As readers know, when the pro-Western leader of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown, the Muslim Brotherhood took power in an election. The Muslim Brotherhood had been suppressed by Mubarak due to their radical Islamic beliefs, but the Egyptian people were so sick of Mubarak they must have thought things couldn’t get worse and elected Mohammed Morsi, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood as the new President. Well, they have gotten worse.
As the first link states, a poll shows that public support for Morsi has plummeted from 79% to 49% as things have gotten steadily worse under his rule. The article notes that fuel shortages have occurred, unemployment is up, tourism is down and prices are up under Morsi’s rule. As readers also likely know, there have been violent confrontations between Morsi’s supporters and those who want a more secular Islamic ruler.
The severely-restrictive interpretations of the Koran by the Muslim Brotherhood and the violent upheavals have understandably driven tourists away from Egypt and this has led to severe hardship on the many Egyptians who depend on tourism to eke out a living (see second link). The poll indicates that more Egyptians are thinking that the tourist industry cannot recover until Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood is gone.
What happens to Egypt is very critically-important to the geopolitical struggle being waged between the Russian-Chinese-Iranian led bloc (the Gog-Magog alliance prophesied in Ezekiel 38 in the Bible) and the western-led bloc led by the USA, NATO, many Sunni Islamic nations, Japan and other allies (this bloc is led by the modern nations descended from the ten tribes of “Israel” as Ezekiel 38 correctly calls them). If Egypt falls into the Gog-Magog alliance, that alliance will gain control of the strategic Suez Canal and could have naval bases on the Mediterranean Sea. If Egypt stays in the western alliance (as it was under Mubarak), it will preserve a key advantage of the western powers.
Egypt‘s military is the key. It had developed strong ties to the USA under Mubarak and the Egyptian intelligence agencies had also developed a good working relationship with their Israeli, Saudi and Jordanian counterparts as noted in a previous post. The USA is in a difficult position as it wants to retain good relations with Egypt and especially the Egyptian military. That is surely why the USA approved an order of F-16 warplanes and modern tanks to Egypt’s military as discussed in a previous post. However, the USA has just shipped a massive order of tear gas canisters to the Morsi regime (see third link) which argues that Morsi expects a massive uprising against him or even the eruption of a civil war like those that erupted in Libya, Yemen and Syria. If a civil war erupts in Egypt, no one can predict what the Egyptian military will do.
The Israelis can’t afford to guess concerning the future of Egypt. It is rapidly building a tall, metal fence along its entire Egyptian border as a protective measure (see fourth link). This will effectively result in Israel having walls and fences along all its borders (except perhaps some Jordanian regions). [I’ve been at the Israeli-Lebanese border with its dual fences, watchlights and interior kill-zones, and I hope the same hostility will not result in the same kind of fence along Israel’s Egyptian border]. The Israelis recognize the existential threat to Israel that would be posed by an Egypt that joins the radical Islamists. However, on the other hand, the Egyptian Navy recently intercepted merchant ships loaded with weapons that were apparently being shipped from Iran to (presumably) the Assad regime in Syria (see last link).
I do not know Egypt’s future, but the Bible may have a hint. Isaiah 19 is a prophecy about Egypt in the latter days, and it rightly prophesied that Egypt would be terrified of the Israelis in the end time (that happened in several Egyptian-Israeli wars), and the Israelis still have the power to quickly destroy Egypt as a nation if a war breaks out. If Egypt dares to fight Israel, Israel could quickly destroy the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam (leading to a destructive tsunami of water heading all the way down the Nile River). However, Isaiah 19:21-25 prophesy that as the latter days transition into the millennial rule of the Messiah (Jesus Christ for us Christians), Egypt will be made a major and prosperous nation by God. This hardly seems a likely outcome if Egypt was a part of the Gog-Magog alliance; therefore, I take this as a hint that Egypt has had enough of fighting the Israelis and that they will be aligned with the western alliance in our future. However, time will tell. Egypt’s future is very important to how the future of world geopolitics unfolds.
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http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/04/11/u-s-ships-140000-teargas-canisters-to-egypts-pro-muslim-brotherhood-regime/
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http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/04/05/egypt-captures-ships-carrying-200000-weapons-off-coast-of-sinai/
