The course of a true revolution never did run smooth. In Russia, the revolution only began with the disposal of the tsar in March 1917. It wasn’t until November that the October Revolution saw the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, take charge.

To those at the time, the French Revolution may have seemed over in October 1789 when revolutionaries captured the king and forced him back to Paris. Then it “ended” again three years later, when the king was executed. And again in 1793, when Maximilien Robespierre came to power. And then again the next year, when Robespierre was executed. And so on, until Napoleon steadied things for a while. Even in the American Revolution, the final Constitution wasn’t adopted until 1787, several years after the first one proved unsuitable.

So it should be no surprise that Egypt’s path isn’t entirely straightforward. Ex-President Mohamed Morsi is now under arrest and the chief justice of Egypt’s constitutional court, Adly Mansour, has been sworn in as the interim president. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are being arrested as the military dismantles the old government, in the wake of protests larger than the ones that brought down Hosni Mubarak two and a half years ago.

Mr. Mansour is expected to lead the country toward another election, in which the Muslim Brotherhood will be allowed to participate. A secular liberal democracy would be a great outcome, and one that many in the West are hoping for. But a sober look at fact shows that isn’t where Egypt is heading.

Elizabeth Nugent, a Ph.D. student in the department of politics at Princeton, points to some revealing statistics. In April, Pew published a report that included data from a poll taken in Egypt toward the end of 2011. It shows that there is no secular majority.

Ninety-five percent of Egypt’s inhabitants are Muslim. Seventy-four percent of Egyptian Muslims said they wanted to make sharia the law of the country. Ninety-five percent said that religious judges should decide family cases and property disputes. Seventy-four percent said that Islamic law should apply to everyone, regardless of their religion. Roughly 86 percent said that those who convert from Islam to another religion should face the death penalty.

“Some media accounts of recent events have categorized them as the result of conflict between two sides, an Islamist government pitted against a ‘mostly secular opposition’ that ‘opposed the Islamist agenda of Mr. Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood,’” writes Nugent. “These descriptions may be applicable to the leading opposition parties within the National Salvation Front coalition, but it is not an accurate portrayal of the opinion of the majority of those reportedly 17.5 million individuals who participated in this weekend’s protests or the Egyptian people more largely.”

“The opposition leadership appears to support constitutional democracy,” writes Stratfor. “Whether the masses in the streets do as well or whether they simply dislike the Muslim Brotherhood is difficult to tell, but we suspect their interests are about food and jobs more than about the principles of liberalism” (July 3).

Western media love to talk to those in the crowds who think like them. But this protest movement isn’t against Islamism. It’s against Morsi, and perhaps also the Muslim Brotherhood. The grievances revolve around Morsi’s failure to fix Egypt’s economy, not his religion.

And this is the major feature the Egyptian revolution has in common with the French and Russian revolutions: bread. Poverty, high food prices and unemployment were instrumental in getting the revolutions going, and prolonging them.

The upheaval lasted long after the original revolution, until either the food shortages were fixed, or a government came to power that was so brutal that none dared resist, no matter how hungry they were.

Egypt can’t solve its food problem without the help of an outside power. It currently imports around 40 percent of its food. It needs foreign cash to buy the food. But since the revolution, that has dried up. Tourism was one of Egypt’s major businesses, and it has collapsed. The nation has been burning through its foreign currency reserves quickly. In early 2011, the Central Bank of Egypt had $36 billion worth. By the end of March this year that was down to $13.4 billion. At this rate, Egypt can’t last another year. Qatar is helping it stay afloat, but even its funding isn’t assured after this latest revolution.

Last year the government spent $5.5 billion subsidizing food. But its finances are in a mess, and so is the Egyptian economy.

Egypt needs foreign currency badly. With its major industries destroyed by the revolution, giving them less to export, that means it needs help from another country. The International Monetary Fund has offered to step in, but its terms are so harsh that they would probably destroy any government that accepted them.

No matter who comes out on top in the latest coup, Egypt cannot stabilize until its finances and food supply are fixed (unless the army addresses the problem Communist-style and simply uses massive brute force to quell the protests—in spite of widespread starvation). Without that core problem addressed, the new government will be overthrown the same way the old one was.

One of the easiest ways to fix this would be to acquire a foreign patron, as Egypt has done already with Qatar. Or, as Lee Smith suggests in his article for Tablet Magazine, it could try the Napoleon solution. “A short war today—precipitated by a border incident in Sinai, or a missile gone awry in the Gaza Strip, and concluded before the military runs out of the ammunition that Washington will surely not resupply—will reunify the country and earn Egypt money from an international community eager to broker peace,” he writes. “Taking up arms against Israel will also return Egypt to its former place of prominence in an Arab world that is adrift in a sea of blood. But even more important is the fact that there is no other plausible way out: Sacrificing thousands of her sons on the altar of war is the only way to save Mother Egypt from herself.”

He might be right. Israel could be one target. Ethiopia, which is building a dam that further threatens Egypt’s economy, could be another—though it would get far more international support for attacking the Jews.

All this analysis gives us some broad indications of Egypt’s direction: an Islamist state in turmoil and in desperate need for a foreign patron, a reasonably successful war, or both. But biblical prophecy foretells its final destination: an alliance with Iran. Even now, Egypt is much closer to that destination than it was under Mubarak.

There are a number of paths Egypt could take to reach that destination. If Iran found a way to bail out Egypt, it would be richly rewarded. Not only would doing so put Tehran right on the border with its archenemy Israel, but it would also give it control of the Suez Canal and smooth the way for it to influence radical Islam throughout Africa.

There may be other twists and turns as this journey unfolds. But you can be sure of the final outcome. For more information on what the Bible forecasts, see our free booklet The King of the South.