Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Three Reasons Reducing Egypt's Aid Is a Mistake

Cutting off U.S. aid to Egypt raises questions for American allies, for the Mideast peace process and for national security. It's a bad idea.

October 9, 2013 at 4:33 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Cutting off a significant amount of U.S. aid to the Egyptian military -- a step the White House is considering this week, according to several reports -- may be a moral necessity. The Egyptian military seems unwilling to use tear gas on demonstrators when the opportunity to shoot opponents in the head presents itself, and it did, in fact, initiate a coup in July against a democratically elected government (albeit one that governed undemocratically and was the target of popular rage).

But curtailing aid raises some difficult questions for U.S. allies in the region, for the Middle East peace process and for American national security. It also raises a question about the utility of half-measures -- because partially cutting off aid would mainly be a gesture of disapproval, rather than a profound shift in policy designed to move Egypt onto a different path.