The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it was reinstating military assistance to Egypt that had been suspended after a bloody crackdown on opposition activists, a move that analysts say mutes U.S. calls for democratic reforms but also promises sweeping changes to the way aid has traditionally been given the country.
The White House said that President Barack Obama personally called Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to deliver the news – an overture that comes as turmoil in the Middle East has the administration looking for partners that are more reliable than revolutionary.
U.S. officials said they’re now ready to provide additional military assistance, including releasing 12 F-16 aircraft, 20 Harpoon missiles, and up to 125 M1A1 Abrams tanks that had been blocked from delivery since 2013, when Egyptian forces killed more than 800 people and wounded thousands in what Human Rights Watch called “one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.” The Egyptian government puts the death toll at 638.
The episode drew international condemnation of Egypt’s powerful military council, which had seized power in a coup amid massive protests against Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood figure who was the first democratically elected president in Egyptian history. Sissi was head of the armed forces during the coup. He was elected president last year and since has cracked down on dissent, not only from Islamists, but leftists and moderates.
Analysts saw the U.S. move as a reflection of less concern for Egyptian human rights than for stability in a country battling Islamist extremists in the Sinai Peninsula and facing an unsettled situation in Libya, its neighbor to the west, where a civil war is allowing Islamists aligned with the Islamic State to flourish.
“Egypt has dropped down the list of priorities for the administration,” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt specialist at the Century Foundation research institute in New York. “Their determination is that this regime is in place, it’s not going anywhere, it’s stable, and our previous policy hasn’t gotten us very far. . . . Clearly, this is not about democratization.”
But Hanna said the announcement of the restoration of military aid also makes important changes in the way Egypt is allocated aid. The changes will allow the United States more say in how and what the Egyptian military buys, ending a practice called cash-flow financing, which essentially allowed Egypt to order military hardware from U.S. contractors on credit. The result locked the United States into paying for Egyptian purchases or leaving U.S. manufacturers with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid-for merchandise.
Hanna called the decision to phase out such purchases by 2018 as “the big headline,” giving the U.S. government more leverage to steer Egypt’s purchases away from tanks and jet aircraft to equipment more suited for counterterrorism and border security.
“Traditionally, the attempts to modernize the Egyptian military and change its priorities have been impossible. They just wouldn’t listen. They weren’t interested,” Hanna said. “The U.S. now has a stronger hand to play in trying to shape that acquisition process.”
National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said U.S. officials had completed a comprehensive review of security assistance to Egypt in the wake of the lethal crackdown on demonstrators. Since then, she said, “we have made clear our commitment to simultaneously pursuing our security interests and our support for meaningful Egyptian political reform.”
“Throughout this process, the president’s national security team carefully examined our military assistance relationship with Egypt to determine what types of support make most sense – for the United States and for Egypt – under present conditions in Egypt and the region,” Meehan said in a statement.
The new priorities for Egyptian military assistance, the White House said, would be the “acquisition and sustainment of new equipment in four categories – counterterrorism, border security, maritime security, and Sinai security – and for sustainment for weapons systems already in Egypt’s arsenal.”