Our Egyptian Unrealpolitik

Our relationship to the Egyptian government has long been an archetypal example of foreign policy realism in action, in the sense that we’ve consistently put our interest in having a cooperative and stable government in Cairo ahead of our commitment to democracy and human rights. Other, non-realpolitik-based approaches would have yielded a different strategy long ago: A principled non-interventionism would have rejected our patronage of the Egyptian military as a costly “entangling alliance” (as Rand Paul did even before recent events), and a principled Wilsonianism would have rejected it as a betrayal of American values. But American policymakers of both parties have stuck with realism instead, consistently choosing the devil we know over the risks inherent in cutting Egypt loose.