“The phase of diplomatic efforts has ended,” Adly Mansour, the interim Egyptian President, said in a statement Wednesday. He was referring to efforts to get the supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the deposed President, to give up and go home. No big surprise; there was never going to be any compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been staging sit-ins in Cairo while Morsi is being held incommunicado. Mansour’s statement, which said that the Brotherhood was “fully responsible for the failure of these efforts and the subsequent events that may result,” was taken as a sign that in the next few days it seems very likely that their protests will be forcibly dispersed and there will be more blood on the streets. Despite this, the Brotherhood gathered again in large numbers on Friday.

The Brotherhood and the Egyptian Military are old foes—one the Islamist outsider, the other the deep state with guns. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928; it has been at the forefront of every moment of political change since and has lost out at almost every turn. Their relationship with the army has been swing-door, trap-door: periods of rapprochement and negotiation followed by crackdowns and arrests.

As much as the coup-revolution of July 3rd was reminiscent of Mubarak’s fall two years earlier—millions in the streets calling for the removal of the President; the army stepping in to oblige—it also echoed 1954 when Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had courted the Brotherhood for their support in a putsch against the king two years earlier, seized the Presidency from General Muhammad Naguib, cancelled promised elections, and used an assassination attempt to round up all the Islamists and put them in prison.

Prison is also where many of the Brotherhood’s leaders were during the eighteen days that brought down Mubarak. Even as they were escaping, the Brotherhood leadership was negotiating with the army. (That escape is now the subject of an apparently politically motivated criminal investigation of Morsi.) In the chaotic aftermath—through parliamentary and Presidential elections and countless protests on Tahrir—the Brotherhood continued to make backroom deals. They used their victories at the polls as leverage, but they never fully connected or identified with the revolutionaries on the streets. The only time the Brotherhood called its members for a sit-in on Tahrir (more often, they told their members to stay away from protests) was when a run-off election between Morsi and Ahmed Shafik, former head of the Air Force and Mubarak’s last-ditch Prime Minister, hung in the balance. The Army, perhaps pressured by the Americans, abided by Morsi’s victory and bided their time. And the Brotherhood understood their fifty-one-per-cent majority as a mandate to rule.

The Brotherhood is right when they condemn Morsi’s ouster as a coup; they are right, too, that his Presidency was sabotaged by the feloul—remnants of the old regime—ministries that refused to implement his policies, and businessmen who organized a fake petrol shortage to discredit him. But the Brotherhood’s great failing is that it relied on a culture of Islam and never really developed a political ideology or philosophy. In the absence of any ideas, Morsi, an uncharismatic backroom guy at the best of times, seems to have copied the only example he knew: Mubarak’s. He tended to rule by decree—pushing for a constitutional referendum, appointing Brotherhood people to key positions, arresting journalists for insulting the Presidency.

For all their entrenched enmity, over the years the Army and the Brotherhood have grown as parallel organizations; they’re both hierarchical, secretive, and dependent on the obedience of their members. Politics, as is often said, is the art of compromise. But this is not a word in either organization’s lexicon. Faced with millions of Egyptians in the streets, Morsi kept thumping his fist on the table and shouting, “Legitimacy!” There was a moment when a compromise, however unfair or distasteful it may have seemed, might have worked, but it would have meant, among other things, holding new elections ahead of schedule. And he refused.

Morsi stood his ground as a democratically elected President. But, despite elections, Egypt is still in revolution. The aspirations for a fair, clean, and transparent government, for reforms of the judiciary and police, and for social justice have not begun to be addressed. As SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, discovered when they were running the country after Mubarak’s fall, it is not enough to appoint new people (your people) to governorships and ministries or to write something on a piece of paper and call it a Constitution.

General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Minister of Defense, enjoys financial support from the Gulf and a resurgent nationalist populism in the streets. For many Egyptians, his promise to press the re-start button on a political process that has been so incoherent and messy over the past two and a half years is welcome. The Army overreached itself politically during Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi’s brief rule while he was thr chairman of SCAF; Tahrir roiled with anger at the Army’s high-handed efforts to control the constitutional process and get rid of pesky protests; it remains to be seen how long the popular honeymoon with el-Sisi lasts.

For the past weeks Morsi has been held out of communication, without charges, in an undisclosed location; many senior Brotherhood leaders have been arrested; hundreds of Egyptians have been killed at their sit-ins and protests in Nasser City and around the country. Now the only choice Morsi has is to surrender and concede to the coup makers and to reality. The senior Brotherhood members still at large have said the organization won’t negotiate with a gun to its head. But they have few bargaining chips and, apparently, no plan except defiance. They are sitting, hundreds of thousands of them, at a crossroad in Nasser City. They have all the right to and principle of democracy and the ballot box on their side, but they have lost.

Adly Mansour, right, and Defense Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, left, stand during a ceremony at a military base east of Cairo, Egypt. Photograph by Sherif Abd El Minoem/AP.