As the debate rages in the United States and other Western nations about a possible strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a parallel debate is taking place in Egypt. Officially, the interim government has rejected any international intervention in Syria. The government’s stance is supported by many political parties, including the liberal Free Egyptian Party and moderate Islamists such as the Strong Egypt Party. The official stance has also gained strong backing from a wide portion of the Egyptian public. The mood now among Egyptians is hostile to any US intervention in Syria. Despite the ongoing civil war, the use of chemical weapons and the thousands of Syrians who were killed, injured or displaced, any US strike against Syria will be viewed in Egypt like the 1956 Suez crisis — that is, an unlawful attack by Western forces against a sovereign Arab state.

To understand the Egyptian stance, it is helpful to link it to the evolution of society after the January 2011 revolution. The last two and half years can be divided into three phases.

Phase one is best described as the romantic phase, in which Egyptians were mostly feeling good about themselves and proud that other countries wanted to mimic the Egyptian experience and revolt against their own tyrants, hence the strong solidarity with the Syrian revolution. Egyptians wholeheartedly empathized with the Syrian youth, without contemplating the implications of the crisis in Syria on the Egyptian domestic front.

Phase two — the realist phase — began roughly with the start of Mohammed Morsi’s tenure as the president of Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership. It more or less coincided with the full-blown armed confrontations in Syria and the rise of radical jihadist groups. Many Egyptians subconsciously began linking Islamism in Egypt with that in Syria, and viewed the Muslim Brotherhood as an international organization that placed its own interests above those of Egypt as a state. In the pro-Syria rally that Morsi organized, in which he claimed that Egypt’s people and army would back the Syrian revolution, the audience came mostly from various Islamist groups, and the shouting of religious slogans was ultimately perceived in a negative way among the military and the wider public, indirectly compelling many to join the demonstrations against Morsi on June 30. In May 2013, a Pew public-opinion poll revealed that close to 60% of Egyptians opposed Arab and Western governments sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria, even though 81% of Egyptians had an unfavorable view of Assad.