There was universal agreement that the United States could do far more harm than good in Egypt’s electoral season. The experts maintained that the most important elements of U.S. policy are to keep attention on the process rather than the outcomes, and to understand that the elections will be highly iterative, with true outcomes unknown for years. One suggested that, having bet on democratic development in Egypt, the United States has to engage in a multi-year, multilateral effort to make it come to fruition. Whatever the outcome, the group agreed that Egyptian politics are likely to be far more complicated in the future than they have been, and all argued that the U.S. embassy will need to reach out far more extensively and creatively to a range of political actors in Egypt than it has done in the past.
Jon B. Alterman, CSIS
