EGYPT

From AICbackground

COUNTRY: conventional long form: Arab Republic of Egypt conventional short form: Egypt local long form: Jumhuriyat Misr al-Arabiyah local short form: Misr former: United Arab Republic (with Syria)

OVERVIEW

Ever since the creation of Cairo in the early tenth century, Egypt has been acknowledged as the cultural and political center of the Arab world. After languishing for centuries as a province of the Ottoman Empire, the independent Egyptian republic returned to this dominant role under the charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who catapulted Egypt into the center of post-colonial Arab political development, as well as transforming his country into the ideological center of the anti-Israel bloc and thus making the Egyptian-Israeli dispute a central facet of the Cold War. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1978, which has removed them from the militant anti-Israeli camp, but with the most powerful military on the African continent and one of the world’s largest populations, Egypt remains a sleeping giant in the politics of the Middle East, a giant which stirs the entire region whenever it awakens.

LAND AND RESOURCES

The majority of Egypt is an uninhabitable desert, bisected north-south by the world’s most fertile river valley, watered by the Nile River, which has sustained human civilization for almost seven thousand years. West of the Nile lies the trackless Libyan desert, which has only been successfully crossed once in human history, effectively giving Egypt a closed western border. To the east lies the Red Sea, linked to the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal. This key location between the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean makes Egypt one of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes, and constitutes a major thoroughfare for Persian Gulf oil making its way to Europe.

AREA: total: 1,001,450 sq km; land: 995,450 sq km; water: 6,000 sq km;

CLIMATE: desert; hot, dry summers with moderate winters

TERRAIN: vast desert plateau interrupted by Nile valley and delta

NATURAL RESOURCES: petroleum, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, manganese, limestone, gypsum, talc, asbestos, lead, zinc

NOTE: controls Sinai Peninsula, the only land bridge between Africa and remainder of Eastern Hemisphere; controls Suez Canal, a sea link between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea; size, and juxtaposition to Israel, establish its major role in Middle Eastern geopolitics.

PEOPLE

Egypt is the second most populous country in Africa (after Nigeria) and by far the most populous country in the Arab Middle East. Despite its large size, Egypt is also incredibly densely populated, especially around Cairo, Africa’s largest city. This choking density, and all of the smog and water pollution that come with it, are a direct result of the fact that most of Egypt is an uninhabitable desert; as it has been for thousands of years, to survive in Egypt it is necessary for humans to live entirely in the valley of the Nile. This population density is a massive, perhaps insurmountable problem for the Egyptian government—Egypt is a poor country, and with millions of surplus mouths to feed it is very difficult for Egypt to offer its exploding population more than dismal urban poverty.

POPULATION: 76,117,421 (July 2004 est.)

ETHNIC GROUPS: Eastern Hamitic stock (Egyptians, Bedouins, and Berbers) 99%, Greek, Nubian, Armenian, other European (primarily Italian and French) 1%

RELIGIONS: Muslim (mostly Sunni) 94%, Coptic Christian and other 6%

LANGUAGES: Arabic (official), English and French widely understood by educated classes

GOVERNMENT

TYPE: republic

Egypt is an Arab republic with a limited democratic system. Executive authority is vested in the president. The People's Assembly is the legislative body and approves general policy, the budget and development plans. Opposition parties have been permitted since 1977, but they have boycotted a number of elections. The largest opposition force remains the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which is subject to harassment by the government but nonetheless remains a very popular unofficial source of authority on the Egyptian street. Please note that even though it is described as a "moderate Arab country" many aspects of the current Egyptian government resemble a police state, where opponents of Mubarak and his policies are arrested with little provocation and can remain in prison for decades, where many are tortured or summarily executed.

CAPITAL: Cairo

INDEPENDENCE DAY: 28 February 1922 (from UK)

CHIEF OF STATE: President Mohammed Hosni MUBARAK (since 14 October 1981)

HEAD OF GOVERNMENT: Prime Minister Ahmed NAZIF (since 9 July 2004)

CABINET: Cabinet appointed by the president

ELECTIONS: president nominated by the People's Assembly for a six-year term, the nomination must then be validated by a national, popular referendum; national referendum last held 26 September 1999 (next to be held NA October 2005); prime minister appointed by the president

ECONOMY

The Egyptian economy is slow-growing, poorly regulated, and totally insufficient to meet the demands of its massive population base. This is the weakest pillar of the Egyptian government, as almost 20% of Egypt lives below the poverty line, and her urban areas are among the most desperately poor in the world. One of the main reasons Egypt maintains its neutrality in most Middle Eastern affairs is because the Egyptians have become very good at endorsing western policies, like the 1991 Desert Storm campaign, in exchange for massive western aid packages, the most significant of which is the yearly aid grant Egypt receives for maintaining the peace with Israel. The single biggest growth industry in Egypt is, and likely will remain, tourism; as one might expect, the ruins of pharonic Egypt are unmatched archaeological sites, and Egypt’s reputation as a moderate Arab country lures millions each year who want to visit the Middle East but do not want to visit a more repressive police state like Syria.

CURRENCY: Egyptian pound (EGP)

GDP: purchasing power parity - $295.2 billion (2004 est.)

POPULATION BELOW POVERTY LINE: 16.7% (2000 est.)

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: 9.9% (2004 est.)

AGRICULTURE PRODUCTS: cotton, rice, corn, wheat, beans, fruits, vegetables; cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats

INDUSTRIES: textiles, food processing, tourism, chemicals, hydrocarbons, construction, cement, metals

EXPORTS: crude oil and petroleum products, cotton, textiles, metal products, chemicals

IMPORTS: machinery and equipment, foodstuffs, chemicals, wood products, fuels

MILITARY

BRANCHES: Army, Navy, Air Force, Air Defense Command

AGE AND OBLIGATION: 18 years of age for conscript military service; 3-year service obligation (2001)

EXPENDITURES DOLLAR FIGURE: $2,443.2 million (2003); 3.6% (2003) of GDP

Egypt has the largest military in Africa, and as of 2007 it has more modern artillery, tanks, and other armored vehicles than Israel. Due to a recent spate of purchases from the US and Russia, Egypt might have recently gained a slight technological edge on Israel in terms of aircraft as well, meaning that, with the exception of nuclear weapons, Egypt if provoked might actually be able to fight a successful war against the legendary IDF. This has raised considerable alarm amongst Israel-advocates in Washington D.C., but the fact is that Egypt’s dependence on western aid makes it extremely unlikely that Egypt will ever engage in a unilateral war against the Jewish State. Egypt is a frequent contributor to international UN peacekeeping forces, and the officer corps is generally considered to be well trained, if highly corrupt.

HISTORY

NINETEENTH CENTURY COLONIALISM

With the completion of the Suez Canal by French engineers in 1869, Egypt became an important factor in the functioning of the economies of Europe, which did not bode well for the independence of the Egyptian sultanate, which had enjoyed semi-independence from the Ottoman Empire of Istanbul since 1805. In 1881 the British declared Egypt to be a British protectorate, which in effect meant that the British dictated affairs of state while the Egyptian monarch served as nothing more than a figurehead, who was usually bribed into submission by British agents. The British used Egypt as a crucial military base during the first and second World Wars; in World War I they used Cairo to coordinate the conquest of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, while in World War II British generals used Egypt to mount the defense of North Africa against the famous German general Erwin Rommel. Throughout this period Egyptians resented their British overlords, but it was not until the aftermath of the second World War, when Britain had been severely weakened, that Egyptian nationalism was finally able to overcome the protectorate system.

KING FAROUK, ISRAEL, AND THE 1952 REBELLION

When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948, Egypt joined the poorly-executed attempt to crush the small Jewish state. Egyptian forces made significant penetrations into the southern portions of the declared Israeli state, but they became pinned down in a number of canyons and were unable to break out until after a cease-fire had been declared. The Egyptian army had been humiliated by the irregular Jewish settler-army, but as a side effect Egypt gained possession of a small sliver of coastal territory centered on the city of Gaza, now known as the Gaza Strip. This territory was packed with local refugees from the war, whom the Egyptians housed in tent cities and makeshift housing, much of which exists to this day.

Fed up with the corruption of the final Egyptian king, a cabal of Egyptian military figures known as the “Free Officers” overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, establishing an independent republic under military rule. A major reason for the anger that led to this revolt was the failure of Egyptian forces in 1948 when they fought the newborn army of Israel. The loss of Arab land to European Jews was deeply galling to many Egyptian nationalists, and this frustration manifested itself in the Free Officers’ movement. The British remained on the scene for several years thereafter, but it was clear from 1952 onwards that Egypt would no longer play by the colonial rules, especially once the undisputed leader of the Free Officers emerged, the charismatic colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.

NASSER AND NASSERISM

Nasser was not the highest ranking figure in the revolution, but he was the most charismatic and daring of them. Combining telegenic good looks with a radical new vision for the shape of the Middle East, he burst upon the world stage in 1952 with a secular nationalist agenda that soon ignited the entire region. He postulated the existence of an independent non-aligned bloc of nations that would pursue their own post-colonial destinies far from the reach of the new Cold War superpowers. The vanguard of this struggle would be the Arab states, which he claimed would unite under a secular, semi-socialist vision known as Pan-Arabism, or more simply Nasserism. Using this ideology he began a daring series of public works projects and socialist economic reorganizations of power at home, while threatening Arab monarchies abroad with his vision of an independent Middle East comprised of secular republics united under Egyptian leadership.

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Internally, there were certainly dissenters to this socio-economic model, the strongest of whom were Egypt’s large association of Islamic groups, collectively known as the Muslim Brotherhood, founded earlier in the 20th century by philosophers who sought to update Islam to meet the demands of the modern world. This group is especially noteworthy because one of its major thinkers, Sayyid Qutb, established the principles of political jihad which today are said to form the basis of Islamic revolutionary groups across the globe. This group tried to assassinate Nasser on several occasions, owing to his vision of a secular state, and he responded by brutally oppressing them within Egypt. Several thousand were summarily executed, including Sayyid Qutb, and the rest were either forced to go deep underground or seek asylum abroad, most notably in Saudi Arabia, which by the late 1950s found itself in an ideological war with Nasser’s regime (see below).

SUEZ CRISIS

Britain attempted to resume its old colonial influence in 1956, this time over the fate of the Suez Canal. Nasser nationalized the canal in mid-1956 as part of a general policy of swinging Egypt away from the west and towards the Soviet bloc, in the hopes of getting foreign support for the destruction of Israel, which had rhetorically preoccupied the Egyptian regime ever since it took power. More specifically, the Canal was nationalized after the British and Americans withdrew all their funding from the construction of the Aswan High Dam, a massive irrigation project Nasser was constructing in southern Egypt. The British and French, who owned the majority of shares in what had previously been the private Suez Canal Company, were furious with the Egyptians, but initially attempted to solve the matter at the UN. This situation changed when they were encouraged to enter into a military alliance with Israel, which in 1956 was engaged in low-level economic warfare with Egypt and suffering desperately from a stringent Egyptian shipping embargo. The Israelis agreed to do the bulk of the fighting if the British and French would commit their own forces, thus giving the fight international credibility; the goal was to retake the Suez Canal, revert its ownership to the European shareholders, and overthrow Nasser, who all sides agreed was jeopardizing the flow of Gulf oil to Europe by nationalizing the Canal.

Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula in late October 1956, quickly overwhelming the Egyptian border force and speeding right for the Canal, which British and French paratroopers quickly secured in a well-executed assault. They could not imagine the scale of international outrage over their actions. Almost immediately, the Soviet Union threatened to launch full-scale attacks upon London and Paris if aggression did not cease against its Egyptian ally. Likewise, the Eisenhower administration in Washington D.C. was unwilling to risk a nuclear war with Russia just to help the British and French salve their wounded pride, so the Americans likewise threatened to bury the exchange-rate of British currency if the troops did not leave at once. The invaders left within a week, the Canal was now the property of Nasser’s Egypt, and it was clear that Britain and France had relinquished their regional authority to the new world powers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Nasser successfully took control of the aftermath of this invasion, which had been an unmitigated defeat of the Egyptian army, by recasting the battle as the survival of Egypt in battle against both the Europeans and the Zionists. His popularity rose to unprecedented heights, leading him on to even more daring political gambles.

UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC

In 1958 Arab opinion was so favorable towards Nasser and his ideology that the government of Syria agreed to politically and militarily unite with Egypt, leading to the creation of the United Arab Republic, with joint capitols in Cairo and Damascus. This union only lasted until 1961, due to a number of structural problems in the overall act of union: most notably, the two regions were not united, and therefore couldn’t conduct cross-regional trade with each other via normal road systems—at the time, most of these roads actually led through Israel. Israel itself proved the other problem in this union: Nasser had proposed the merger as a way of pincering the Jewish state between their two armies, but for this principle to work, the armies had to achieve a unified chain of command, which in Nasser’s mind meant that the Syrians would have to become subservient to the Egyptians, a humiliating proposition which poisoned the opinions of the Syrian military towards this agreement, and would lead to the creation of a generation of Syrian leaders that were deeply distrustful of Egyptian political aspirations, future dictator Hafez al-Assad among them.

YEMENI CIVIL WAR AND THE ARAB COLD WAR

The failed union with Syria was a serious ideological blow to Nasserism, coming as it did from a country which had previously enjoyed very good relations with Egypt. Nasser responded by trying to press his republican vision harder upon the region’s surviving monarchies, which he saw as backwards pawns of the colonial powers. The weak kingdom of Jordan was seriously rocked by Nasser’s destabilization attempts, but survived intact under the skillful leadership of King Hussein Hashemi. The main target for Nasser was not that tiny kingdom, however, but the much richer prize of Saudi Arabia. The enmity between these countries was fueled during the 1950s by the large flow of refugees between these two countries: an exiled Saudi prince fled to Cairo and proceeded to publicly call for the overthrow of the house of Saud, while the exiled Egyptian Muslim Brothers set up anti-Nasser militant groups in Mecca and Medina.

This situation came to a head in 1962, when the undeveloped nation of Yemen devolved into a civil war following the overthrow of its priestly ruling elite. The surviving members of the Yemeni royal court sought Saudi help to maintain their position, while the rebels declared their territory the Yemeni Arab Republic, a secular socialist regime. Nasser sensed an opportunity to seriously weaken his Saudi rivals, and began to arm the rebels, with help from the Soviets and Cuba. The fighting quickly devolved into brutal mountain warfare in the Yemeni highlands, and by 1967 Nasser found himself supporting more than fifty thousand Egyptian troops and artillery units bogged down on the Saudi border. In hindsight he would sorely miss those troops and weapons.

THE SIX-DAY WAR

Ever since 1948 low level skirmishing between Israeli forces and neighboring Arab populations, especially refugee populations, had become a constant part of Middle Eastern political relations. These nuisances began building into a deadlier momentum in 1964, when Syrian and Israeli forces began periodically shelling each other in the area of the Golan Heights, the site of major Israeli water-diversion projects at that time. The Syrians and Lebanese countered with their own water diversion projects, and by 1967 it became clear that Israel and Syria had entered into quiet war with each other over water access that the Israelis estimated would proved crucial to the growth of their country. On the Jordanian border, Israel made a series of large-scale punitive incursions into the West Bank in 1966 to attack refugee villages believed to be responsible for bombing attacks in Israel, some of which were carried out by the newly founded Fatah organization. All of this combined to make Jordan’s King Hussein profoundly uneasy about the security of his own country, which culminated in his signing a defense treaty with former rival Egypt in May 1967.

Nasser took political advantage of these conditions to construct a new alliance against Israel, amd Egypt finally found itself on a firm operational footing in the wake of the treaty with Jordan. Internally, Nasser was also building a formidable war machine based on modern Soviet technology which would have placed his army, if it were not spread out over Egypt and Yemen, on equal footing with that of Israel. Analysts at the time observed that Egypt’s equipment was barely out of the box, and certainly didn’t make Egypt ready to fight a war, but in constructing his new alliance Nasser did not reveal these weakness: he told the world that the Arabs were ready to fight, and that this fight would spell the eradication of Israel. To flex his muscle he closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping on 22 May 1967, cutting off Israeli access to the Red Sea and thus all southern sea traffic.

Unlike Nasser, the Israelis were prepared for war, and the closing off of Tiran gave them the justification they needed to destroy the Egyptian war machine. At 7:45 AM on 5 June, the Israeli air force snuck up on Egyptian territory by flying low over the Mediterranean, and destroyed the entire Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground. Having thus assured air superiority within the first hours of the war, Israeli then poured a massive armored force into the Sinai Peninsula, supported by the bulk of the now-dominant Israeli air force. Nasser responded to these attacks by telling his Syrian and Jordanian allies that the Israeli air force had been wiped out by Egyptian defenders, and with this encouragement those two countries joined the war. Jordan pushed towards Israeli occupied areas around West Jerusalem, while Syrian forces adopted a conservative policy of shelling the Galilee region without committing ground forces.

Within days, the Israeli advance had captured the entirety of the Sinai, which left Israelis forces free to mop up the Jordanian advance and neutralize the Syrian artillery barrage. Both operations succeeded entirely, and by 10 June Israel found itself in possession of the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in southern Syria. Israel had tripled in size, acquired a million new Arab subjects, and stunned the world with an unimaginably successful war. The Arab states were all deeply ashamed by this failure, none more so than Nasser, who lost almost the entirety of his international influence with this humiliating defeat. The best the Arabs could manage was a declaration in fall 1967 that there would be no recognition of Israel and no peace with Israel…but the combined Arab League no longer spoke optimistically about the possibility of Israel being destroyed.

Internationally, responses to this war were mixed; Russia responded by rearming its Syrian and Egyptian allies with a speed and efficiency that stunned the west, while America swung fully towards supporting Israel after their incredible showing. At the UN, deliberations over the newly occupied territories produced one of the most significant motions in UN history, UN Resolution 242, which stipulated that Israel would receive peace assurances from its Arab neighbors in return for the lands conquered during the war. Egypt and Jordan immediately signed the document, though Syria long resisted this resolution. The Middle East had changed irrevocably in only six days. Nasser died in 1970, a broken man.

THE OCTOBER WAR

Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, came to power in 1970 as the inheritor of a country with a massive Soviet arsenal but a deep sense of shame over the events of 1967. Moreover, Sadat secretly believed that the stalemate with Israeli was damaging the fabric of Egyptian society, which meant ending the conflict somehow—but to be possible, he had to sell this resolution to his own people as an honorable peace. To secure this peace, his began preparing secretly for another war. Joining forces with new Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad, Sadat began preparing for a campaign which would either totally crush Israel or leave it so shaken that it would be forced to the bargaining table.

The hammer fell on 6 October, 1973, which coincided with the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, earning the war its common informal name, “The Yom Kippur War.” This holiday meant that the majority of the Israeli military was on-leave when the assault began, but ironically enough this probably made the call-up easier for Israel; since all the soldiers were at home, it was easy to get ahold of the vast majority of them very quickly. The initially attack came along the Sinai, where Egyptian forces which had been secretly building up on Egyptian territory completely neutralized Israel’s primary line of defenses and began racing across the desert towards Israel, destroying Israeli outposts as they went. At the same time, Syrian tanks rolled into the Golan, while the conservative Hafez al-Assad refused to commit the bulk of his forces in the early hours of battle. These forces were aided by irregular units from the rest of the Arab world, as well as monetary assistance from Saudi King Faisal ibn AbdulAziz. For the first 48 hours of the war, things went very well for the Arabs, at which point the Israelis completed regrouping and began a well-executed counter attack on both fronts, aided immensely by Israel’s compact geography and therefore the ease of moving military resources during defensive warfare.

Under general Ariel Sharon the Israelis completed a massive encirclement of the Egyptian army in the Sinai and actually ended up on the west side of the Suez Canal on the road to Cairo itself, at which point the Egyptians quickly signed a cease-fire agreement. Free to deal with the Syrians, the combined might of the Israeli army utterly wiped out the majority of the Syrian invading force, and even positioned units atop the Golan Heights within fifty miles of Damascus. When the final ceasefire came on 26 October, the Israelis had once again emerged victorious, but no longer invulnerable.

ANWAR SADAT AND CAMP DAVID PEACE ACCORDS

After rattling Israel with the size of the force Egypt was able to secretly mobilize, Sadat felt after the war that he was finally in a position to honorably negotiate with the Israelis. His first step was to begin taking the country into the western orbit, which meant expelling his Russian military advisors and warming diplomatic relations with the US. Frustrated at the slowness of developments through official diplomatic circles, in 1977 Sadat stunned the world by being the first Arab leader to appear at the Israeli Knesset (parliament), where he offered the possibility of peace to the Israeli government of conservative PM Menachem Begin.

Building on this unprecedented diplomatic overture, in 1978 Sadat and Begin met for twelve days in the secluded confines of Camp David, Maryland with American president Jimmy Carter, who facilitated the crafting of a comprehensive peace treaty with between Israel and Egypt. In short, Egypt regained the Sinai and Israel gained a guarantee of peace with its most dangerous neighbor. In addition, both parties gained generous American aid packages which continue to this day.

The Arab world was outraged by what they say as a betrayal of this magnitude, and from 1979-1989 Egypt was formally banned from the Arab League, which came to be dominated by Saudi Arabia and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Sadat shrugged off his critics and began putting Egypt on a peacetime footing, restructuring the economy and allowing for greater political openness. This did not assuage his enemies, however. Sadat was assassinated by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981, a group which included individuals who are now senior members of al-Qaida. Sadat is remembered internationally as a visionary man of peace, but many in Egypt still regard him as a traitor, and the peace between Israel and Egypt remains a cold peace, with official embassies but no sense of friendship on either side of the border.

MUBARAK AND THE PRESENT

Since the assassination of Sadat and the cessation of hostilities with Israel, the government of Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak has focused on internal issues, most notably the protection of state powers against what many fear is a resurgent tide of Islamic resistance groups within the country, as indicated by the murder of Sadat. To that end, Mubarak has governed Egypt from a “state of emergency” ever since 1981, and has jailed thousands of Muslim Brothers and suspected terrorists since then, giving Egypt an appalling human rights record. None of this has notoriety has affected Egypt, however, because it remains an ally of the United States.

Egypt has gained a reputation as a “Moderate Arab State,” meaning that it recognizes Israel and supports western policies in the region; Egyptian troops were part of the first wave of attackers in the 1991 Gulf War, and since then Egypt has helped to encourage other states, like Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan, to attempt to reach more pro-western stances. This has caused considerable aggravation amongst Egyptian citizens, who see Mubarak as a dictator that does not represent the opinions of the Egyptian people, which match up much more closely with those of other Arab countries. They are probably right.

The one issue where Mubarak has attempted to keep Egypt on the Arab side of the street is regarding the Palestinians. Egypt remains the primary international advocate for the Palestinians, since Mubarak can speak with all Palestinian factions, conduct diplomatic activity in Israel itself, and enjoys excellent relations with Washington. This position often puts Mubarak in the unenviable position of trying to speak for the Palestinians while also appeasing allies in Washington, all while being forced to maintain diplomatic contact with the Israelis yet not appear weak in the eyes of other Arabs. It is a thankless job, one which the aging Mubarak is rumored to wish to give up as soon as is politically possible.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

As the headquarters of the Arab League and an African powerhouse the policies of Egypt are tremendously influential throughout the region and beyond. Its policies are generally pro-western, but this tactical position does not mean that Egypt has stopped being an Arab country, and many of its policies match up closely to those of other Arab governments on every issue except for recognition of Israel. In this regard, Egypt is actually a very useful player for the Arab League, because Egypt, along with Jordan, is one of the only Arab governments that can openly deal with the Israelis, floating policies that states like Saudi Arabia and Lebanon cannot openly support.

Britain: Britain and Egypt maintain good cultural relations, especially since the Egyptians respect British schools and love watching British soccer. For their part the British are a major investor in Egyptian companies and continue to appreciate the value of the Suez Canal as a channel for Gulf oil being routed towards Europe.

European Union: Egypt is a member of the Mediterranean Cooperation Council, a fledgling organization created in 1995 as a spin-off from the EU economic integration talks, which has the ambitious plan of perhaps creating a unified Mediterranean economic zone sometime in the future. The EU is a major aid donor to Egypt, in return for Egypt’s continued role as an island of stability in the volatile Middle East. High level contacts between Mubarak and most European leaders are excellent, and the majority of tourists to Egypt are wealthy Europeans.

Iran: relations between Egypt and the Islamic Republic are bad on the best of days. The Iranians despise Egypt for making peace with Israel, and have even named one of the largest streets in Tehran after Sadat’s assassin. For that insult, combined with the destabilizing role Egypt sees Iran as playing in the region, the two countries do not have normalized relations—a fact that some analysts see as a reason Iran has not been more successful at integrating into the Arab Middle East.

Israel: an Israeli once commented that Israel signed a peace treaty with Sadat, and not the Egyptians. While the two countries are technically at peace, this peace is largely guaranteed by Mubarak’s conservative nature and a large amount of American bribe money to both governments. The Egyptian people continue to hate the Israelis, and for their part Israeli tourists to Egypt are often described as downright racist against their Egyptian hosts. There have recently been bombing attacks against Israeli resorts in the Sinai, and the two countries do not have fully normalized relations. This strained relationship is largely due to Israeli treatment of the Occupied Territories, especially since the Likud tenures of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. While Mubarak honors the peace treaty with Israel to the letter, it is a cold peace indeed.

Jordan: Egypt and Jordan stand united as the "Peace Camp" within the Arab League, since they are the only neighbors of Israel which have made peace with the Jewish State. The two countries share very good diplomatic and economic relations, and have grown very close over the decades. They are rarely on opposite sides of important issues for long.

Lebanon: Mubarak stands with the elected government of Fouad Siniora against the current disruptions by Hezbollah and Maronite general Michel Aoun. Despite Mubarak’s strong anti-Iranian stance, he has continually called for mediation between these sides, and has not publicly advocated a violent solution to these problems…potentially because of the popularity Hezbollah gained as a result of fighting Israel in the summer of 2006.

Palestinians: Mubarak has endorsed the Hamas governments and does not consider them terrorist entities, though he has obviously proven more willing to work with Mahmoud Abbas and the old guard of Fatah. Within the terms of the Camp David treaty, Mubarak continues to do his best in attempting to find a just peace for the Palestinians, and often serves as their primary outlet to the outside world. Via the Refa border crossing into Gaza, Egypt is also one of the main ways for outside trade to enter into Palestinian territory…though much of these goods are alleged to be illegal supplies of weaponry for Hamas and other militant groups.

Saudi Arabia: despite the longstanding feud between Nasser and the Saudis, at present these two nations enjoy good relations, though the Saudis took a long time to forgive Egypt for Camp David. At present Mubarak has endorsed King Abdullah’s Middle East peace plan, and the two countries enjoy good diplomatic relations on the issue of Israel.

Syria: the Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad has never forgiven Egypt for making peace with Israel, especially once the Syrians realized that Sadat waged the entire 1973 war simply to gain the diplomatic clout to facilitate the peace treaty, thus leaving Syria to face Israel alone. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the near-collapse of the Syrian government as a result, Egypt has been a key actor in trying to convince the Syrians to open their doors to the rest of the world and become a more moderate regional player. As of now these efforts have been largely unsuccessful.

United States: Egypt probably remains the US’ staunchest ally in the region, though both sides acknowledge that this is a marriage of convenience. Mubarak has suffered tremendously in terms of domestic credibility for his closeness to what most Arabs see as an oppressive government, and since the invasion of Iraq he has been forced to publicly distance himself from the Bush administration, but this does not mean that contact between these two governments has ceased: within the American government, diplomats remember how dangerous Egypt was before it joined the western camp, and based on investment alone it is clear that the Americans are prepared to spend massive sums of money to keep Egypt “moderate.”