President Barack Obama, we know, believes in "engagement." He believes that maintaining ties even with the most hateful regimes holds out the possibility of progress. In his Nobel Peace Prize speechhe mocked moralists -- implicitly including his predecessor, George W. Bush -- who preferred "the satisfying purity of indignation" to the hard and very impure work of diplomacy. And that, I imagine, is why Obama has reacted so cautiously to the shocking massacres in Egypt, canceling planned military exercises but leaving U.S. military aid intact.
More...I think this is a serious mistake. But the calculus that may have lead Obama to his decision is one that I would have admired in a different context. It's a calculus that needs to be reckoned with. I'll try to do that here.
Both Obama and many of the people whose advice he has listened to since 2009 are morally driven figures who nevertheless accept that the world is a fallen place which cannot easily be changed, even with all of America's might. Samantha Power, a senior White House official before she became U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, used to say, "We are all consequentialists now." We -- that is, outside advocates and activists like her who had joined the administration -- had an obligation to choose words, and policies, according to their consequences, not according to some abstract moral scale. If praising dictators in Sudan or Burma, as the administration did at times, encouraged them to reconcile with their rivals, then they should be praised. Cutting ties to demonstrate the purity of your indignation, by contrast, is irresponsible.
Obama's consequentialism was a welcome relief from Bush's moralism. Perhaps Obama should have more sharply criticized the grossly fraudulent Iranian election in 2009, but he held his tongue for fear of jeopardizing talks on nuclear enrichment. It's true that the Iranian authorities simply pocketed Washington's silence and remained intractable; but they would have pocketed American outrage with the same nonchalance. The United States has far more to gain from engaging Iran than it does from issuing ultimatums, even if Israel and most of the U.S. Congress don't see it that way.
Doesn't the same logic apply to today's Egypt? After all, even the Bush administration was unprepared to lower the boom on President Hosni Mubarak when he rigged elections and sent thugs to beat and kill protestors in direct defiance of a promise to Washington. When I was writing The Freedom Agenda, my book about Bush's embrace of democracy promotion, I asked White House and State Department officials why they hadn't even threatened to cut military aid to Egypt. The answer was: Because it wouldn't do any good, and because "we have other fish to fry" with Egypt, which served as a regional counterweight to Iran and a reliable supporter of U.S. policy towards Israel.
Today, of course, those same fish are still frying, especially as Secretary of State John Kerry tries to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. This may explain why Kerry has continued to absurdly insist that a path to a political solution in Egypt "is still open" -- even as Islamists are being hunted down in the street. At the same time, it's just as absurd to imagine that a suspension of the $1.5 billion a year in U.S. aid, or the threat of it, would have any effect on Egypt's new military rulers. They have waded hip-deep in blood; they won't retrace their steps because Washington is outraged.
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