William Burns, the veteran American diplomat whose candidacy was announced by President-elect Joe Biden to run the CIA, is considered to be one of the most closely informed about Egypt in American political circles. His knowledge of the situation in Egypt, and stemming from his work in the American foreign policy and not the intelligence establishment, is not limited to the last years or the period in which he was an envoy from the Obama administration during the period of the January 2011 revolution and beyond, but it goes back to the eighties of the last century, when he wrote a book in The beginning of his career with the title "Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt 1955-1981". This book, published in 1985, deals with the role of aid in Washington’s policy towards Cairo during the reign of Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.
The book talks about how the United States used Egypt's need to support its economy in the post-revolution phase of 1952 and Gamal Abdel Nasser took power, in an attempt to find influence in Egypt, and how the situation differed completely between the periods of Nasser and Sadat.
Amazon says in its simplified review of Burns' book that what the American diplomat wrote shows the US government’s attempt to use economic aid programs to push Egypt to support American interests in the Middle East over a quarter of a century in the period after the 1955 Egyptian-Czech arms agreement. He conducted interviews with former policymakers to demonstrate how aid was a tool of American policy during the Nasser era, and he made strong observations about the role of US economic aid programs during the Sadat era.
In the book, Burns discussed the origin and development of economic aid to Egypt by the United States, the role of the High Dam crisis when the United States refused to finance the High Dam in the deterioration of relations between the two countries, and the focus of successive US administrations on providing food aid in the 1960s.
Baines said in his book that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision in 1955 to barter Egyptian cotton for weapons from the Soviet bloc to Egypt had pushed Cairo to the center stage in the Cold War in the Middle East. What Egypt needed most during this period, and what the United States was able to provide, was economic assistance. As for the Egyptian government, which was seeking during that stage to take rapid steps towards economic development, but was hindered by population growth, scarcity of arable lands and lack of available foreign exchange reserves, US economic aid would have been an important support. For policymakers in Washington, this aid was an ideal way to develop US influence in Egypt, according to the book.
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