June 14, 2012

The Egypt that Mubarak officially inherited from Anwar Sadat on Oct. 14, 1981, was very ‎different from the country that slipped from his grasp on Feb. 11, 2011. On the eve of the ‎uprising, many of Egypt’s critical macroeconomic indicators were pointing in the right ‎direction: GDP growth was healthy, the debt-to-GDP ratio was manageable, foreign ‎reserves were up, and foreign direct investment was flowing. To be sure, not all Egyptians ‎were benefiting from this state of affairs. However, if one surveys the daunting economic, ‎social, and political problems they confront now, it seems that millions of Egyptians are ‎thinking the unthinkable—that someone who represents the Mubarak period is the ‎appropriate person to lead the country into what would most likely be a not-so-new era.

I can’t, sitting here today, tell you what the Iranians will or won’t do, but I am quite certain that they are ‎under tremendous pressure from the Russians and the Chinese to come to Moscow prepared to ‎respond. Now, whether that response is adequate or not, we will have to judge. They, for about the last ‎‎10 days, have been pushing to get a so-called experts meeting, pushing to try to even postpone ‎Moscow in the absence of such meeting. And there was not a single blink by any of the negotiators. ‎And then, as you saw in the news, there was a statement that yes, the Iranians would show up. My ‎counterpart from Russia, Sergey Lavrov, is either there or on his way there.