Creditors Close In

Abstract

By the late 1980s, all anticolonialist bravado had vanished. Egypt’s state had painted itself into a corner: chafing under a heavy debt burden, it found itself entangled in a web of dependencies that seemed to permanently shackle it to the creditor states of the global economic core. All it could offer the creditors in return for their generosity was continued peace with Israel, the promise not to let the nation fall into the hands of Islamists, and the agreement not to align itself with the Soviet Union.