MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Events in Egypt have dominated the news all week, and that's where we begin with political commentators E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post - good to see you.
Mr. E.J. DIONNE (Commentator, The Washington Post): Good to see you.
SIEGEL: And David Brooks of the New York Times. Hi.
Mr. DAVID BROOKS (Commentator, The New York Times): Good to see you.
SIEGEL: President Obama has been confronted with a dilemma: A useful ally, a friend in international relations, is regarded at home as a dictator, plain and simple. The advent of democracy could mean the advent of groups the U.S. is very wary of because they oppose U.S. policies. First, E.J., how well is the president playing that very difficult hand he's been dealt?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, I think we'll not really know the answer to that until this is all over. I think for now, he's doing reasonably well. At the heart, President Obama's foreign policy is far more like the first President Bush's than President Bush's son's foreign policy was. At heart, Obama is a realist with an overlay of liberal values. And he was basically saying Obama's our friend - I mean, Mubarak's our friend for a long time. They did not see this coming, but neither did anyone else..
And he's quickly adjusted to a much stronger emphasis on human rights because he now believes that's in our interest. And I was so struck today - when he was talking about President Mubarak, Obama sounded a bit like an employer, you know, giving someone a firm but warm shove out the door. He is proud, but also a patriot. He's already said he's not going to run again. He made that psychological breakthrough.
It was like, come on, you already know you're not going to be around long. This is a serious business with historic implications, but it's also a very personal business for Mubarak. And Obama was trying to walk that line between history and the person.
SIEGEL: Yes. Actually, President George W. Bush, at one point, embraced the cause of advancing democracy in the Middle East as a policy objective. David Brooks, how do you think this is playing out right now?
Mr. BROOKS: I guess I give Obama a C-minus for the first week, and an A for the last couple days. He did start out very slowly embracing Mubarak, sort of keeping the good relationship. But I really think what's notable is how quickly they've learned. I think they were behind the step continuously for about a week.
And I'd say in the last three or four days, they finally got out in front - and really negotiating for Mubarak to leave. And now, quite clearly, they're pressuring him to leave now and presumably, doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I really figure they're being - about - doing about as well as they can. The question for me is, will President Obama learn from this in the long term? Will he see that the George H.W. Bush foreign policy had some problems?
It's fine to negotiate with the leaders, but you got to pay attention to the people. And second, the internal nature of a regime really matters. You can't ignore that, or it'll come up and bite you on the rear end.
Mr. DIONNE: I must say that I think Obama and the administration decided by Saturday that Mubarak's position was unsustainable, and that everything happened - after that, everything flowed from that assumption. And in fairness to Obama on this, President Bush did speak those words about democracy. And yet, really, we sustained our support for President Mubarak all the way through that period, partly 'cause he was an ally of ours on a lot of foreign policy issues.
Mr. BROOKS: Well, we were scared by the Hamas election.
Mr. DIONNE: Yes, absolutely.
Mr. BROOKS: In the first three years, there really was a genuine push to overthrow some of these autocracies - or at least undermine them. After Hamas won in Gaza, we sort of pulled back and we - but, you know, and this is the problem - the line that has to be drawn. But I do think President Bush had a correct insight, which is these autocracies are the most unstable form of government in the world today, and you just can't hang your hat on them.
SIEGEL: Ever since - at least - the agreement the U.S. signed with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco back in the '50s, we've had a problem, which is useful dictators who ultimately either die or leave, and we have to make friends with the people who hate those guys.
Mr. BROOKS: But my problem is we act like - each time, we act like it's the first time. Since '74 - it really started with Portugal - there have been a hundred democratic movements. Eighty-five autocracies have been overthrown, and we react each time like, oh, what's happening? There are people on the street; how do we react? There's like, no set of protocols to react.
Mr. DIONNE: And I think that's partly because the lessons, in terms of what came afterward, are inconsistent. And there were some easier cases and some harder cases - the hardest case being Iran. And the folks at the beginning there, the early post-Shah Iranian governments were almost social democratic in their nature, and then they quickly moved to a theocracy. I think there's a fascinating - and this is helping Obama - fascinating, sort of shift among conservatives.
Neo-conservatives, when Jimmy Carter was in office, were very, very critical of Carter's human-rights policies. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the U.N., wrote a famous article and commentary, really warning against middle-class Americans who always thought democracy was around the corner. Since the Iraq War, a lot of neo-conservatives have joined the human-rights camp. And you had this very odd but interesting alliance pushing Obama from both the left human-rights advocates, and some of the neo-con human-rights advocates.
Mr. BROOKS: When Jimmy Carter was president, neo-conservatives were Democrats.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BROOKS: And they were running Jimmy Carter's foreign policy.
SIEGEL: Well, the events in Egypt have really been so dramatic, they've practically driven our own politics off the front pages - or off of Twitter, I guess, is the more apt phrase nowadays. Are we still, by the way, on course for a huge fiscal collision on Capitol Hill, or has there been any progress in the conflict between the administration and House Republicans? David?
Mr. BROOKS: We're not going to have a collision because the Republicans have said they will not shut down the government. But we're going to have an argument. And my fear is that we're going to end up saving all the things we should be cutting, like Medicare and Medicaid and the entitlements. And the people who are going to get savaged are the discretionary spending.
I met this week with Bill Gates, who's concerned about foreign aid. Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health, concerned about scientific research. A bunch of university people, university funding, early childhood education - these are some of the most worthy things the government does. And I'm afraid that they're going to get savaged because we're unwilling to take on the big, tough issues.
SIEGEL: Because all of the entitlements that are really driving the deficit, each one is a third rail of its own.
Mr. BROOKS: Right. And so, all the stuff that actually pays off - and is small in budget terms, by the way - all that stuff's going to get hit because we don't have the courage to take on Medicare. So I wish all those universities, everybody's got to take on Medicare.
Mr. DIONNE: I think that the reason we will have a collision is precisely for what David said, which is we don't have to cut the basic parts of government the way the Ryan budget, or some proposals from the Republicans that are much worse, would. And - but I think you're also going to have interesting politics in another respect, which is that there all are - there's a group of 10, 15 Senate Democrats who want a deal of some kind on the budget.
And so I think you may have a number of positions inside the Democratic Party as this goes forward. I've been so struck at how different our domestic discussions are from the discussion we've had on Egypt. There was a joint resolution, introduced by John Kerry and John McCain, on Egypt. We are much more humble and willing to sort of talk to each other about the Egyptian mess than we are about anything else. I wonder if we will learn any lessons from the way we talked about Egypt.
Mr. BROOKS: Well, I would say in general, Obama's foreign policy is very bipartisan. And there's been relatively little fighting about foreign policy, in part because we all agree that Mubarak's government is probably too big. We don't necessarily agree about whether Obama's government is too big. So we fight about that.
SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, thanks so much.
Mr. BROOKS: Thank you.
SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post, and also the Brookings Institution. And David Brooks of the New York Times. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.