Peter Beinart somehow manages to minimize the role of the Egyptian military regime in his article on U.S. Egypt policy:

Ordinary Egyptians never embraced the alliance with the United States, because that alliance brought them neither freedom nor prosperity. What Obama “lost” was a regime willing to do America’s bidding despite its people’s desires, and had he tried to preserve that in the face of revolutionary change, things in Egypt would be even worse than they are today.

Of course, in practice the Obama administration has tried to preserve the Egyptian regime, and he has made sure to continue U.S. aid to that regime. Egypt is now being governed along the lines of a Pakistani or old Turkish model in which the army wields disproportionate influence and has the ability to rein in or overthrow the weak civilian leadership, and the U.S. is supporting Egypt’s military regime. Whether the military regime will be “willing to do America’s bidding” is less certain, but the reality is that Obama has done almost exactly the opposite of what Beinart claims. It’s true that Obama signaled that the U.S. didn’t want the regime to rig the election to give the victory to its favorite, but Egypt’s presidency is now so weak that it scarcely matters.

Beinart also misrepresents a lot of the domestic reaction to Obama’s response the initial uprising:

From the Gulf to Israel to the GOP, conservatives chastised Obama for not standing more firmly behind America’s old ally.

It’s true that some movement conservatives here in the U.S. responded that way. Rick Santorum was the loudest critic of Obama’s decision to endorse the protesters’ demand that Mubarak resign. However, most of the criticism Obama received from Republicans was entirely different: Obama was accused of responding too slowly to the protests in Egypt. Most Republicans that denounced Obama on Egypt did so because they believed he failed to embrace popular uprisings quickly enough. Democracy promotion had become a core part of the Bush-era Republican foreign policy agenda, and many Republicans remain wedded to it even now. A lot of this has to do with bitterness over the abject failure of the “freedom agenda” under Bush and a strange need to portray themselves as more revolutionary and liberal than Obama.

The partisan accusations of “losing” another country are always absurd for two main reasons: they grossly exaggerate the degree of control Washington has in the other country, and they usually ignore the other nation’s public opinion until just before the country is “lost.” The truth is that the Egyptian people were “lost” to a pro-U.S. alignment decades ago, and they probably never would have aligned their country with the U.S. at all had their government reflected their views. The military regime in Egypt is still more or less intact, and it continues to be a U.S. client regime, so in that sense Egypt has not been “lost” to the U.S. If its recent decree is any indication, it intends to retain its privileges and its power for the foreseeable future. The “Egypt is lost” arguments have mostly focused on Mursi’s election, and in some cases they have tried to dismiss the idea that the military still wields most of the real power. In fact, the people worried about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (and I include myself here) seem to have consistently underestimated the military regime’s staying power.