategic dialogue. Since the 1990s, I, while serving as director of the Policy Planning Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1994-1996), advocated such dialogue. The foreign minister at that time, Amr Moussa, was also supportive. However, the US administration was reluctant. I recall a talk with the US ambassador at the time, Edward Walker, on the necessity of such dialogue, when he literally said: “It is better for Egypt to have a strategic dialogue with Israel.” In the late 1990s, a round of talks took place in Washington, but was not followed up on.
My point of departure in advocating an institutional and systematic dialogue between Cairo and Washington was that relations between the two countries are complex both bilaterally and regionally, that they always need regular conversations at the ministerial and high official levels, with agreed agendas. While the two countries need this dialogue, I believe that Egypt needs it more. Egypt needs to regularly explain to the American side its considerations, motivations, priorities and commitments, particularly after 30 June 2013. The two countries' relations became more and more complicated, and a number of misconceptions and inaccurate readings of Egypt developments prevailed within the US administration and associated institutions. Hence, Egypt needs to intensify its arguments and explain its realities. In a recent article, Daniel Kurtzer, the former US ambassador to Egypt, analysing current American-Egyptian relations and their prospects, wrote that Egypt and the United States should reinvigorate their moribund strategic dialogue and invest it with meaning. Senior officials should meet semi-annually to share analysis and try to coordinate approaches on issues such as Nile water, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and the like. This dialogue needs also to be institutionalised.
While the strategic dialogue must be conducted on the official level, it is equally needed on the civil society organisation level. In this context, Egypt needs to encourage members of the US Congress, American scholars and media representatives to visit Egypt to have an expanded dialogue with their counterparts in Egypt. While the US media in particular is still behaving according to misconceptions, there is a beginning of understanding — particularly among the administration and the congress — that Egypt is fighting terrorism and this understanding was behind delivering the Apache helicopters previously held up to Egypt.
Egypt needs to undertake enormous efforts to explain to the American audience the conundrum between their call for inclusiveness in Egypt's political process and the Muslim Brotherhood's violent rejection of the Egyptian people's choice following the 30 June Revolution.
With the coming of a new US ambassador we are hopeful he will be instrumental in solving this puzzle and realising the new reality in Egypt. The writer is executive director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.
