The White House’s bland announcementWednesday that the Kremlin chief would not attend a Group of 8 summit at Camp David this week covered a rude rebuff. Obama had tailored the conclave to Putin, moving it from Chicago so that it would be clearly separate from a NATO summit. Earlier this month, Obama dispatched national security adviser Tom Donilon to Moscow to hand Putin what a Russian official described as “a multi-page, detailed document, whose main message is that Obama is ready to cooperate with Putin.”

Sitting comfortably in the lobby of a Western-owned hotel in Cairo, Nabil Naim recounts his history as a leader of Egypt’s al-Jihad organization, which assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, waged a terrorist war in the 1990s and helped give birth to al-Qaeda. He was, he says, the personal bodyguard of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. He was “the right arm” of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former al-Jihad leader who now heads al-Qaeda.

A lot has changed in Egyptian politics in the past nine months: There are dozens of new political parties, Islamists are openly campaigning for political power and the most free parliamentary election in decades is underway.

The peaceful, blocks-long lines outside polling stations here this morning were the dream of Egypt’s democratic revolutionaries just a year ago. But just about everything else they foresaw after the overthrow of strongman Hosni Mubarak is looking like a mirage.

A lot of people in Washington seem to think so, though they are talking about it quietly so far. Their fears are specific: that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic fundamentalist parties will take power when Egypt’s first democratic elections are held later this year; and that peace with Israel — the foundation of a 30-year, American-backed order in the Middle East — is “hanging by a thread,” as Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put it.

The U.S. ambassador is one of the great protagonists of the post-9/11 era, serving more than half of the last 10 years in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Along with Gen. David Petraeus, he rescued the United States from catastrophe in Iraq four years ago; now he is trying to repeat the feat in Kabul. He finds himself repeating many of the same phrases: “It’s hard. It’s going to go on being hard. But it’s not hopeless,” he said in our conversation last week.