Shadi Hamid writes:

On July 3, 2013, the Arab Spring ended. A military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president who was a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, a decade later, the role the United States played in the events leading up to the coup, and the coup itself, is still contentious.

Brotherhood supporters blame the Obama administration for its unwillingness to stop the coup or even to call it one. Coup supporters, meanwhile, claim that it was U.S. President Barack Obama who propelled the Brotherhood to power in the first place. Among Western analysts and policymakers, the prevailing narrative is that the U.S. government was blindsided by the coup and, in any case, didn’t have the ability to do much about it.

However, drawing on journalistic accounts as well as more than 30 interviews I conducted with senior U.S. officials—including those who were in the room with Obama at key moments of decision—the available evidence points to a disturbing conclusion. The conventional narrative that Obama was blindsided by the coup is simply false. The opposite is closer to the truth: Obama gave the Egyptian military what amounted to a green light to overthrow the country’s first-ever democratically elected government.

Democratization in the Arab world has long been hobbled by an “Islamist dilemma.” U.S. officials who might otherwise believe in democracy have found it more difficult to support in Arab countries because Islamist parties are the most likely to perform well and even win in free elections.

With Obama, there was some room for optimism. As the son of a Muslim father and the first U.S. president to have lived in a Muslim-majority country, Obama seemed more broadminded about Islamism than his predecessors. Yet this perceived openness also proved a liability. As one senior White House official put it to me: “Don’t forget, at the beginning, he’s accused of being an Islamist sympathizer himself. I think he had to fight that perception. And sometimes he overcompensated.” This was a time when Obama’s very identity was being challenged. Remarkably, a majority of Republicans came to believe that Obama himself was “deep down” a Muslim.

But Obama was also a pragmatist who was temperamentally inclined toward care and caution. Stability was the watchword. And in the case of Egypt in the wake of the 2011 revolution, that meant supporting the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), Egypt’s transitional authority that took over in 2011 after former President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, even if it meant subverting the democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people. The SCAF, Obama seemed to believe, would ensure that democracy didn’t get too out of hand. Obama admitted as much. “Our priority has to be stability and supporting the SCAF. Even if we get criticized,” he said. “I’m not interested in the crowd in Tahrir Square and Nick Kristof,” he added, referring to the New York Times columnist who had been critical of the administration’s Egypt policy.

In the interest of stability, the United States wanted the Egyptian military to hold presidential elections before parliamentary elections. As Dennis Ross, a senior advisor to Obama, described it: “Part of the reason that we had been pushing for presidential elections first was precisely because it was a given, at least to me, that in parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood would dominate.” Or, as U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson told me, “Our sort of default position was that [secular candidate] Amr Moussa was going to win [the presidency], which was an entirely Western way of looking at things.”

But parliamentary elections came first. In 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party secured 43 percent of the seats in parliament, while Moussa was unable to advance past the initial round of voting for the presidency, garnering only 11 percent of the vote. Morsi, who narrowly won the second round of presidential voting in June 2012, spent a turbulent year in office, culminating in mass protests against his government over deteriorating security and economic conditions. The vast majority of protesters weren’t calling for a military coup. They were calling for Morsi’s resignation or early elections. But the military, led by the enigmatic then-Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, seized the initiative and, within days, took power. [Continue reading…]