Barack Obama’s assertion
that he doesn’t consider Egypt an ally stunned NBC’s chief foreign
correspondent Richard Engel. Engel, reporting from Cairo, tells Chuck
Todd that he needed to “sit down” after hearing that statement. Engel
reminds Todd that the US had two major Arab allies in the region when
Obama took office, on which it spent a significant amount of foreign aid
to keep it that way — Egypt and Saudi Arabia. If we’ve lost Egypt as
an ally, Engel asks, wasn’t supporting the effort to overthrow Hosni
Mubarak a huge mistake?

Who lost Egypt? Barack Obama. His administration waited eight whole
days when those demonstrations erupted to demand Mubarak’s ouster, and
then insisted on immediate elections — even though the only opposition
organized well enough at that point in time for elections was the
radical Muslim Brotherhood. In both Egypt and even more in Libya —
where Obama applied military force to dislodge and topple Moammar
Qaddafi — the White House left power vacuums that allowed the most
radical elements to seize control. Critics of Obama’s policies in both
regards warned of this very outcome eighteen months ago, to no avail.
It looks like the media may have finally decided that Mitt Romney’s
criticism of an embassy statement that even the Obama administration
ended up disavowing isn’t the biggest issue at stake here. We’re
watching the collapse of decades of diplomacy and the Pax Americana
within a few short weeks. Engel’s not the only one who has to sit down
over the stunning declaration that we’ve lost Egypt as an ally.