Obama congratulates Egypt’s new president-elect

Gaza’s Hamas Prime Min­is­ter Ismail Haniyeh, cen­ter, waves the Pales­tin­ian and Egypt­ian flags dur­ing cel­e­bra­tions of the vic­tory of Mohammed Morsi in the Egypt­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, in Gaza City, Sun­day. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Hatem Moussa)

ROBERT BURNS

AP National Secu­rity Writer

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Sun­day called Egypt’s president-elect, Mohammed Morsi, to con­grat­u­late him on his vic­tory and offer con­tin­ued U.S. sup­port for Egypt’s tran­si­tion to democracy.

Obama “empha­sized his inter­est in work­ing together with President-elect Morsi, on the basis of mutual respect, to advance the many shared inter­ests between Egypt and the United States,” the White House said.

“Morsi expressed appre­ci­a­tion for Obama’s call and wel­comed U.S. sup­port for Egypt’s tran­si­tion,” the White House said in a press release. Obama and Morsi also agreed to stay in close touch in the com­ing weeks and months.

In the tur­bu­lent after­math of long­time leader Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in Feb­ru­ary 2011, the U.S. is eager to sal­vage an alliance with Egypt that has been a foun­da­tion of sta­bil­ity in the Mid­dle East since the late 1970s, ensur­ing peace between the Arab world’s most pop­u­lous coun­try and Israel.

In his first tele­vised speech, Morsi said Sun­day he car­ries “a mes­sage of peace” to the world and pledged to pre­serve Egypt’s inter­na­tional accords, a ref­er­ence to the peace deal with Israel.

An ear­lier state­ment from White House press sec­re­tary Jay Car­ney alluded to the Obama administration’s hope that the rise of Morsi and his Mus­lim Broth­er­hood party will not set back Egyptian-Israeli rela­tions. For all his faults, Mubarak was cred­ited in Wash­ing­ton with resist­ing three decades of pres­sure within Egypt to break the Camp David accords with Israel or loosen its alliance with the United States.

“We believe it is essen­tial for the Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment to con­tinue to ful­fill Egypt’s role as a pil­lar of regional peace, secu­rity and sta­bil­ity,” Car­ney said.

The admin­is­tra­tion had expressed no pub­lic pref­er­ence in advance of Sunday’s announce­ment that the Islamist pres­i­den­tial can­di­date had defeated Ahmed Shafiq, who was the last prime min­is­ter under Mubarak.

Obama also called Shafiq on Sun­day, encour­ag­ing him “to con­tinue to play a role in Egypt­ian pol­i­tics by sup­port­ing the demo­c­ra­tic process and work­ing to unify the Egypt­ian peo­ple,” the White House said.

The Mus­lim Brotherhood’s vic­tory adds a new ele­ment of uncer­tainty for U.S. pol­icy in the Mid­dle East, which has been rocked by the con­flict in Syria, where some 40 peo­ple were said to have died Sun­day in new clashes between rebels and gov­ern­ment forces.

The U.S. pro­vides about $1.3 bil­lion annu­ally in mil­i­tary aid to Egypt; the two coun­tries reg­u­larly hold joint mil­i­tary exer­cises, and U.S. Navy ships are fre­quent vis­i­tors to Egypt­ian ports.

In a reflec­tion of the Pentagon’s large stake in Egypt­ian sta­bil­ity and a tran­si­tion toward democ­racy, Defense Sec­re­tary Leon Panetta placed a phone call June 15 to the head of Egypt’s rul­ing mil­i­tary coun­cil, Field Mar­shal Hus­sein Tantawi, who was Mubarak’s defense min­is­ter for 20 years. Panetta stressed to Tantawi the need for the mil­i­tary coun­cil to ensure a full and peace­ful tran­si­tion to democ­racy, accord­ing to Panetta’s press sec­re­tary, George Little.

But just one week ago, as polls were clos­ing in the pres­i­den­tial runoff, the Supreme Coun­cil of the Armed Forces issued con­sti­tu­tional amend­ments that stripped the president’s office of most of its major pow­ers. The rul­ing gen­er­als made them­selves the final arbiters over the most press­ing issues com­pli­cat­ing the tran­si­tion, such as writ­ing the con­sti­tu­tion, and granted mil­i­tary police broad pow­ers to detain civil­ians. For now, the author­i­ties of the pres­i­dent are not clear.

Sen. John Kerry, chair­man of the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, said the U.S. should embrace the elec­tion out­come even if the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s past posi­tions are a cause for concern.

“It would be a mis­take for us to pull back from our engage­ment with a free and demo­c­ra­tic Egypt,” said Kerry, D-Mass. “This is a time to test inten­tions, not to pre­judge them.”

Kerry said that in recent con­ver­sa­tions with Morsi, the new president-elect said he was com­mit­ted to pro­tect­ing basic free­doms, includ­ing the rights of women and minori­ties and the right to free expres­sion and assembly.

“He said he under­stood the impor­tance of Egypt’s post-revolutionary rela­tion­ships with Amer­ica and Israel,” Kerry said.

Anthony Cordes­man, a Mid­dle East expert at the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tional Stud­ies, said uncer­tainty over Egypt’s rela­tions with the U.S. and other key coun­tries is likely to per­sist for sev­eral years.

“In the near term, it seems unlikely that the elec­tion will have a major impact on U.S. and Egypt­ian rela­tions,” he said. “The Egypt­ian mil­i­tary remains too strong, there is no leg­is­la­ture, and the new Mus­lim Broth­er­hood pres­i­dent will con­cen­trate on domes­tic issues.”

How­ever, Cordes­man added, “The midterm is far more uncer­tain and the long term is totally unpredictable.”

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