Cairo speech one year on: an opportunity squandered?

His insistence on democracy and human rights was the portion of President Obama’s Cairo speech that received the loudest and most sustained applause from young people in the audience. But the administration has failed to deliver on the rhetorical promise and nowhere more so than in Egypt, according to The Washington Institute’s J. Scott Carpenter and Dina Guirguis.

The administration’s new National Security Strategy “shores up many of the speech’s weak points, including the declaratory policy on democracy and counter-radicalization,” they note. But the U.S. missed an opportunity to press for reform when where the regime renewed the emergency law shortly before the anniversary of the speech:

Washington did not adequately press Cairo to honor its years-old commitment to replace the law with modern anti-terror legislation, reflecting the apparent lack of priority the administration placed on the issue. Despite assurances that it consistently voiced human rights concerns at the highest levels throughout the past year, the administration’s efforts were clearly insufficient to convince Cairo that ending the emergency law was high on the U.S. agenda.

While administration officials continue to insist that it is committed to reform, albeit in a more muted and incremental approach than its predecessor, it will be judged by its actions rather than words, Carpenter and Guirguis conclude.   

The administration has another opportunity to get it right, human rights advocate Neil Hicks writes. It should ensure that Mubarak’s successor is chosen through free and fair elections and not through an opaque or corrupted dynastic succession:

Unless the Obama administration finds a way to use the succession from thirty years of rule by President Mubarak as an opportunity to place U.S. relations with Egypt on a different footing, such that they contribute to genuine political reform, greater democracy and improved respect for human rights over time, then by the administration’s own arguments, Egypt will be at risk of greater instability, economic decline and greater insecurity.

Arab democracy activists had little love for the former Bush Administration, writes Sharif Mansour, but some of them “are beginning to look fondly back to that era of outspoken democracy promotion.”

The previous administration’s democracy agenda was unsuccessful because it was associated with the Iraq war, but “at least there was a democracy assistance agenda,” says Mansour, senior program officer for Freedom House’s Middle East and North Africa programs.