America can no longer rely on military aid to influence the Middle East

American military aid no longer guarantees faithful allies. For nearly four decades the US was able to count on Egypt as a reliable ally in managing Middle Eastern affairs to its liking. From the time of Anwar Sadat through the years of Hosni Mubarak, American military aid sustained a government in Cairo that kept the peace with Israel and did Washington's bidding, whether providing token symbolic military forces for the Gulf wars or rendition destinations in the "war on terror". That trend began when Sadat turned his back on Nasser's ambition to unite the Arab world, invited the US to help him end the 1973 October war, and dismissed the Russians – Egypt's first big- time arms supplier. Although military aid did not really start to flow to Egypt until after Camp David in 1978, the pattern was set. Under Sadat, the west once again enjoyed a special position in Cairo, just as it had for all those years before the 1956 Suez debacle. When Mubarak's regime began to sway in the wake of the events in Tunisia a year ago, the US had well-developed relations with the Egyptian military. The generals would soon have to choose between loyalty to Mubarak and their own welfare as recipients of the American aid that had made them a privileged elite. When Mubarak resisted American suggestions to make concessions, regarding that as foreign interference, US leaders demanded he give up power. But when the Egyptian military behaved according to expectations, President Barack Obama contrasted hopeful events in Egypt with the suppression of dissent in Iran: "So far, at least, we're seeing the right signals coming out of Egypt." Within a few weeks, however, protesters were back in Tahrir Square, challenging the interim military regime to keep its promises about steps towards constitutional government. Meanwhile, recent elections have deepened fears that the strong showing of the Salafi movement will push Egyptian politics towards radical Islamism. In any event, it is clear Washington's influence over the course of events in Egypt and elsewhere has diminished as a result of the Arab spring. Over the past year the US simply stood by as Saudi Arabia put down protests in Bahrain, whose ruling family hosts a key American naval base, and exhibited a studied ambiguity toward events in Yemen as the country struggled to end the Saleh dictatorship. While the US did eventually join in demands for Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, to step down, and steered events to depose the long-time Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, the general picture American policy conveyed was of an ageing stand-pat power, fearful of losing its grip. Increasingly, Turkey has stepped forward in areas where the US had, as Sadat put it, once held 99% of the cards. The obvious temptation for the US, in an effort to maintain its position, is to double-down on past policies, for – as Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the joint chiefs noted last year – military aid to Egypt was an investment that had "paid off for a long, long time". In 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton remarked approvingly that Americans "do a lot of military business and sell a lot of weapon systems to a number of countries in the Middle East and the Gulf". Its value in the future is much more in doubt. On the eve of Arab spring in October 2010, the Obama administration announced that it would authorise military sales to Saudi Arabia (highly sophisticated aircraft and satellite-guided bombs) worth more than $60bn over the next decade and a half. Such sales – once part of cold war rituals accompanying the rivalry with the Soviet Union – always had the dual purpose of keeping internal order and maintaining the tenuous balance of arms with Israel. They also served American domestic interests by easing balance of payments problems that began in the later years of the Vietnam war. American arms, in other words, had been lid-keepers on unrest and inter-Arab rivalries, and a cushion for the decline of US economic competitiveness. The Arab spring should prompt serious reconsideration of policies designed to protect the status quo in the Middle East, as well as more general questions about supplying arms to decaying regimes and postponing the day of serious negotiations with their own citizens. So far it has not. Senator Patrick Leahy has noted that when Americans brag about economic aid to Egypt, protesters hold up gas canisters that say: "Made in the USA." Economic aid to Egypt has fallen off in recent years to a couple of hundred million dollars, while military aid remains constant at $1.3bn. Instead of giving the US greater influence over the internal politics of Egypt, then, deeper involvement with the Egyptian military frustrated the objectives of Obama's 2009 Cairo speech encouraging the evolution of Middle Eastern politics. With the economic recession, arms exports appear as a bright spot on the horizon, and building weapons such as drones provides a boost to economies in the towns where factories are located. But reliance on military aid and other old methods of securing influence inside Middle Eastern countries may have dangerous consequences.