Morsi in Tehran: strategic realignment or a safe pair of hands?

For now, Egypt’s financial stability depends on keeping the US and Saudi Arabia happy.

BY DAN GLAZEBROOKPUBLISHED 31 AUGUST 2012 17:13

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attend the opening session of the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran (Photograph: Getty Images)

Egypt’s new President Mohammed Morsi was in China this week before putting in an appearance at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Iran – all before he has even stepped foot in the US. Several commentators have speculated that this could herald a strategic realignment away from Washington and towards Tehran. The Washington Post hailed the trip as “a major foreign policy shift for the Arab world’s most populous nation, after decades of subservience to Washington”. This seems very unlikely, if not disingenuous, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the importance of foreign visits and their chronology can easily be overstated. Every reactionary from Doha to Downing St goes to China to do business and – unlike the West – China does not demand political allegiance in return. This trip in itself signifies nothing about Egypt’s foreign policy.

Likewise with Tehran: the Turkish foreign minister and the Emir of Qatar are also attending the summit, yet no one is suggesting that an end to their “decades of subservience to Washington” is on the cards anytime soon. Neither should it be forgotten that, although Morsi has yet to visit the US, he hosted a visit from Hillary Clinton within a fortnight of coming to power, and his first foreign visit as President was to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – the West’s number one Arab friend.

Secondly, it is difficult to believe that Morsi’s election would have been received quite so enthusiastically in the Western media had he been seriously contemplating an end to the US alliance. Pundits from the Guardian to theTelegraph were falling over themselves to downplay Morsi’s "Islamism", hype up his “conciliatory” tone and moderation, and reassure the world that he was, in fact, a respectable statesman like any other.

Morsi received just under 25 per cent votes on a 43 per cent turnout in the first round of voting, and managed to just scrape a majority on a 50 per cent turnout in the second round. The “people have spoken” rhetoric in the Western media over this (hardly landslide) victory contrasted sharply with its scorn for the 63 per cent majority won by Iran’s Ahmadinejad (on an 85 per cent turnout) in 2009 – a victory which easily overshadow’s Morsi’s, even after possible anomalies are accounted for.

Third, Morsi’s government looks set to be deepening, not reducing, his country’s economic dependence on the West: a $4.5bn IMF loan is currently under negotiation. The IMF do not do free lunches - they demand their pound of flesh in the form of privatisation of industry, the abolition of tariffs, subsidies and other measures to make life easier for foreign capital (and harder for the poor).

Not that Morsi’s organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, have any particular objection to such policies – their economic strategy document al-Nahda(“the renaissance”) is a model of the type of extreme neo-liberalism the IMF so adores. They have already pledged to abolish the £10bn annual food and fuel subsidy that is currently a lifeline for the country’s poor, and are committed to the emasculation of the trade unions which were such a potent force in last year’s uprisings.

The parliamentary opposition that might be expected to fight such measures will be neutered if the Brotherhood implements their commitment to end the long-standing rule that 50 per cent of seats in the Egyptian parliament be reserved for workers and farmers. Interestingly, the IMF loan currently being negotiated was rejected by Egypt’s military leaders last summer as being politically unwise – in other words, likely to provoke massive popular outrage. In economic terms, the elites of Egypt and the West are definitely singing from the same songsheet.