Focus in relationship with Cairo shifts toward security matters
The visit appeared to go well for the Egyptian leader: He received coveted photos posing with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and walking down the White House colonnade, while neither Mr. Trump nor White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made any public mention of Egypt’s spotty human rights record.
“The president recognizes…that’s best discussed privately,” Mr. Spicer said. “I’m not going to get into what they discussed privately. But I will tell you we understand the concern and I think those are the kinds of things that I think progress is made privately.”
.. “He has longed for a big hug from Washington as a sign of his broadening international legitimacy and he got that today,” said Eric Trager, an Egypt expert at The Washington Institute.
.. Experts and former officials say the human rights conditions have significantly deteriorated over the past several years.
.. “We are building up our military to a level that will be the highest, probably the highest that we’ve ever had.” Mr. Trump said.
.. Egypt is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military and foreign aid, getting about $1.5 billion a year. The Trump administration’s budget blueprint doesn’t guarantee aid to Egypt, and State Department officials have said aid to every country, except Israel, is under review.
.. Mr. Sisi won an election in 2014, several months after the military, then under his command, led a coup to oust Egypt’s first freely elected leader, President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The battle between the U.S. and the Confederacy affected global trade in astonishing ways
.. It took just a couple of weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in South Carolina for farmers the world over to realize the scope of the bounty that had landed in their lap. Agricultural laborers from Australia and India to the West Indies ditched wheat and other food staples and hastily planted up their fields with cotton. Prices had risen by up to 150 percent. As soon as it became clear that England wouldn’t enter the war as allies of the Confederacy, many farmers doubled down and gave over every scrap of their acreage to this enriching crop.
.. In 1861, Egypt had only exported 600,000 cantars of cotton (a traditional measurement equal to about 100 pounds), but by 1863 it had more than doubled this to almost 1.3 million cantars, the New York Times reported at the time. By the end of the 19th century, Egypt derived 93 percent of its export revenues from cotton, which had also become “the major source of income for almost every proprietor in the Delta,”
.. For just as the expansion in the trafficking of slaves to the southern United States is often explained in part by the pick up in cotton production, so too the arrival of this tremendously labor intensive crop in Egypt led to the introduction of a variation of the feudal system. Farmers who had previously spent much of their time planting land that was for all intents and purposes theirs, now found themselves pressed into work on large estates. Where once poorer townspeople had had access to cheap produce, soon they discovered that the cultivation of cotton at the expense of food meant much higher prices for fruits and vegetables.
.. Ismail was so intent on building up cotton infrastructure and transforming Cairo into a ‘Paris on the Nile’ that he encouraged the “establishment of banks like the Anglo-Egyptian from which he might borrow heavily in return for certain favors,” writes Owen. Very soon he’d built up such big debts to mostly British and French creditors that he couldn’t hope to ever pay them back. Additionally, the end of the American Civil War in 1865 led to a steep fall in global cotton prices as the U.S. crop came back on the market and proved particularly damaging for Egypt. It created a sharp budget deficit and ultimately a declaration of national bankruptcy a decade later
.. “I think you can say that the American Civil War – and the effects on cotton – made the British change their policy towards Egypt,” says Mohamed Awad, director of the Alexandria & Mediterranean Research Center at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. “Indirectly it was one of the main reasons for the occupation of Egypt.”
.. But the stellar reputation of Egyptian cotton still holds, even though in the United States, linen manufacturers can use the name on products with just five percent of the Egyptian crop.
Wealthy Egyptians were among President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s most ardent supporters after he seized power in 2013, favoring stability and a harsh crackdown on Islamists, even at the cost of civil liberties. But that loyalty is being tested now, as Egypt’s severe shortage of foreign currency cripples businesses, impedes luxury imports and crimps their lifestyles. And that has prompted a tide of unusually sharp criticism of Mr. Sisi.
.. Mr. Sisi is using what scarce resources he has mainly to help the poor — and the seven million people on the state’s payroll — by propping up the value of Egypt’s currency.
.. “No class or demographic is happy now, from Alexandria to Upper Egypt. Sisi isn’t satisfying anyone.”
.. The country’s tourism minister says that the slump has cost Egypt $1.3 billion in revenue since then, and that the number of visitors to the country was down 44 percent in January.
.. Egypt’s Gulf allies, like Saudi Arabia, used to give the country generous aid — some $30 billion in the first two years of Mr. Sisi’s rule — but since last summer that has slowed to a trickle.
.. General Motors has a car plant in Egypt, but it had to temporarily halt production recently because it could not get the parts it needed. Foreign airlines have threatened to curtail flights to Egypt because of rules blocking them from repatriating profits. For a time, British Airways stopped selling tickets in Egyptian currency.
.. Still, there remain plenty of Egyptians, rich and poor, who continue to see Mr. Sisi as a bulwark against the instability that has roiled other countries in the region.
Underlying growing instability is the Egyptian state’s increasing inability to contain the devastating social impacts of interconnected energy, water and food crises over the last few decades.
.. In 1973, U.S. senator and oil expert Henry Jackson noted that Israel and the Shah’s Iran were “reliable friends of the United States” who, along with Saudi Arabia, “have served to inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab states…who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal source of petroleum in the Persian Gulf.”