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THE ACCIDENTIAL DIPLOMAT
Egyptian-American relations have had their rough patches during the past four decades, but perceptions are often far from reality. Nabil Fahmy, Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S, says while the two countries do not see eye to eye on individual policies, bilateral ties have remained solid during his nine years in the office.
BY RÉHAB EL-BAKRY
Having grown up during the Nasser era, Nabil Fahmy witnessed the transformation of Egyptian-American relations from the coolness that characterized them during the 1950s and 60s to the strategic partnership of the last three decades. As Egypt’s ambassador to the United States since 1999, he has played an important role in maintaining this partnership. It is an enormous challenge, but also an enormous honor, he says.
Articulate and soft-spoken, Fahmy is a master of diplomacy. But his 32-year career in the foreign service was quite unexpected, even by him. “I never really wanted to be a diplomat,” he admits. “I studied physics and mathematics and ultimately, I did an MA in management. So while I come from a diplomatic family, I was actually the one member of the family who didn’t want to become a diplomat.”
He says what intrigued him about the Foreign Service was the challenge. The entrance exam is notoriously difficult, and having heard so much about it growing up, Fahmy wanted to prove to himself he could pass it. And he did, on his first attempt. Soon he was working in the Cabinet of External Communication as part of President Anwar Sadat’s administration. “The problem with the Foreign Service is that, while you may be hesitant about entering it, it’s very difficult to leave,” he chuckles. “And that, I think, is how I got stuck into continuing my career.”
His career path led him to become an authority on international disarmament. Since the mid-1980s, he has been on a number of Egyptian and UN teams to tackle security and arms control. But it was his work outside the field that pleased him most. In 1997, while serving as a political adviser to Egypt’s foreign minister, he received word that he had been appointed as an ambassador to Japan. It was by far the most interesting assignment of his career, he says, because it marked a complete departure from all his previous assignments. But there were bigger honors to come.
Baptism by fire
In 1999, Fahmy was on his way to his next assignment in Geneva when he was reassigned to Washington. And judging by the events of the first few days, it was not going to be a smooth ride for the embassy team. “To be responsible for safeguarding Egypt’s interest in a country like the US is a tremendous honor and challenge,” he says. “Of course, we started off with quite a baptism by fire with the EgyptAir crash [on October 31, 1999], which was horrible. I think it was 10 or 12 days after I arrived. I hadn’t even submitted my credentials. That was very difficult for us on a personal level. We are not trained to handle these kinds of things – to deal with the technical and political results of that and all the families and the loss. And we’ve been running ever since.”
Bigger challenges lay ahead, and Fahmy’s role grew substantially more complex following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans, previously preoccupied with domestic issues, were now looking beyond their borders. “Their concerns about the world and the Middle East were heightened after 9/11 and its tragedies,” Fahmy explains. As people were seeking to understand why these events had taken place, demand for the Egyptian ambassador to speak to officials and the public increased. Whereas previously discussions would focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and to a lesser extent US-Egypt relations, “post 9/11, it became who are you as Middle Easterners? Or as Muslims? What is your culture? What’s it like and where’s it going? So the discussions changed and it has kept me running for seven of the nine years.”
In the wake of these events, the Bush administration attempted to tailor its Middle East policies in a way that would give the US a better sense of security and consolidate relations with allies in the region. Everything from the Middle East Road Map to the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) was proposed to facilitate this sense of security and understanding, says Fahmy.
The failure of these initiatives, he points out, was not necessarily a reflection on the initiatives themselves; the problem lay in the nature of the Bush administration and the platform on which its policies are based. “The failure comes from the fact that they are mostly reactive [policies],” Fahmy explains. “The Bush campaign ran on the basis of moving America from where it was internationally. America was becoming the world’s only superpower and that was fine, but they wanted to stay away from nation-building and brokering agreements. That was the campaign that Bush ran on. [However,] 9/11 forced him to think of things differently.”
The Bush administration adopted the approach that earlier foreign policies were misguided and a new direction was needed. “Now, it’s good to develop your policies, but you can’t recreate the wheel all the time and you can’t re-write history,” he says. “Everything that happened in the past cannot be wrong.”
The new policies aimed at changing the relationship between the US and the Middle East, with the focus on promoting democratization and economic reform in the region. While some of the proposals seemed good on paper, Fahmy argues that they failed to yield tangible results because they were put forward for all the wrong reasons. “The Middle East will change, but it has to change from within. You can help the change by making people more effective Middle Easterners. But you can’t make them more effective Americans or effective Europeans.”
Free trade fallout
Egypt’s economy has made stunning progress since the Nazif government came to power in July 2004. Reforms such as lower income and corporate taxes, customs reform, streamlined bureaucracy and opening markets to competition, have heated up the economy. GDP growth has exceeded 5 percent for nearly three years, reaching 7.1 percent during the last fiscal year.
Fahmy has no doubt that the US has taken notice. Once the macroeconomic indicators showed improvement, Washington began opening its doors to visiting Egyptian cabinet officials. “We could basically get any meeting we wanted,” he says. “I attended a meeting with Alan Larson, undersecretary for economic affairs, and he told us that this was the first time where [Egypt] has done everything [the US] wanted.”
Washington’s response was to provide support that would make this growth sustainable. In December 2004, it granted Egypt a Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ) Agreement, which allows Egyptian products manufactured in designated industrial areas quota- and duty-free access to the US market, provided they contain a required percentage of Israeli content. The agreement boosted Egyptian exports to the US from $1.3 billion in 2004 to $2.4 billion in 2007, and threw a lifeline to Egypt’s ailing textile and garment industry.
Egypt’s improved economic performance has created new opportunities for trade and investment. “It’s recognized throughout the US that economically we’ve done a marvelous job from a market-oriented perspective and it’s admired,” says Fahmy. “The good thing here in America is that if you have a story, you will gain attention. But that’s also the bad thing. If it’s not a good story, it will gain bad attention because people look at Egypt and [consider] its importance.”
And then there’s the press. Too often, Fahmy complains, the press plays up the negative stories without giving due attention to the positive ones. If one were to go solely by what is written in newspapers, they might be anxious about the state of Egyptian-American relations. “The perception of the US-Egyptian relationship in the last few years has been that it has been a rough ride. And you can argue that it has been challenging, I am not going to question that. But we’re still on top of the horse and the relationship is still quite solid despite the bumps on the road,” he says. “We [have a relationship] that is founded on fundamental interests... There should be acceptance of the fact that, while we agree most of the time, we do disagree on some issues.”
One big stumbling block is free trade. The US currently has free trade agreements (FTAs) with three countries in the Middle East North Africa region: Israel, Jordan and Morocco. Washington has completed free trade talks with Bahrain and Oman, and FTAs are pending approvals. Negotiations for a US-Egypt free trade agreement ended abruptly in 2005 with each side blaming the other. The issue is basically dead in the water, Fahmy concedes.
He accuses the US administration of setting double standards. “I think it was an inconsistency by the administration in the application of its policies,” he says. “US administrations in general have always argued, ‘let the market forces run... don’t interfere with the market forces... a growing economy will help with the market reforms, peace and prosperity... keep politics out of economics.’ Even when you look at their attempt to push Arab-Israeli relations, they argued to let trade occur [as] when trade happens there will be peace between the Israelis and the Arab states. This was the whole premise behind the QIZ agreements with Egypt and Jordan.”
But when it came to Egypt, the US administration made an FTA contingent on political development. “They had some problems with a domestic [political] case being dealt with by the Egyptian courts and they came back and said, maybe this is not the right time to discuss an FTA. Our answer was very simple: we’re not going to link any domestic issue with FTA negotiations and the court system is completely independent. So if you want to negotiate an FTA, we’re completely happy to discuss it, but if you want to link it to a domestic situation, we’re not going to have this discussion.”
Fahmy says he was completely baffled by the administration’s 180-degree turn. The US administration had always claimed it was in favor of letting economics and politics run their separate courses. And it had always been in favor of expanding the private sector and its role in the economy, which was in line with the policies the reform-minded Egyptian cabinet was adopting. So its decision to tie economic reform to political development was a departure from its policies and undermined its goal of a regional free trade area by 2013. “It was regrettable that they did that [because] at the end of the day, the decision [hindered] the creation of MEFTA because you can’t move it forward without Egypt,” he says. “Egypt has a quarter of the population of the Middle East. So how can you have [a regional free trade agreement] without a quarter of the people living in [the region]?”
Fahmy has no doubt that in the long run the US will come to realize its mistake, particularly in that by rejecting an FTA it has encouraged Egypt to align its trade policies with other countries. “I think America is losing a tremendous opportunity. Let me give you an example. As we develop our relationship with Europe, we will start correlating our industrial specifications with our trading partners – be they Europe or China or whoever. So take telecommunications – are we going to have a GSM system or an American system? It depends on who the trading partner is. Consequently, if the losing partner is wondering why I am not taking up their system, the simple answer is ‘why should I take on your system?’”
Election outlook
Fahmy concedes that the chance of a US-Egypt FTA in the short to medium term is near zero. Congress recently revoked the presidential fast-track authority, which allows the president to negotiate FTAs without requiring congressional approval, and it seems unlikely it would reinstate it regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House come November.
Election-year politics have also diminished the likelihood that the Bush administration will approve a request by Egyptian and Israeli trade ministers to expand the QIZ agreement to include Upper Egypt. “Because this is an election year, they want to get through the Colombia free trade agreement (FTA) and possibly another FTA, and they’re worried about adding another piece to the table,” says Fahmy. “They don’t want to have to have the textile lobby use the Egyptian QIZ as an excuse to advocate against Colombia [and Korea]. This is my personal analysis.”
Don’t expect Egypt to be part of the election agenda, although the region certainly will. According to Fahmy, the Iraq War and perhaps Iran will top the list of foreign affairs on the agenda. Unfortunately, the Arab-Israeli conflict will probably only receive a passing mention and not the attention it truly deserves, he says.
That said, even if a candidate were to make this issue part of their campaign platform it would have little bearing on Egypt’s declared neutrality in US domestic politics. “We gather and analyze... information very carefully with what I hope is a degree of sophistication to predict what the policies are likely to be if McCain, Obama or Clinton are elected,” says Fahmy. “But we do not engage one way or another in their politics.”
As for Fahmy, his next move will be back to Cairo this summer, although he has not revealed what or where his next assignment will be. But he has made no secret of the fact that after over a decade abroad, he is looking forward to returning home.
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