US interests in the Southeastern Mediterranean seem pretty
clear: We should be empowering secular democratic political actors
in Egypt to compete in the future with the currently ascendent
Islamists, and meanwhile maintaining strong ties with Israel — our
only truly stable ally in the region — to deter belligerence by
actors within Egypt who might be itching to tear up the Camp David
Accords. More specifically:
1.
Withhold aid to Egypt’s military government until they reverse
course on repression of organizations like the National Democratic
Institute and the International Republican Institute, which train
activists in the nuts and bolts of political organization;
2. Maintain support for said organizations;
3. Strengthen military ties with Israel;
4. Avoid diplomatic friction with Israel.
In the budget proposal released Monday, the Obama administration
proposes to do the opposite of all of these things.
1. As Jen Rubin
notes,
[T]he administration has threatened a cut off of aid to Egypt if
the junta goes ahead with prosecution of NGO’s personnel including
some Americans. But - you guessed it - the
administration’s budget calls for $1.3 billion in military
assistance to Egypt. Might the administration have put that on hold
as an incentive for the Egyptians to dismiss the changes?
Apparently, not.
There are efforts on Capitol Hill to move on this front,
including the
amendment Rand Paul wants added to the Highway Bill, which is
currently
stalled over this issue; the administration’s position no doubt
helps explain Senate Democrats’ resistence.
2. Democracy-promotion — including the National Endowment for
Democracy, which funds the NDI and IRI —
takes a cut:
Under Obama’s proposal, released Monday, the State Department’s
Democracy Fund would be cut by 21 percent from its current
$140-million appropriation, leaving it with $111 million for fiscal
2012. Subsidies for the National Endowment for Democracy, a private
nonprofit that focuses on spreading democracy, would be cut by 12
percent, from $118 million to $104 million.
This is a familiar move for the Obama administration, which in
its first year made major cuts to programs promoting democracy and
governance in Egypt. The White House slashed those funds by 60
percent, from $50 million to $20 million, during 2009, though
Congress added another $5 million in funding to the programs. Hit
hardest by those cuts were civil-society programs and
nongovernmental organizations, whose funding dropped 78 percent,
from $32 million to $7 million.
Those cuts were backed by diplomats in Cairo, who told the White
House that democracy-promotion programs harmed relations with
recently-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
To repeat this: In the two years prior to Mubarak’s fall, the
Obama administration was cutting back on training Egyptian
democrats. When Mubarak fell, his
legacy included an Islamist movement with unmatched
organizational muscle. And the White House has apparently learned
nothing from this.
3. Obama’s budget cuts funding for US-Israeli missile defense
programs, to the horror of the relevant House Republican leaders;
Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Armed
Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon sent an
open letter on Wednesday urging President Obama to reconsider.
McKeon, at an event on Capitol Hill yesterday morning hosted by the
“Defending Defense” project (a joint venture of the American
Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign
Policy Initiative), reiterated his objection to cutting missile
defense funding. “We should be increasing it,” he added.
4. On the other hand, there is an area where the Obama
administration does want to increase funding, as Adam Kredo at the
excellent new Washington Free Beacon
explains:
The Obama administration is clandestinely trying to resume
funding a U.N. body that officially recognized the “State of
Palestine.”
But members of Congress say that they won’t stand for it.
A footnote tucked into the president’s recently unveiled budget
proposal reveals the administration’s intent to resume funding for
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization, otherwise known as UNESCO.
UNESCO caused an
international firestorm last year when it accepted Palestine as
a member - despite the fact that Palestine is neither a state nor a
full member of the U.N.
Congress responded to UNESCO’s unwarranted intrusion into the
Middle East peace process by invoking a U.S. law that prohibits
funding of any international organization that recognizes a
Palestinian state.
Now, however, Obama is aiming to resume UNESCO’s funding -
ignoring the Palestinians’ ongoing quest to establish a state via
the U.N., rather than through direct negotiations with Israel.
According to a footnote in the White House’s budget summary:
“The Department of State intends to work with Congress to seek
legislation that would provide authority to waive restrictions on
paying the U.S. assessed contributions to UNESCO. Should the
Congress pass this legislation, this funding is sufficient to cover
the FY 2013 UNESCO assessment and the balance of the FY 2012
assessment.”
Kredo goes on to quote Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Joe Walsh
expressing opposition.
So, to recap, the administration’s budget attaches no strings to
aid to the Egyptian government that is suppressing organizations
dedicated to democratic development, cuts funding for those
organizations, cuts missile defense cooperation with Israel, and
seeks to restore UN funding in a way that gives the Palestinians a
pass on an attempted end-run around bilateral diplomacy with
Israel. Do you ever get the idea that this administration doesn’t
know what is and isn’t in our national interest?
