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The Obama administration equivocated in its initial comments on last week's military coup in Egypt that removed President Mohamed Morsi from power. But the White House has made the US position much clearer with its announcement yesterday that it will deliver four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt, despite the dubious legality of the ouster. 

If Washington declared Mr. Morsi's removal a coup, the US would be legally required to cut its estimated $1.3 billion in military aid to Cairo. White House spokesman Jay Carney said yesterday it would not be "in the best interests of the United States to make immediate changes to our assistance programs," the BBC reports. The Obama administration has carefully avoided using the word "coup."

The F-16 delivery is an installment of a previously arranged order of 20 planes. Eight have already been delivered, according to the BBC.

The US considers its military ties to Cairo – encapsulated in $40 billion in aid since 1948 and annual military exercises – as one of its most important relationships in the region. It is loathe to do anything to endanger that relationship, even if the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) went ahead with the coup in defiance of US objections, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

US officials worry that the growing influence of the wealthy Gulf monarchies is eroding the importance of following US guidelines. While the US debated whether the ouster was a coup, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait pledged $12 billion in aid. That money comes with "few, if any, clear strings attached," as a senior US official noted to The Wall Street Journal. 

But Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairman of the bipartisan Working Group on Egypt, says that the US decline in influence is a myth.

Mr. Kagan argues that the only way to correct the US mistake of not trying to head the coup off earlier is to cut aid now – completely.

But John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal that cutting off aid to Egypt would be a mistake, even if what happened was a coup. The democratically elected Brotherhood had stopped behaving in a democratic manner, he argues, making the law moot.