In today's print-version of the New York Times, the inestimable Tom Friedman penned a piece entitled Morsi's Wrong Turn in which he expresses his disappointment and concern regarding Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's visit to Tehran to attend the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, during which Morsi will pass the chairmanship of the Movement from Egypt to Iran. Friedman gets right to his point:
I find it very disturbing that one of the first trips by Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, will be to attend the Nonaligned Movement’s summit meeting in Tehran this week. Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran’s people that the world approves of their country’s clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.
[...]
[Morsi] is lending his legitimacy to an Iranian regime that brutally crushed just such a movement in Tehran. This does not augur well for Morsi’s presidency. In fact, he should be ashamed of himself.
The op-ed is fascinating, not so much for the content
per se but for the metanarratives that subtend Friedman's views of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and the exercise of American power in the region.
Some thoughts, after the moustache à l'orange...
Friedman is, as he indicates in his first sentence, "very disturbed" that President Morsi will attend the Non-Aligned Movement's meeting In Tehran this week. His expressed concern is that Morsi's visit will lend legitimacy to and "sanitize" the Iranian regime, an effect of which might be to chill the democracy movement in Iran. While Ban Ki-moon is also singled out for criticism for "lending his hand to this Iranian whitewashing festival" (the UN Secretary General regularly attends NAM summits) Friedman omits mention of the presence of other leaders and representatives of the 120-nation membership of the Movement who are all presumably implicated in this whitewashing. There must therefore be something particularly concerning in Friedman's mind about Morsi's anticipated four-hour stop in Tehran on Thursday.
In typical Friedman prose-style, he moves on to ask himself "[b]y the way, what is the Nonaligned Movement anymore?"
“Nonaligned against what and between whom?” asked Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy specialist at Johns Hopkins. The Nonaligned Movement was conceived at the Bandung summit in 1955, but there was a logic to it then. The world was divided between Western democratic capitalists and Eastern Communists, and developing states like Egypt, Yugoslavia and Indonesia declared themselves “nonaligned” with these two blocs. But “there is no Communist bloc today,” said Mandelbaum. “The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries.”
Mandelbaun, who has co-authored articles and a book with Friedman (
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back [2011]), is a strong advocate of Western democracy-promotion programs abroad, particularly efforts to nurture democratization through neoliberal economic reforms. See, for instance, his
The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (2002). Friedman and Mandelbaum view the Non-Aligned Movement as an illogical relic of the Cold War. America won so, to paraphrase a comment from Friedman's May 2003 appearance on
The Charlie Rose Show, "suck on that, Morsi." Less glibly, we might recognize in Friedman's and Mandelbaum's representation of the Movement's irrelevance today an optimistic, in my opinion naive, reading of the teleology of Fukuyama's "end of history."
Now, back to President Morsi for a moment. Morsi's visit to Tehran follows a three-day visit to China for bilateral talks on economic cooperation, development assistance and trade agreements. A spokesperson has also announced the President's intention to visit Brazil and other South American countries, perhaps at the end of his trip to the opening of the United Nation's General Assembly in late September. Morsi is indeed reconsidering Egypt's regional and global relationships, and American / Western authority in Egypt is no longer assured. Complete rapprochement with Iran is unlikely, but Morsi's brief visit does perhaps indicate a willingness to restore relations in some form and perhaps to cooperate on important regional issues. Morsi's visit to China and the announcement of his intent to visit Brazil also indicates to me some degree of interest in association with the BRICS nations, likely as an alternative model and source of markets for economic growth. In short, American authority in Egypt can no longer be taken for granted.
This—the diminution of American authority and the emergent challenges to American hegemony—is what Friedman is lamenting in his piece. Sure, the piece is nominally concerned with Morsi and Egypt; but Friedman can't help but view Egyptian policy, especially with respect to Iran, through the lens of American power. For Friedman, as for so many others, the "success" of post-Mubarak Egypt and that of MENA more generally is premised by the fundamental belief that the proper and necessary telos of development is a distinctly ethnocentric vision of modernity, reified in the supposed perfection of a Western-style secular democracy, in the form of the Western nation-state, fully integrated within a Western-dominated capitalist global economy.
The world is changing, whether Friedman approves or not. He and his mustache likely have much more disappointment in their future, whether measured in years or Friedman Units.
I myself can't help but think back to Edward Said's delightfully biting review of Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, particularly this:
Of course Friedman is perfectly entitled to his views, which are not always unsympathetic, but what is particularly shady is that Friedman palms off his opinions (and those of his sources) as reasonable, uncontested, secure. In fact they are minority views and have been under severe attack for several decades now. They represent a narrow consensus associated not with desirable political change but with the equally political, basically conservative perspective of the status quo.