Morsi is gone. Now what?

Morsi is gone. But, what can we predict about Egypt's future? Carolyn Glick says there are only three things one can predict with certainty.

First, it will be poor. Egypt is a failed state. It cannot feed its people. It has failed to educate its people. It has no private sector to speak of. It has no foreign investment.

Second, Egypt will be politically unstable. Mubarak was able to maintain power for 29 years because he ran a police state that the people feared. That fear was dissipated in 2011. This absence of fear will bring Egyptians to the street to topple any government they feel is failing to deliver on its promises — as they did this week.

Given Egypt's dire economic plight, it is impossible to see how any government will be able to deliver on any promises — large or small — that its politicians will make during electoral campaigns. And so government after government will share the fates of Mubarak and Morsi.

Beyond economic deprivation, today tens of millions of Egyptians feel they were unlawfully and unjustly ousted from power on Wednesday. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists won big in elections hailed as free by the West. They have millions of supporters who are just as fanatical today as they were last week. They will not go gently into that good night.

Finally, given the utter irrelevance of liberal democratic forces in Egypt today, it is clear enough that whoever is able to rise to power in the coming years will be anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-democratic, (in the liberal democratic sense of the word). They might be nicer to the Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood has been. But they won't be more pro-Western.

How should the West respond to these events? Glick urges us to follow the cautious app;roach Israel has been taking, not the reckless approach advocated by Obama and McCain.

Wednesday's overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government is a total repudiation of the US strategy of viewing the unrest in Egypt — and throughout the Arab world -- as a struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.

Obama ignored Congress three times and maintained full funding of Egypt despite the fact that the Morsi government had abandoned its democratic and pluralistic protestations.

He was silent over the past year as the demonstrators assembled to oppose Morsi's power grabs. He was unmoved as churches were torched and Christians were massacred. He was silent as Morsi courted Iran.

In 2011, the military acted to force Mubarak from power only after Obama called for them to do so. This week, the military overthrew Morsi and began rounding up his supporters in defiance of the White House.