President Mohamed Morsi meets with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during their meeting at the presidential palace, in Cairo on Saturday.
CAIRO — In the days before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here on Saturday, becoming the highest-ranking American official to meet with Egypt’s newly elected Islamist president, she planned to deliver a forceful public speech about democracy.
But with the new president still struggling to wrest power from Egypt’s top generals, there were too many questions, too many pitfalls and too little new for Mrs. Clinton to offer, said several people briefed on the process. After rejecting at least three different drafts, the administration called off the speech days before its scheduled delivery, these people said.
The administration’s struggle to define a message here reflects its quandary with how to deal with a rapidly shifting contest for power whose outcome remains to be seen. Policy makers are struggling to balance a public push for a democratic Egypt against a desire to maintain long-term ties with both factions, the generals and the Islamists, in a context where almost any American statement is sure to provoke a backlash.
The generals have repeatedly rebuffed American pressure. The new president, Mohamed Morsi, and the other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood still harbor deep doubts about Washington’s agenda. Some of Egypt’s secular politicians are even accusing the United States, implausibly, of conspiring to back the Brotherhood. A secular political party and a Christian group have called for a protest outside the American Embassy against what they assert to be United States support for the Islamists.
All of which has lent what some American officials say is a sense of futility about Washington’s muffled voice in the future of a strategic ally.
“In some ways all the talk in Washington about what to do in Egypt is incredibly inefficient,” said Peter Mandaville, a political scientist at George Mason University who until recently advised the State Department on Islamist politics in the region. “At a time of virtually zero U.S. influence, we don’t need to waste so much time figuring out how to try to get the Egyptian people to like us.”
In brief remarks after her meeting with Mr. Morsi, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly commended the Egyptian people on the achievement of the country’s first free presidential election and emphasized that Egyptians alone would decide their future. She said she would work with Congress and the Egyptian government on the details of delivering a $1 billion aid package that President Obama promised a year ago and that Egypt desperately needs. And she talked about the importance of peace treaty with Israel and the protection of individual and minority rights.
But she alluded only lightly to the military’s recent grab for power, or its failure to deliver on its promise hand power to civilians by July 1. She cited the need for “consensus” on the subjects of Parliament and the Constitution so that Mr. Morsi could “assert the full authority of the presidency.”
She said she planned to meet Sunday with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the top military commander, and State Department officials have said she will urge him to expedite the transition. But the closest she came to publicly calling for the military to exit power was when she said the United States would work “to support the military’s return to a purely national security role.”
Officials say that the generals have repeatedly ignored American pressure, including the threat that the United States might end its $1.5 billion a year in economic assistance to Egypt, including $1.3 billion in military aid. When a constitutional court was weighing a challenge to the electoral rules used to elect the Parliament, Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador, anticipated a decision against the Parliament and repeatedly urged the generals not to dissolve it, officials said.
The generals did it anyway. They seized all legislative and budgetary authority for themselves, defying repeated calls from Washington to fulfill the promise of a handover of power to civilians by July 1.
The most serious confrontation took place when the military-led government shut down three United States-backed groups chartered to promote democracy, barred their American staff members from leaving the country and filed criminal charges against their employees for operating without official permission and conspiring to manipulate Egyptian politics. Mr. Obama himself called Field Marshal Tantawi to underscore the threat that the United States might cut off aid if Egypt continued its crackdown on the groups.
The foreign citizens on trial were ultimately allowed to jump bail and flee Egypt. But about 15 Egyptian employees of the American groups and one United States citizen are still facing criminal charges, potentially including jail time. In her remarks on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton made no reference to the case, and the United States has continued to deliver the economic aid.
Some now argue that the Obama administration’s “hollow” threats have undermined whatever leverage over the generals the United States might have gained from its aid.
“The Egyptian military likely saw its suspicions as confirmed; in a tense standoff over democratization, the U.S. would buckle under pressure,” Shadi Hamid, research director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, recently wrote in an essay arguing for a cutoff in aid. The ruling military council “continues to undermine Egyptian democracy, apparently confident that there will be few, if any, real consequences.”
But there is domestic resistance in the United States to cutting the aid, which is delivered in the form of contracts with American defense companies. And State Department officials argue that continuing the aid provides important channels of communication and potential leverage to preserve other American priorities, like a workable alliance and the peace agreement with Israel.
“Cutting the aid is a very blunt tool,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation. “You can’t bluff, and you can only use it once.”
As for the protests here that the United States is conspiring with the Islamists of the Brotherhood, several senior officials call that absurd, given the long legacy of enmity. Even after a year of mutual outreach, American officials and the Brotherhood remain deeply wary of each other, diplomats say, and Brotherhood leaders appear to believe that American policy makers see Egypt only through the prism of Israel’s security.
The Brotherhood has surprised Washington with its brisk moves to challenge the generals, running for and winning more parliamentary seats than it said it would, breaking a pledge not to run a presidential candidate, and then last week using a presidential decree to call back Parliament in defiance of the generals’ enforcement of a court order dissolving it. Some policy makers have begun to question their trust in the Brotherhood’s professed strategy of patience in the struggle with the military.
Many United States officials earnestly want to support Egyptian democracy, said Mr. Mandaville, the former State Department adviser. But the history of suspicion toward the Islamists may be hard to overcome.
“Every bone in the body of the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” he said, “is going to feel more comfortable with the idea that there is still a strong military looking over these guys and looking out for U.S. interests in Egypt and the region.”
