[alephnerd]

And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.

A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.

The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.

> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990

Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.

[cherryteastain]

Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)

Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.

Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.

[alephnerd]

And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.