Hot Take: Fahmy: ‘Constructive engagement’ better than using ‘assistance as a weapon’

Half steps. The Biden administration is planning to send $170 million in military aid to Egypt that Congress has conditioned on improvements in Cairo’s human rights record. That’s only slightly more than half the $300 million Congress had appropriated. The compromise, Elizabeth Hagedorn reports, has not appeased activists and some Democrats who wanted Washington to take a tougher approach on conditioning aid.

Fahmy: US assistance a win-win. "Constructive engagement is a better approach than attempting to use assistance as a weapon or the withholding of access to facilities," former Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy tells Al-Monitor, "especially because the overwhelming majority in both countries aspire for a centrist moderate political center of gravity and peace in the Middle East."

And it’s a two-way street, not an act of charity, says Fahmy, who served as Egypt’s ambassador to the United States from 1999-2008 and is the author of "Egypt’s Diplomacy in War, Peace and Transition."