All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we have our next guest on the line to talk about his article, Resurgent Arab Nationalism in Egypt.
It's Giorgio Katherio.
He's a research assistant at the Institute for Policy Studies.
His regional focus is the Middle East and North Africa.
In 2011, he graduated from the University of San Diego with an MA in International Relations.
The piece is, again, Resurgent Arab Nationalism in Egypt.
It's at foreign policy and focus, fpif.org.
Welcome back.
No welcome in the first place.
Nice to talk to you.
Hey, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you.
Very interesting piece here.
First of all, especially, I think we have a pretty young audience.
Can you remind people, this is before my time, that's for sure, remind people about who President Nasser was in Egypt?
And then we can get to the resurgent Nasserites.
Sure.
Well, Jamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt in the early 1950s.
He ruled until 1970, and he was really kind of the poster child in the Arab world for the Arab nationalist cause.
This took place right after most Arab countries won their independence from France and England.
And what he really stood for was a strong, secular Arab world where the Arabs were really united and industrialized their countries.
Unfortunately, at least from their end, this movement came to an end pretty much with the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.
And after that event and the war of attrition that lasted until 1970, the movement was deemed sort of a failure in the eyes of many Arabs.
But there is a presidential candidate in Egypt now, Hamdeen Sabahi.
I wanted to ask you back then, whose side or how did they work as far as the bipolar Cold War world where everybody supposedly was in one camp or the other with D.C. or Moscow?
Yeah, well, this was the perception from Washington that the world needed to be seen in either a pro-U.S. or pro-Soviet set of lens.
However, what President Nasser really stood for was an Egyptian foreign policy where Egypt was non-aligned in the Cold War and was actually an independent country, not a proxy of the Soviet Union like many people in Washington believed he was.
Mm hmm.
So it wasn't that he was outright in the red camp.
It was that they just sort of talked themselves into believing that he was.
Yeah.
And as America grew much closer to Israel, it was just understood that if the Arab states wanted to maintain deterrence capacity over Israel, they needed to turn to the Soviet Union for arms.
So their alliance with Moscow was more about necessity rather than adherence to communist ideology.
Sure.
Yeah.
And in fact, secular Marxism and communist atheism isn't going to take too well in the Arab world, I guess.
Right.
Right.
And in fact, a lot of the Arab nationalists really clamped down on communist movements within their own countries.
Now, I'm trying to remember Robert Dreyfus' book.
Wasn't it this article I read this morning?
Don't you mention Robert Dreyfus in here?
Yes.
Yeah.
In his book, Devil's Game, I think it's in there where he talks about really the Americans could have had a deal with the Egyptians to help them build the Aswan Dam.
And because of narrow minded, basically the kind of politics you're talking about, they're trying to see that these nationalists in the Soviet camp, even though they really weren't because of that, they really pushed them into the Soviet camp and they wouldn't cooperate on the damn deal.
They didn't want anything to do with this Nasser guy who really could have been a very natural ally for the United States.
And instead, they just kind of stumbled and pushed him into the Soviet sphere, or at least further into it.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
At that time, Egypt, which represented a sort of pan-Arabist movement, was fighting a proxy war with Saudi Arabia, very pro-Western conservative monarchy.
And the United States really put its bet upon Saudi Arabia and really tried to empower that monarchy and prevent the Arab nationalists from really taking control in the region.
And then Dreyfus writes that one, of course, as you said, this is a lot of this had to do with because that's what Israel wanted.
They couldn't stand for it.
And always so short-sighted, the Israelis and always dominating American politics, the Israelis, they get to decide when really the Nasserites were the best hope really for our side, probably out of the different factions we have to choose from.
And instead, as Dreyfus writes, the CIA backed the Muslim Brotherhood as the right-wing religious alternative to the nationalists.
Oh, totally.
In the media today, there's so much fear surrounding the possibility of Egypt really being controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
But there are so few people who are just bringing up some recent history and actually mentioning the fact that the U.S. allied itself with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
They viewed the organization as a weapon against Nasser and Arab nationalism throughout the region.
How was it that that Nasser died and Sadat came to power?
I don't remember that part of it.
OK, well, Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat replaced him.
So he just died of a heart attack or something or what?
What happened?
Yeah, I believe it's old age health conditions.
I don't remember specifically, but...
So it wasn't a coup or a poisoning or a...
No, no.
And then Sadat, he was the American sock puppet, right?
Unquestionably on America's side.
Yeah, certainly.
And he definitely became that way more so in his presidency.
But in 1973, the Egyptians and Syrians sought to challenge Israel's control of the Sinai and Golan Heights.
And although they didn't win the battle militarily, the Arabs were able to demonstrate to the Israelis that when their forces combined, they had the capacity to impose unacceptable damage on Israel, which happened in the Yom Kippur War.
And at that moment, the Americans and Israelis pursued a policy of removing Egypt from the pan-Arab circle and sought to neutralize it with Israel and bring it into the American camp in the Cold War.
And this was done through a lot of economic aid and a lot of other incentives.
And that effectively did lure Egypt out of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And it became basically an American puppet from that point on.
Right, because then when Sadat was shot and Hosni Mubarak replaced him, that was no difference at all, right?
He was the loyal puppet up until a year and a half ago.
Yeah, Mubarak continued the Sadat policy of being entirely in the American camp.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I'm sorry, we have to hold it here and go out to this break.
But I think it's important that people get a little bit of a background there in the history of who the nationalists were, especially on the Egyptian side.
And then when we get back, we can talk all about the new Nasserites in Egypt.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Giorgio Caffiero from Foreign Policy in Focus.
The piece is called Resurgent Nationalism in Egypt.
And so we just spent the last segment going over the history of Nasser.
And we didn't really talk about the whole Pan-Arab Union and this and that.
But we're talking about the nationalists from back in the Cold War days.
And now, of course, it's 2012, a year and a half ago, more or less, the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak fell.
And now they're holding elections and they're now at the runoff.
There's nobody left in the runoff except for the Muslim Brotherhood guy and the former Mubarak regimeist.
But this article is about the guy that came in third.
And you might have missed him.
His name is Morsi.
He was only five points behind the, I guess, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, I think, in the in the recent election.
And so he's not a player at the very top of this, but he represents perhaps the rebirth of this Egyptian nationalist movement.
And this great article at Foreign Policy and Focus does a real good job of explaining why this is important.
And again, it's called Resurgent Arab Nationalism in Egypt.
So, Giorgio, tell us a little bit about this guy that came in third place.
OK, this gentleman's name is Sabahi and he won 20.4 percent in the first round, just right behind Morsi, who's in first place at 24.3 and Safik, the Mubarak official, at 23.3.
So he came very close to making the second round.
I switched their names around, didn't I?
Sorry about that.
There's so many names, it's rather difficult to keep everyone straight.
But his movement is very important because out of those who supported the revolution, there is a rather big divide between those who would like Egypt to be an Islamic state and those who would like it to be a civil state.
What he represents are the revolutionaries who want Egypt to be a tolerant society where women and religious minorities, particularly the Coptic Christians, are treated equally under the law and where Egypt will remain a secular state.
The main thing he represents to a lot of Egyptians is a challenge to the neoliberal order that the regime has embodied and has been supported by the Islamist factions in Egypt, a real commitment to expanding social programs for the poorer segments of society and raising fees in the Suez Canal to assert Egyptian sovereignty there.
In other words, the way you write about the state capitalism model that they're based on, it's, well, more or less what they have now, right, where their entire economy is really controlled by the state as it is.
It's just the poor get nothing.
And so this would cut them on a little bit of the cronyism as the plan, huh?
Exactly.
A big, one of his main appeals is that he's not a corrupt man, that he's really suffered with the Egyptians throughout these years.
He was silenced by the regime and he really suffered under Sadat and Mubarak and he's seen as a very sort of humble man who can, in a lot of young, secular-minded Egyptians, see him as a real leader down the road.
And how old is he?
He was born in the mid-1950s, if I remember correctly, so it's about 60, almost.
Well, I'm no good at arithmetic, so I'll take your word for it.
Certainly, I'm no good at arithmetic live.
Anyway, so he still has a future, even though he came in third, here's the point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, well, so that's very interesting.
Now, I wonder though, I mean, I know it's a very young population, but what hope does a secularist candidate really have in Egypt at this point?
I mean, the Islamists are just the shoe-in all the way around, other than where the military can stop them with bayonets, right?
Yeah, there's no doubt that the Islamists are very popular in Egypt.
It's a very conservative country.
And after we saw the Muslim Brotherhood do so well in the 2005 elections, it's really no surprise that they've gained so much since Mubarak fell.
But what a lot of experts contend is that whoever is going to take over in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, their political fate will be linked to their economic performance.
And I think if the Islamists do not deliver on economic issues, they will lose support in the future.
And this will provide the Nasserists an even bigger opportunity to increase their popularity in Egypt.
Well, and so now, what do you see as the most likely outcome of the runoff election?
It's taken place, I don't know when it starts, but it's this week, right?
Yeah, it is going to be held on June 16th and June 17th.
And one of the biggest variables between now and then is a decision made on June 14th by the Supreme Constitutional Court.
They're going to, first of all, determine whether or not Safiq is even eligible to run, because there was a law passed, it was approved by the Military Council in April, that pretty much bars former Mubarak officials from running for president.
So he may be unqualified to run, and then this whole election will become an up or down vote on Morsi.
And the legal implications of that are not really made clear by the Constitution.
And then the other decision the Supreme Constitutional Court has to decide upon is the validity of the recent parliamentary elections.
So it seems like a lot will be determined by this body on the 14th.
I'm not going to even try to predict how things will go.
Things could go in so many different directions right now.
Sure, it's interesting to see that you would have this guy from a Nasserite position, I mean, a nationalist is a nationalist, I guess, but he seems a lot more interested in independence from the West than we ever hear the Muslim Brothers, right?
They always say, oh, don't worry, everything is going to stay exactly how it is, pretty much, as far as you know, that kind of thing.
But this guy is running against the status quo, hardcore, he wants independence, and he wants it immediately.
Apparently, some of these quotes you have in here.
Oh, absolutely.
For a few decades, there's really been a tacit alliance between Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
And Sabahi would really like to remove Egypt from that axis, align it with other Arab states, and also improve relations with Turkey and Iran.
So the implications of the nationalists conducting Egyptian foreign policy are very important, as Egypt would be completely realigned in the region.
Mm hmm.
Well, I wonder, do you have much of a feeling for, I mean, I presume this guy really means it, but I guess the real question is, do the Muslim Brothers mean it when they deny that they have the same agenda?
I mean, because it seems like those would be the ones that you would expect to immediately, I guess, once they won the presidency, if they win it, assert their as much of their sovereignty and independence as they possibly could, no?
No, I think it's more than the nationalists who are focused upon that.
I ultimately believe that the Muslim Brotherhood will not challenge the role of the Egyptian military in politics.
And as long as the military has this privileged position in Egypt, I'm sure the country will remain within the sphere of US influence.
So no, I really do not think that the Muslim Brotherhood would push hard to change Egypt's foreign policy throughout the region too much.
Well, yeah, and see, just they have such bad branding here in the West.
That's the kind of thing that would get them bombed.
You know, if it was some nationalists that might, we might try real hard for a coup, but if it's Islamists with that same policy, we might just invade that place, you know?
I hope not.
I hope not.
That's how crazy they are over there at where Hillary Clinton works, man.
The guys standing around that water cooler, you don't want to know what they think.
They're insane.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I think, well, hell, I don't know the first thing about Egypt, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can.
And, you know, I certainly want the best for liberty over there in the long run, one way or another.
And I think independence is probably, well, certainly a big part of that.
Maybe it's first and foremost, as far as that goes.
But so I really appreciate you bringing this issue to my attention.
The rise of these new Nasserites is something for me to try to keep my eye on in the medium and long term too, I bet.
So thanks again.
Definitely, Scott.
Thank you so much.
And thanks to all your listeners too.
All right.
Appreciate it.
That is Giorgio Caffiero.
I'm sorry for butchering your name.
And everybody, I'm gone.
I'm leaving town for a week to go hang out with the in-laws.
Zoe Greif will be taking over the show.
You are in capable hands and it'll be great.
So stay tuned for that.
And thanks, Zoe.
No problem, man.
It'll be my pleasure.
