July 3, 2013 marked the end of Egypt’s post-revolutionary democratic transition. Following three days of massive nationwide protests calling for the resignation of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, the Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, ousted the government in a military coup restoring the system of military rule that Egyptians had cast off during the 2011 revolution. What are the factors that conspired to bring this counterrevolution about? Contrary to some of the early accounts of this period, I propose that the counterrevolution in Egypt was not preordained either by the strength and ambition of its military or by the weakness of its civil society. I propose instead that the counterrevolution was a contingent outcome brought about by the intersection of three dynamics: 1) the hesitation and caution of Egypt’s military generals, 2) the fracturing of the revolutionary coalition into two competing camps, and 3) the ambivalence of foreign allies towards the democratic project. Egypt’s generals were scarred by their experience ruling the country directly in 2011, and had little appetite to return to power once they handed it off to civilians in 2012. Instead, the military was “pulled” into action by the secular wing of the revolutionary coalition, who turned against the Morsi government after the November 2012 constitutional declaration. Despite a number of rapprochement initiatives, several of which nearly succeeded, these secular parties and movements decided ultimately that they were better off calling on the military to remove Morsi than trying to resist him through the formal political process. Their support removed a major risk factor that had been holding Egypt’s generals back: the risk of popular backlash and a “re-running” of the 2011 revolution. Finally, though major foreign powers officially expressed support for Morsi’s government, these states, particularly the United States, were actually deeply ambivalent about the prospects of democracy in Egypt. Several members of the Obama administration quietly communicated that a coup was unlikely to be punished with a decisive diplomatic response, removing a second major risk factor that had been giving Egypt’s generals caution. The analysis is based on over one hundred interviews with Egyptian activists and politicians, as well as foreign diplomats, conducted between June 2016 and February 2019. The findings have important implications for our understanding of counterrevolution and democratic consolidation, pointing to the centrality of coercive, coalitional, and diplomatic factors in shaping these outcomes.