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Egypt slams Foreign Affairs magazine article over criticizing country's policies

Xinhua, October 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

Egypt's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday slammed a recent article by Middle East expert Steven Cook in Foreign Affairs magazine criticizing Egypt's domestic and foreign policy.

"Attempting to analyze and explain a country's entire domestic and foreign policy through a single, narrow lens is much like trying to force several square pegs into the same round whole; it is exhausting to follow, and ultimately makes little sense," the ministry's spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in an article published at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry Blog, titled "The Neglected Reality in Egypt."

"The same can be said of the latest article by Middle East expert Steven Cook, titled 'Egypt's Nightmare: Sisi's dangerous war on terror,' published in the 95th Volume of Foreign Affairs magazine," the article read.

In his article, Cook said after Egyptians forced former President Hosni Mubarak to step down in 2011, "once again, a former military official who turned dictator rules the country. But President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has established an even more harshly authoritarian regime than the one Mubarak oversaw. By almost every measure, conditions in Egypt are worse now than prior to the revolution."

Abu zeid said the article's purpose is to assert that the sole driving force behind all of Egypt's policies as a state is some obsessive vendetta against the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Cook is a highly respected author on Middle Eastern affairs; it is thus unfortunate to see him adopt such a simplistic approach to analyzing Egypt's policies," said the spokesman.

The spokesman further said that what is noteworthy, however, is the article's outrageously far-fetched portrayal of Egypt as the primary destabilizing factor in the Middle-East, grossly misrepresenting the Egyptian foreign policy in the process, and skimming over important details regarding the crises that are plaguing the Middle East.

"The author struggles to draw a feasible link between his criticism of internal affairs in Egypt, his attack on Egypt's foreign policy, and the Muslim Brotherhood factor that is supposed to serve as the fulcrum of his argument. As such, the article buckles under the strain of this task, resulting in a disjointed and slightly incoherent piece," he added. Endit