Following more than a week of wide-spread protests to his rigid 30-year autocracy, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has finally announced that he will not seek re-election in September. His welcome statement is a sure sign that Egypt will soon have a new government and a new political order. With a little help, that should occur far sooner than September, as well. Beyond that, it’s virtually impossible to know with any certainty what will come next as the ripples of Egypt’s new era, hopefully of a working democracy, lap outwards from Cairo and spill more broadly across the Middle East.
What we know with certainty is that the presently uncertain future for Egypt is enormously important well beyond Egypt’s borders. Egypt is by far the largest of the 24 Arab states in North Africa and the Middle East. With a population of nearly 80 million, or around 22 percent of the Arab world, Egypt has always exerted huge influence in the pan-Arab mind-set and in Arab nations’ governance and geo-political policies.
So what comes next in the governance of Egypt will affect not just other Arab nations. It also will affect the United States and other Western nations that rely on Middle East oil and natural gas resources, and on long-nurtured diplomatic and commercial relationships. And it will affect, most particularly, Israel, the tiny Jewish state that has been whip-sawed since its creation by its surrounding Arab tyrants as a political scapegoat for all their nations’ problems.
Hanging in the balance already is Israel’s security with respect to its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt; the price and certainty of oil and natural gas supplies from the Middle East; Western efforts to restrain Muslim extremists; secure passage through the Suez Canal; and a host of diplomatic and military relationships and tacit agreements between Western nations and other regional autocracies that may go belly-up as the waves of popular uprising that have spread from Tunisia to Egypt and to Jordan — another Western ally — inspire the Arab street in other capitals.
Washington certainly cannot advance its agenda on such issues in Egypt in the current circumstance, nor can it steer a friendly new successor to power. The foment that has spurred popular grass-roots uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and that is now sure to emerge in other neighboring states, will settle on its own terms.