Edward Schatz on Manar Shorbagy

This essay is a response to Manar Shorbagy’s contribution in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. It argues that Shorbagy is correct in stating that U.S. policy in the region produces the very resistance to its policies that it seeks to undermine, but it also wants to extend the argument beyond analysis of policies. Schatz, for example, insists that ordinary people and political actors form their opinions and pursue their agendas not solely based on policy calculations, and he stresses that this is more important than Shorbagy’s essay presents. He asks several questions in his response to Shorbagy’s analysis of Kefaya: (1) Is Kefaya likely to survive the Obama Administration, the next U.S. president, their different foreign policy choices, and at times very different rhetoric, given its trans-ideological nature uniting Islamists and secular democrats? (2) Will Kefaya need to move beyond critiques of “foreign threats and political despotism” and demonstrate its efficacy to the broader public? And (3) is it possible that the new U.S. administration could engineer new modes of engagement in the region that are much less beholden to old patterns of behavior?