It has not been a week of good news from Washington for Cairo. Days after a Congressional hearing on Egypt which the official spokesman of the Foreign Ministry described as “not objective” Cairo is bracing itself for a significant reduction in the annual economic aid it receives from the US. Egypt could lose over 45 per cent of the $150 million of annual economic aid in the draft budget submitted to Congress by the US administration. Concerned Egyptian officials say this is not necessarily a final figure and remains subject to some negotiations but they acknowledge that at the end of the day Cairo faces a significant cut as the US administration cracks down on foreign assistance. The news — “largely expected” according to one official — on a potential reduction in economic aid to $67 million is not as disturbing for Cairo as the Congressional hearing that took place on 25 April when three speakers told Congress that the Trump administration should refrain from showing flexibility towards Egypt's stand on human rights and needs to be wary of the efficiency and outcome of the counter-terrorist strategies Cairo has adopted. According to one diplomat, the hearing, at which Michele Dunne, a former Obama administration diplomat seen in Cairo as a staunch opponent of the regime, was a key speaker, was not at all well received. It was surprising for some in Washington, according to sources there, that the Foreign Ministry spokesman in Cairo issued an official statement criticising the hearing. In Cairo official sources say the statement put out by the spokesman of the foreign minister was inevitable given the wide coverage the hearing received, especially on social media in Egypt where videos of the statements of the three speakers were shared alongside soundbites in which the referred to a controversial video, broadcast by the Turkey-based pro Muslim Brotherhood satellite channel Mekamline, purportedly showing violations by Egyptian soldiers during their terror combat missions in Sinai. Cairo was also unimpressed, say officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, by blunt references during the hearing to the military cooperation Egypt between Israel over Sinai. Sources in Cairo agree that it would have been difficult for the Egyptian government to look the other way given the extent of the “allegations and claims” made during the Congressional hearing. “Public opinion in Egypt had to be told we completely reject everything that was said,” said one government source. The hearing came a week after Egyptian-American citizen Aya Hegazi was received in the White House by President Trump after an Egyptian court acquitted her of abusing street children through Beladi, an Egyptian non-governmental organisation. Hegazi and seven of her co-workers at Beladi had been behind bars for three years. Following her acquittal Hegazi was transferred with her husband, a co-defendant, to a US military plane accompanied by senior Trump Middle East advisor Dina Powel, and then flown to Washington. In a press interview Trump made it clear he had demanded the case be sorted out during President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi's recent visit to the Oval Office. Hegazi's acquittal and her departure from Egypt came hours before a visit by US Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Mattis was received by Al-Sisi, Defence Minister Sedki Sobhi and Chief of Staff Mahmoud Hegazi. The meetings Mattis held in Cairo were described as friendly and positive by both sides. They included “candid discussions” about “the kind of help” the US could provide Egypt in its war against IS and other terror organisations in Sinai “and maybe elsewhere”, according to an Egyptian source. Both sides say no final agreement was reached on any of Egypt's demands. The resumption of Egyptian participation in the US-led Bright Star manoeuvres remains as tentative as ever and no timetable was set for the Egyptian-US strategic dialogue at the level of foreign ministers. Cairo was also disappointed by the US strike against military targets of Syrian ruler Bashar Al-Assad that Trump ordered days after Al-Sisi finished his five day-visit to Washington. Cairo is also concerned about the level of openness in Washington's relations with Riyadh. Officials here had expected the opposite to happen, a situation they thought would help Cairo rebalance its own relationship with Saudi Arabia. So is Cairo disappointed with the Trump administration? “No,” says an informed Egyptian official. “For the most part we think that in the first 100 days of Trump we managed to reposition the relations with the US from negative to positive. We are well beyond the acute tension that marked our relations with the Obama administration.” Cairo is not particularly worried about the economic impact of the aid cut. The joint Egyptian-American mechanism that determines the projects on which the economic aid is spent is so complex that Cairo has close to a quarter of a billion dollars in overdue aid waiting to be processed. The cuts in Washington's overall military and economic annual aid package of $1.5 billion are, after all, around five per cent, and officials in Cairo are convinced the amount can be made up with direct investments and a resumption of the cash-flow agreement that allows Egypt to bypass military aid limits in purchasing arms from the US. It is not economic or military aid, or even cooperation, that is ruffling feathers in Egypt. Cairo's worries are instead focused on the Trump administration's attitude to human rights in Egypt, the hesitation Washington is showing over designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, and on possible demands by Washington that Egypt participate in regional military operations under the anti-terror umbrella. Informed sources say the latter was a subject of discussion during Mattis' trip to Cairo in April. According to political commentator Amr Al-Shobaky, Egypt will “inevitably have to give something if it wants to get something out of the Trump administration in return”. Such trade-offs, he says, are far more consequential to Egyptian-American relations today than aid. “It is almost 40 years since the aid was initiated. We are living in a totally different world today and we need to think differently,” argues Al-Shobaky. Whatever positive impact US aid has had cannot be viewed separately from the “accumulated negative influence this aid has had on Egypt's regional political role”. Cairo, says Al-Shobaky, “has for too long measured its political choices with an eye on the impact they might have on Washington's management of aid”. For Al-Shobaky the time is ripe for Cairo “to launch more realistic and more balanced cooperation away from the constraints that come with aid”.
