On a spectrum ranging from persistent autocracy to durable democracy, Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey would typically fall at very different points. Ruling But Not Governing puts these dissimilar governments in a single framework and cites a common thread: the continuing influence of military officers at steering national politics without directly managing them.

This useful comparison illuminates important shared characteristics that are overlooked in the typical democracy-authoritarianism divide that sets Egypt and Turkey in different categories, not to mention in different books. Ongoing events in Turkey remind us that the country’s military stewards remain ready to intervene in defense of their interests and national mission. Steve’s lucid discussion of the military’s continuing role thus provides a valuable and pleasant summer read. It raised several questions for me, too, and I am grateful for the invitation to engage Steve on his work. His opener dovetails with the issues I’d already jotted down.

While deeply satisfying in its empirical presentation, Ruling But Not Governing kept me wondering: “Who is Steve debating? Who thinks the military doesn’t matter in these cases?” Even accepting some lag between knowledge production and its consumption among non-academics, we have had for several years a group of scholars intent on explaining authoritarian durability in the Middle East.

Thus, it’s not clear to me that a claim about regime stability challenges today’s “conventional wisdom,” nor that the repressive apparatus has been so neglected as Steve implies. I think Eva Bellin’s 2004 article, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East” (subsequently reprinted in an edited volume with a similar theme) cemented the notion that non-democratic regimes in the region are not transitioning and that their repressive agencies play a large part in the continuation of despotic rule. In that vein, Steve’s work contributes to a lively and ongoing debate, not on whether Middle East regimes are stable but on why they are so.

This lead me to raise two more sets of questions, briefly. First, how much is the military really ruling in Egypt today and how constrained, really, has the Turkish military become? On the one hand, what evidence do we have that Egyptian officers are participating in the actual steering of national policy? (This is an open question; the chapter on Egypt addresses Mubarak's assault on the opposition more than the regime's relationship to the military.) On the other hand, in light of the events Steve mentions, it seems the Turkish military may not have become as constrained by EU accession hopes as we might have otherwise thought.

Finally, what does the limited success of the EU at reining in the Turkish military imply for Steve’s prescriptions about US aid to Egypt? I am skeptical that an increase in aid – even if it were coupled with some form of political conditionality – would spur Egypt’s leadership to undertake genuine reform. In fact, the opposite might be more accurate. If the United States were to incrementally reduce military aid to zero over, say, 5 years, would we expect the Mubarak government to become more or less accountable to its citizenry? The literature from Bellin and others would logically suggest that a drop, rather than an increase in rents is what might spur Egypt’s rulers to heed the demands of their own public, instead of responding to foreign patrons abroad.

[I note one commenter has responded to Steve’s point about Iraq. I’d like to return to the lessons for Iraq, but after we’ve pinned down the implications for Steve’s core cases.]