Lipton observes that even Poland took almost 15 years to join the European Union, but the prospect of membership meant that any political party that proposed to deviate from the path to European integration lost in the polls. He concedes that "in the case of North Africa, we will find nothing that is as compelling as EU membership," but says that policymakers hope to build a "staircase" toward reform starting with the quick infusion of IMF money, then moving on to increased trade and investment, and help with legal changes to unshackle the private sector and improve revenue collection. The plan requires U.S. compliance as well: Obama's proposed Trade and Investment Partnership won't amount to much unless legislators prove more willing than they have so far to reduce tariffs on apparel and the other manufactured goods that would come from the region.

The funding will be conditioned on reforms developed in each country. The IMF will work with Egypt and Tunisia over the next year or so to put together a comprehensive plan to spur growth, create jobs, and establish a safety net other than the one endemic in the region: dead-end jobs in the bloated public sector. The World Bank has begun working out such conditions in both target countries. In Tunisia, says a bank official, the interim government has embraced the plan: "They've tried to identify changes that would be difficult to reverse and that would give clear signals that policymaking will be different," she says. These include freedom-of-information rules and public access to government data. Egypt, she concedes, has been "harder."

Indeed, Egypt's interim military government may put up serious resistance to the Deauville Partnership. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, as the ruling clique calls itself, has proved increasingly hostile to the citizens movement that ousted President Hosni Mubarak from office in February. Even if the military agrees to surrender political power to a new civilian government, which seems less and less certain, it may do so only on the condition that it retain its vast -- and disabling -- web of economic privileges. "We must not allow the Egyptian military to control the economy or to retain power through privatization," says Anders Åslund, a former Swedish diplomat who worked with Lipton in the early 1990s. The "a priori answer" to whether the military will agree to surrender its economic role, Åslund says, is "no."

The premise of the plan is that the combination of political change and economic opening will produce a dynamic that ultimately forces Egypt's own nomenklatura to abandon its privileged position. Aslund notes that policymakers in the early 1990s rightly focused on one new democracy -- Poland -- with the hope that others would follow later. Egypt is the Poland of the Arab Spring; but Egypt is much poorer, much more conservative, and much more mired in the past than Poland was in 1989. The country's vast hinterland largely sat out the revolution and is available for mobilization by a range of anti-democratic forces. Democratic consolidation is going to be a lot harder in the Middle East than it was in post-communist Europe. And in any case, success in one place may not have the hydraulic effect it had two decades ago. All the international financing in the world won't make a difference until autocrats fall in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, it is a sign of progress that institutions now exist with the resources, experience, and expertise to rally behind nascent and would-be democracies, and to help counteract the internal and external pressures that endanger them. It's mortifying that the United States can offer so little to this international effort, but it's heartening to see the care with which the Obama administration has marshaled this plan.

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