The United States government is a big spender. We have a bit of a debt problem right now.
But that didn’t stop us from giving $572 million in military aid to Egypt earlier this month.
This makes the Editorial Board wonder if our government’s money is well spent and in what exactly we’re ?investing.
$572 million is a lot of money, especially considering Egypt’s tricky situation.
The Egyptian people rose up during the Arab Spring of 2011 and overthrew the President-by-title, dictator-by-action, Hosni Mubarak.
It was a big win for democracy, but things got complicated. The party that rose to power was the ?Muslim Brotherhood.
While democratically elected, many Egyptians thought the Islamist group and their leader, President Mohamed Morsi, were a ?little too extreme.
More riots occurred. The military intervened and eventually instigated a coup d’état. General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was elected May 28 in a landslide vote.
There are many different interpretations of these events. You’ll get different stories depending on whom you talk to and whom they support.
Some believe Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are violent extremists. Some think they were trying to save Egypt. Some just think they were the first political party to get broad support, and then they pushed their luck a little too far.
The military’s role is also in question.
Some believe they protected the people, stepping in when things got out of hand and preserving order. Others say they waited for an opportune moment and then put their own man in power with a questionable election.
Regardless of what you think, America has bankrolled Egypt’s military ?expenditures.
And this isn’t a new occurrence. When Mubarak was in power, he would visit the White House annually.
From 1946 to 2010 the U.S. gave more than $57 billion in military aid to Egypt.
The reason the U.S. was willing to provide so much aid to a country ruled by a series of authoritarian leaders was pragmatic ?geopolitics.
Egypt is a large, powerful country in the Middle East. We wanted to make sure they allied with the west, and not with Russia during the Cold War, or Iran afterward. As long as they were on our side, we could control what happened in the Middle East a little more easily.
And now, chances are, the reasons are the same. Although we like to promote democracies, Egypt is still big enough that we’d like to stay close friends. Even if that means funding a semi-democracy, we’ll put the money down.
So is this donation a good one? Couldn’t we be using this money to get our own country on better footing? Are we funding an oppressive regime? Even if El-Sisi means well, Egypt is still ?fairly corrupt.
How do we know the money will be used to serve the people or at least our ?interests?
The Editorial Board believes we do not.
Maybe we need to keep giving money to countries such as Egypt.
But if we don’t ask questions about decisions such as this, we’re never going to create a better world or get out of our insane debt.
@ids_opinion
