America's Response to the Arab Uprisings: US Foreign Assistance in an Era of Ambivalence

Abstract

This article traces the impact of the Arab uprisings on US foreign assistance to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the period since 2011. Despite the Obama administration's rhetoric in support of Arab protesters and their demands for political and economic change, and despite the US President's commitment to place the full weight of the US foreign policy system behind political openings created by mass protests, US foreign assistance programs to the MENA region were largely unaffected by the dramatic political changes of 2011 and beyond. The article explains continuity in US foreign assistance as the result of several factors. These include the administration's ambivalence about the political forces unleashed by the uprisings; domestic economic and political obstacles to increases in foreign assistance; institutional and bureaucratic inertia within the agencies responsible for managing foreign assistance programming, and institutional capture of the foreign assistance bureaucracy by implementing organizations with a vested interest in sustaining ongoing activities rather than adapting programs in light of the new challenges caused by the Arab uprisings.

Notes

^1. The question of whether foreign assistance should be used as an instrument to advance the interests of a donor government or driven by local needs is a subject of considerable debate. To address this issue in depth is beyond the scope of the current paper. I work from the assumption, however, that in the US case both Congress and the Executive Branch have long seen and justified foreign assistance on the grounds that it serves US interests and, increasingly after 2001, US national security interests. This view is consistent with the findings of Alesina and Dollar (2000: 33), that ‘the direction of foreign aid is dictated as much by political and strategic considerations as by the economic needs and policy performance of the recipients’.

^2. Melia's unpublished paper provides the most detailed and exhaustive review available of the elements of US democracy promotion assistance. Its coverage extends well beyond the agencies and programmes listed here to include those operated by the Department of Defense, public diplomacy programmes and US funding to relevant programmes at the UN and World Bank, among others. In this paper I focus on the subset of democracy promotion mechanisms that are most commonly understood as such within the literature concerning US foreign assistance to the MENA region.

^3. An essential reference for understanding patterns and trends in US foreign assistance to the Middle East is the annual report published by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) for the past several years (See McInerney, 2012). In addition, up through 2010 analysts of the Congressional Research Service have also provided periodic analysis of US foreign assistance to MENA (See Sharp, 2010, cited below).

^4. One of the authors of this memo, Tamara C. Wittes, would later go on to oversee MEPI as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State.

^5. Note that sources differ slightly on MEPI funding levels. Sharp (2010) has FY06 funding at $113.8m, McInerney (2012) at $142.4m. For all other years their figures are consistent.

^6. The US government fiscal year is 1 October–31 September. Thus, FY12 ran from 1 October 2011 to 30 September 2012. Preparation for submission of a budget typically begins at the end of the calendar year for the next fiscal year. Preparation for the FY15 fiscal year budget was well underway by January 2014.

^7. Decisions about FMA for Egypt have a significant domestic dimension that looms large in understanding Congressional behaviour. Because the vast majority of FMA to Egypt is required to be spent in the US on the purchase of military equipment, and because the lead time for the production of this equipment extends over many years, US defence contractors are given permission to make commitments against Egyptian FMA before it is appropriated by Congress. To cut off this aid would primarily damage US defence contractors and their American employees, an outcome that Congress weighed heavily in its decision to renew US aid.

^8. Carothers was arguing against the alarmist view of those who criticized the Obama Administration for supporting the removal of President Mubarak that Egypt was likely to follow an Iranian trajectory.