By MATT BRADLEY

ReutersSalafists recently protested in favor of Islamist law in Cairo.

CAIRO—A radical faction within Egypt’s most conservative Islamist party is breaking away, threatening to pull the nation’s politics further rightward ahead of a vote to elect a new Parliament.

The split is also fracturing the Islamist Nour Party, which has allied with President Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood but is more religiously conservative.

The next polls are critical because the new Parliament will draft laws fleshing out Egypt’s new Islamist-tinged constitution. That charter, approved last month in a national referendum, leaves wide room for legislators to interpret Islam’s role in the state, particularly with regards to the enforcement of public morality, say some of the document’s opponents.

Emad Abdel Ghafour, the former head of the Nour Party, the main political representation for the austere Salafi Islam, said Tuesday that he and hundreds of defectors from the Islamist Nour Party would form a new party called Al Watan, or Homeland.

Nour-led Salafi parties won more than 25% of seats in Egypt’s first postrevolutionary parliamentary polls that ended in early 2012, before courts dissolved that legislature.

Associated PressMr. Abu Ismail, an ultraconservative leader, will ally with a new Salafi party. (more…)

By JOSHUA MITNICK

TEL AVIV—Israel completed the main section of a $416 million fence along the Egyptian border on Wednesday, a project that became more urgent after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago.

Getty ImagesThis handout image supplied by the Israeli Government Press Office shows a general view of the border security fence along the Israel-Egypt border.

The 144-mile section of the 16-foot-high fence includes barbed wire, surveillance cameras and radar, stretching from the Gaza Strip to just north of Eilat.

Israeli officials said the fence had already stopped the illegal entry of thousands of African migrants and lowered the risk of militant infiltration from the chaotic Sinai Peninsula. An eight-mile section through harder-to-infiltrate mountainous terrain is to be completed this year, a defense official said.

Before construction began 2½ years ago, a few lines of barbed wire on rickety poles protected the border. The porous desert frontier became a threat for Israel after Mr. Mubarak’s fall weakened the security presence on the Egyptian side. (more…)

By MATT BRADLEY and SAM DAGHER

EPAA general view shows protesters demonstrating against the President Mohamed Morsi’s decree in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

CAIRO—Tens of thousands of Egyptians descended on central Cairo to challenge new claims to power by President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist allies, forcing the new leader to manage popular discontent that echoed the protests against the strongman who preceded him.

Mr. Morsi said Thursday that his decisions as president would be immune from judicial review, in a decree that would prevent judges from dissolving the committee—dominated by Islamist politicians from the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, which Mr. Morsi once led—that is responsible for drafting a new Egyptian constitution.

In awarding himself expansive powers, Mr. Morsi provoked a popular backlash against him and other Islamists in the government. Similar protests broke out when the military council that ruled after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster moved to take greater control of government just before presidential polls.

ReutersAn anti-Morsi protester runs to throw a tear-gas canister during clashes with riot police at Tahrir Square, Cairo, on Tuesday.  (more…)

Early last week, the Egyptian president and Muslim Brother brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas with the assistance of the Obama administration. On Wednesday, a story in the New York Times gave the blow-by-blow account of the negotiations from Mr. Obama’s angle.

“Mr. Obama told aides he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence,” the Times reported. “He sensed an engineer’s precision with surprisingly little ideology. Most important, Mr. Obama told aides that he considered Mr. Morsi a straight shooter who delivered on what he promised and did not promise what he could not deliver.” 

Going on in this gushing vein, the Times concluded: “As for Mr. Obama, his aides said they were willing to live with some of Mr. Morsi’s more populist talk as long as he proves constructive on substance. ‘The way we’ve been able to work with Morsi,’ said one official, ‘indicates we could be a partner on a broader set of issues going forward.’ ”

A day after this era of good feelings had begun, Mr. Morsi awarded himself dictatorial powers. The worst that White House spokesman Jay Carney would say is that the administration is “concerned.” (more…)

By MITT ROMNEY

Disturbing developments are sweeping across the greater Middle East. In Syria, tens of thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has come to power, and the country’s peace treaty with Israel hangs in the balance. In Libya, our ambassador was murdered in a terrorist attack. U.S. embassies throughout the region have been stormed in violent protests. And in Iran, the ayatollahs continue to move full tilt toward nuclear-weapons capability, all the while promising to annihilate Israel.

These developments are not, as President Obama says, mere “bumps in the road.” They are major issues that put our security at risk.

Yet amid this upheaval, our country seems to be at the mercy of events rather than shaping them. We’re not moving them in a direction that protects our people or our allies.

And that’s dangerous. If the Middle East descends into chaos, if Iran moves toward nuclear breakout, or if Israel’s security is compromised, America could be pulled into the maelstrom.

We still have time to address these threats, but it will require a new strategy toward the Middle East.

The first step is to understand how we got here. Since World War II, America has been the leader of the Free World. We’re unique in having earned that role not through conquest but through promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law. We ally ourselves with like-minded countries, expand prosperity through trade and keep the peace by maintaining a military second to none.

But in recent years, President Obama has allowed our leadership to atrophy. Our economy is stuck in a “recovery” that barely deserves the name. Our national debt has risen to record levels. Our military, tested by a decade of war, is facing devastating cuts thanks to the budgetary games played by the White House. Finally, our values have been misapplied—and misunderstood—by a president who thinks that weakness will win favor with our adversaries.

Associated Press/Hassene DridiAn American school adjacent to the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, on Sept. 15. Protesters burned the school the day before.

By failing to maintain the elements of our influence and by stepping away from our allies, President Obama has heightened the prospect of conflict and instability. He does not understand that an American policy that lacks resolve can provoke aggression and encourage disorder. (more…)

By FOUAD AJAMI

The sight of Hillary Clinton cutting a rug on the dance floor this week in South Africa gives away the moral obtuseness of America’s chief diplomat. That image will tell the people of the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, under attack by a merciless regime, all they need to know about the heartlessness of U.S. foreign policy.

True authority over foreign affairs has been vested in the White House, and for that matter, in the Obama campaign apparatus. All the great decisions on foreign policy—Iraq and Afghanistan, the struggle raging in Syria, the challenge posed by the Iranian regime—have been subjugated to the needs of the campaign. All that is left for Mrs. Clinton is the pomp and ceremony and hectic travel schedule.

Much has been made of her time in the air. She is now officially the most traveled secretary of state in American history. She has logged, by one recent count, 843,458 miles and visited 102 countries. (This was before her recent African swing; doubtless her handlers will revise the figures.) In one dispatch, it was breakfast in Vietnam, lunch in Laos, dinner in Cambodia. Officially, she’s always the life of the party.

This is foreign policy trivialized. If Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was “present at the creation” of the post-World War II order of states, historians who bother with Mrs. Clinton will judge her as marking time, a witness to the erosion of U.S. authority in the international order.

After settling into her post in early 2009, she made it clear that the “freedom agenda” of the prior administration would be sacrificed. “Ideology is so yesterday,” she bluntly proclaimed in April of that year. This is what her boss had intended all along. The herald of change in international affairs, the man who had hooked crowds in Paris and Berlin and Cairo, was, at heart, a trimmer, timid about America’s possibilities beyond its shores.

AFP/Getty ImagesSecretary of State Hillary Clinton (right) dances with South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Pretoria, Aug. 7.

Presidents and secretaries of state working in tandem can bend historical outcomes. Think of Truman and Acheson accepting the call of history when the British could no longer assume their imperial role. Likewise, Ronald Reagan and George Shultz pushed Soviet communism into its grave and gave the American people confidence after the diplomatic setbacks of the 1970s and the humiliations handed to U.S. power under the presidency of Jimmy Carter. (more…)