This is so right:
It might have seemed clever to withhold judgment on the July coup and try to nudge the military towards a return to elected government, but this was interpreted by all sides as a positive endorsement of the coup and confirmation that there was nothing that the Egyptian military did that would trigger the suspension of aid. The attempt to retain “leverage” confirmed that the U.S. never really had any. The U.S. can’t constructively influence what the Egyptian military and its interim government do, and it should stop pretending that it can. This isn’t going to remedy any of Egypt’s ills, but it would be the first step in acknowledging that it is beyond the ability of the U.S. government to remedy them. In the meantime, it does nothing but harm America’s reputation to be backing a coup government that kills civilian protesters in the streets. It costs the U.S. very little to end that support, and it gains the U.S. nothing but grief to continue the status quo.
This is so very true. We are funding these idiotic feuds, like the one between Israel and Palestine. We need to stop this and start focusing on rebuilding our own economy. This uprising in Egypt should be a textbook example of why Wilsonian foreign policy simply does not work. The quicker the United States figures this out, the better.