Eric Trager was the Esther K. Wagner Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
The former secretary of state's memoirs illustrate how Egypt's misplaced focus on supposed American conspiracies has exacerbated U.S. skepticism regarding Cairo's recent political direction.
Hillary Clinton was never really an "Arab Spring" romantic. Even as thousands of Egyptians took to the streets in January 2011, then-Secretary of State Clinton was calling Hosni Mubarak's regime "stable" and warning her Obama administration colleagues against "pushing a longtime partner out the door." She later cooperated with President Mohamed Morsi, despite the Muslim Brotherhood leader's increasingly autocratic behavior.
That approach put Clinton squarely in the administration's "realist" camp. As she describes in her new memoir "Hard Choices": "America will always do what it takes to keep our people safe and advance our core interests...Sometimes that means working with partners with whom we have deep disagreements." Clinton uses her "realism" to explain why she didn't press the post-Mubarak military junta or the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet despite her apparent willingness to work with Cairo's latest repressive-yet-pro-Western regime, Clinton will likely steer clear of Egypt if she's elected president...
