AP Photo

In February 2006, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to a disappointed Egypt to meet with President Hosni Mubarak, who a few months earlier had defied both Egyptian popular will and President George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" by declaring reelection victory with an insultingly improbable 89 percent of the vote. In Washington, the trip marked the beginning of the end of Bush's democracy-promotion agenda: Rice, who had spent much of 2005 very publicly pushing Mubarak for democratic reform, instead re-built ties with the Egyptian dictator, who was an important U.S. ally on counter-terrorism and the...