Friday, January 8, 2016

‘We caved’

By Michael Crowley


On a late July day this past summer, a roar filled the sky over Cairo. It was the sound of Barack Obama’s capitulation to a dictator.
Eight new American fighter jets, freshly delivered from Washington, swooped low over the city, F-16s flying in formation. As they banked hard over the city’s center, they trailed plumes of red, white and black smoke—the colors of the Egyptian flag.
For Egypt’s brutally repressive president, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the spectacle was a triumph, symbolizing not only his militaristic power at home, but also his victory over an American president who had tried to punish him before surrendering to the cold realities of geopolitics.
Just two years earlier, Sisi had seized power in a military coup, toppling Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected successor to Hosni Mubarak, himself a strongman of 30 years pushed out in early 2011 by mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the summer of 2013, Sisi followed his coup with a brutal crackdown that would have done Saddam Hussein proud. His security forces arrested thousands of people, including much of his political opposition, and in one bloody day that summer, they gunned down some 1,000 pro-Morsi protesters (or more) who were staging peaceful sit-ins. The massacre was shocking even by the standards of Egypt’s long-dismal human rights record.
Obama was appalled. “We can’t return to business as usual,” he declared after the slaughter. “We have to be very careful about being seen as aiding and abetting actions that we think run contrary to our values and ideals.”
Several weeks later, Obama halted the planned delivery of U.S. military hardware to Cairo, including attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles and several F-16 fighter jets, as well as $260 million in cash transfers. He also cast doubt on the future of America’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt—a subsidy on which Cairo depends heavily, and much more than the United States sends to any country in the world aside from Israel.
But a fierce internal debate soon broke out over whether and how to sanction Egypt further, a fight that many officials told me was one of the most agonizing of the Obama administration’s seven years, as the president’s most powerful advisers spent months engaged in what one called “trench warfare” against each other. It was an excruciating test of how to balance American values with its cold-blooded security interests in an age of terrorism. Some of Obama’s top White House aides, including his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, and the celebrated human rights champion Samantha Power, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urged the president to link further military aid to clear progress by Sisi on human rights and democracy. But Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Hagel’s successor, Ash Carter, argued for restoring the aid. Trying to punish Sisi would have little effect on his behavior, they said, while alienating a bulwark against Islamic radicalism in an imploding Middle East. “Egypt was one of the most significant policy divides between the White House and the State Department and the Department of Defense,” says Matthew Spence, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.
For months, Obama tried to split the difference. In meetings and phone calls with the Egyptian ruler, by now paranoid and resentful about America’s intentions, Obama and Kerry urged Sisi to respect human rights, while also seeking his help in countering the the metastisizing Islamic State in nearby Syria and Iraq. Sisi did little of either.
In the end, Obama folded. This past March, he called Sisi once again, this time to explain that he would release the cash transfers and delayed hardware—including the F-16s—and end the administration’s threats to block the larger $1.3 billion annual aid package.
“We caved,” says a former senior administration official who participated in the debates.
* * *
In a long conversation recently, Rhodes, the speechwriter turned national security aide who has been with Obama from the beginning of his presidency, didn’t mince words when it came to the years-long internal battle over Egypt. “We’re in that sweet spot where everyone is pissed off at us,” Rhodes told me.
And not just about Egypt. The persistent problem of how to deal with American-allied strongmen has long tripped up a president who prefers pragmatic solutions to moral purity but has been unable to find much of either in the Middle East. While every U.S. president struggles to balance values like democracy and human rights with national security, Obama has struggled more than most because of the vast gap between his inspirational rhetoric and the compromises he has made with thuggish world leaders, especially—but by no means exclusively—in a Middle East where authoritarian heads of state from Riyadh to Cairo have cracked down with renewed vigor after the unsettling protests of the Arab Spring.
“The rhetoric got way ahead of the policymaking,” says Michael Posner, who served as Obama’s top State Department official for human rights and democracy in his first term. “It … raised expectations that everything was going to change.”
He’s never quite melded his rhetoric with his policies,” says Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top Middle East aide in his first term. Adds Robert Ford, who was Obama’s ambassador to Syria before resigning in frustration over the president’s policy there: “It seems like we are swinging back to the idea that we must make a choice between supporting dictators or being safe.”
Their views were echoed in many of more than two dozen recent interviews with current and former administration officials, members of Congress, experts and activists—interviews that revealed a striking degree of frustration and disillusionment. Many Obama supporters started out believing that the president had grand ambitions for replacing George W. Bush’s militaristic posture with a more enlightened and progressive approach to the world before coming to believe they had misread a president who was not the idealistic internationalist they had thought he was.
In hindsight, it seems clear that Obama came to office far more focused on showing the world that the Bush era was over than on any coherent strategy of his own for advancing human rights or democracy.
But it didn’t seem that way at the time: Obama’s aides entered the White House full of plans for “dignity promotion”—a favorite phrase of Power’s meant to signal a contrast with Bush’s post-9/11 talk of “democracy promotion” and his second-term “Freedom Agenda” that many came to equate not with Bush’s lofty goal of “ending tyranny in our world” but with imposing Western values on countries like Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint.
Obama’s early rhetoric as president suggested a real shift, the hopes for which were reflected in his remarkable receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office; in accepting the award, he acknowledged the struggle of protesters and democrats everywhere. When Obama went to Egypt in June 2009, he gave an address to the Muslim world at Cairo University in which many heard an inspiring celebration of universal values. Freedom, justice, honest government: “These are not just American ideas; they are human rights,” Obama said. “And that is why we will support them everywhere.”
* * *
Early in Obama’s first term, at the president’s urging, his aides spent long hours strategizing about how to do that. They debated esoteric questions like how to prioritize the three D’s of democracy, development and, Power’s hobbyhorse, dignity. Rhodes, who wrote Obama’s Cairo speech, emerged early as an idealistic thinker who wanted to see American values advanced in peaceful ways. Gray-haired national security veterans on Obama’s team, notably including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, serving his fourth president, found the thirtysomething aides like Rhodes and Power dangerously naive.
One product of those early discussions was Presidential Study Directive 11, an 18-page document distributed to federal agencies in August 2010 that foreshadowed the Arab Spring. It warned that “the region is entering a critical period of transition” thanks to “growing citizen discontent” with authoritarian regimes. Obama administration officials were instructed to “manage these risks” by demonstrating “the gradual but real prospect of greater political openness and improved governance.”
The slow-moving American bureaucracy was still digesting the directive when mass protests erupted across the Arab world in late 2010. By February 2011, Tunisia’s dictator had been toppled and huge crowds filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanding Mubarak’s ouster. Suddenly, Obama was facing a dramatic real-time test of his ideals. He was naturally inclined to side with young, Internet-savvy protesters against an 82-year-old dictator who ran a cruel police state. But Mubarak was also a longtime U.S. ally who opposed Islamic radicals, honored a peace treaty with Israel and gave the Pentagon vital access to the Suez Canal. Younger aides like Rhodes, Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them, in her memoir, as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.” She, along with other elders like Gates and then-national security adviser Tom Donilon, warned of unintended consequences. Gates recalled the way Jimmy Carter withdrew his support for the embattled Shah of Iran only to see the fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini hijack Iran’s 1979 revolution. Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, would listen to Rhodes in White House meetings and wonder what he really knew about Egypt.
But Rhodes’ camp carried the day. Obama told Mubarak he had to go, and on February 11 the Egyptian stepped down. Afterward, a group of White House aides—including Rhodes and Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser and now Obama’s chief of staff—gathered for an impromptu party in the office of Michael McFaul, Obama’s top Russia aide. They celebrated the historic moment with beer and vodka. “It was a euphoric night for us, no doubt,” says McFaul. But his academic background in democracy issues gave him an understanding of the many ways things might go wrong. Amid the celebration, he recalls, “I was nervous as hell.”
He was right to be. Egypt would soon reveal the perils of swift democratic change in a stunted society. A June 2012 democratic election produced a new president in Morsi, a leader of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Obama cautiously embraced Morsi at first but grew alarmed as the Egyptian consolidated power and began his presidency by provoking a power struggle with the judiciary in his first month. Many Egyptians who applauded Obama for nudging out Mubarak were furious at his support for Morsi. Clinton discovered this firsthand on a July 2012 visit to Cairo, when protesters pelted her motorcade with tomatoes. In June, her senior aide Jake Sullivan emailed Clinton a news article about Morsi’s embrace of September 11 conspiracy theories. “You’ll love this one: Morsi is a 9/11 denier,” Sullivan wrote. The subtext was that Clinton had seen it coming.
By the summer of 2013, huge crowds were back in Tahrir Square, this time calling for Morsi’s ouster. Sisi, Egypt’s top general, soon made his move, announcing an interim government. Appearing on television in his tan military uniform festooned with medals, he grimly vowed to lead a process of “national reconciliation.”
Obama’s team scrambled to respond. It didn’t help that Sisi’s takeover occurred on Susan Rice’s third day as national security adviser. Or that the next day was the Fourth of July. (Obama presided over a Situation Room meeting in a short-sleeved shirt and khakis.)
Which was the right side of history now, the president must have wondered. Supporting a military coup would hardly send a positive message about democracy. But declaring Sisi’s power grab a coup would, by law, cut off all U.S. military aid to Cairo. So be it, argued Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wrote in the Washington Post: “we may pay a short-term price by standing up for our democratic values, but it is in our long-term national interest to do so.” Obama wasn’t prepared to go that far. The administration publicly danced around the word “coup” for weeks until, at an August 6, 2013, briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki memorably announced: “We have determined that we do not have to make a determination.” (“What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”)
Then came the August 14 massacre of a thousand pro-Morsi protesters, the bloody apex of a broader political crackdown and an event that forced Obama, then vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, into a firmer response. He first canceled U.S. military exercises with Egypt; then, on October 9, he announced the partial military aid freeze, pending “credible progress” toward free elections and a “democratically elected civilian government.” Critics argued that Obama had only put a symbolic dent in aid to Egypt. But the reaction in Cairo was furious. “You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that,” Sisi told the Washington Post.
But that was just the beginning of the internal fight. By then, Clinton had been replaced by Kerry, who declared a few weeks after the coup that Egypt’s generals were “restoring democracy” to the country and quickly worked to reverse the aid freeze. Kerry had an ally in Hagel, who had developed a relationship with Egypt’s top general. Both men believed they could moderate Sisi’s behavior. “Kerry thinks he can get guys to do things because they trust him, even if it’s not necessarily in their interest,” says one former State Department official. Hagel sent Sisi Ron Chernow’s 904-page biography of George Washington, urging him to read a chapter about Washington peacefully relinquishing the presidency.
As they lobbied the White House, both Cabinet secretaries heard from Sunni Arab allies who insisted Sisi was saving Egypt from radicalism. Likening Egypt to a patient on an operating table, they argued that democracy and human rights had to take a back seat to the urgent task of stabilizing the country. The Egyptians even told Pentagon officials that they no longer wanted to speak with the White House, where officials like Rhodes and Power supported punishing their thuggish behavior.
At times, the internal disagreement seemed to go public. Kerry in particular prompted no little eye-rolling at the National Security Council with his off-message suggestions that things in Egypt were not so bad. During a June 2014 visit to Cairo, Kerry emerged from a 90-minute meeting with Sisi and said the Egyptian “gave me a very strong sense of his commitment” to human rights issues. “I am confident that we will be able to ultimately get the full amount of aid,” Kerry said.
The following day, an Egyptian court convicted three reporters from Al Jazeera’s English-language TV news network on political charges. Just weeks later, Amnesty International reported that “rampant torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions” had led to an overall “catastrophic decline in human rights” in Egypt. In May, an Egyptian court sentenced Morsi to death. Two weeks later, Sisi was officially “elected” Egypt’s president with a reported 96.1 percent of the vote.
* * *
The latest annual report of Freedom House, a nonprofit that tracks democracy and rights worldwide, tells an unhappy story. Rising authoritarianism from Asia to Latin America made for “a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014.” That made 2014 just like every other year of the Obama presidency: The group’s freedom index has seen a net decline each year since 2006. Most recently, Freedom House found that authoritarian rulers worldwide “increasingly flout democratic values, argue for the superiority of what amounts to one-party rule, and seek to throw off the constraints of fundamental diplomatic principles.”
Some of the worst offenders are nations with which Obama regularly does business, including China, whose president, Xi Jinping, Obama has sought to befriend even as the Chinese leader conducts what activists call a political crackdown unseen since Tiananmen Square. In Turkey, a NATO ally where the U.S. operates a major air base that it uses, in part, to strike the Islamic State in Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has smothered dissent (a Turkish physician is on trial for posting photos online that likened Erdogan to the reptilian Lord of the Rings character Gollum), and Erdogan recently completed a $350 million palace symbolizing his bloated power. Obama’s relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin may be frosty since Putin’s land grab in neighboring Ukraine, but Obama has said little about Putin’s political repression at home.
A special case is Uzbekistan, an ex-Soviet republic in Central Asia ruled for almost 25 years by Islam Karimov, considered one of the world’s toughest dictators. But Karimov enjoys a strategic location next to Afghanistan, and in Putin’s orbit. Which might explain why Obama placed a phone call to Karimov in September 2011, pledging “to build broad cooperation,” according to the White House, while reminding him that “advancing democracy” would make his country more prosperous and secure. This past March, Uzbek democracy delivered Karimov to a new five-year term—with 90 percent of the vote. In the fall, Kerry called on Karimov in Samarkand. After their two-hour private meeting, a State Department official told reporters that Kerry had told Karimov that “more needs to be done” about human rights. Karimov said he would think about it.
Obama is hardly the first president to do business with Karimov or his ilk. What’s more striking about Obama’s record is not the individual embarrassing tradeoffs between, say, an access route to Afghanistan and the need to deal with the tyrant who sits astride it. Rather, it is that much of his de-emphasis of democracy and human rights, it turns out, is not about necessity but by design.
Consider that Obama has not invested heavily in the government’s traditional democracy promotion efforts. By the end of 2014, according to Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, U.S. spending on pro-democracy programs had shrunk by 28 percent under Obama, to less than $2 billion per year.
That may be a logical outgrowth of Obama’s conclusion that those programs didn’t work—or may have even invited the current backlash, as Rhodes argued in our interview. Russia is a case in point. Bush emphatically supported pro-Western democratic movements in the republic of Georgia and in Ukraine. Imagining himself next to be targeted for overthrow, Putin wound up invading both countries. He also created an aggressive propaganda machine featuring the Orwellian English-language network RT, which, among other things, promotes the false claim that Kyiv’s March 2014 Maidan revolution was funded by billions in U.S. dollars. “That took years to set up,” Rhodes said of RT. “And they did it because they thought they were under threat from the Freedom Agenda.”
Obama’s legacy is sure to be defined in partby his strategy of engaging with repressive regimes to change, rather than undermine, them. His bet is that opened economic and political doors will gradually liberalize their closed societies—even if it takes a decade or more. This is the foreign policy version of Obama’s “long game” theory of politics.
Rhodes has been at the center of this effort. In 2014, he was among a few aides who made secret trips to Canada and the Vatican to discuss with Cuban officials the restoration of diplomatic ties with Havana. In October, Rhodes traveled to Myanmar, where he met with the country’s Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and warned the country’s military leaders to respect the results of a looming election. It’s an unlikely portfolio for someone who started at the White House as a 31-year-old wordsmith. But Rhodes “plays the leading role in engagement with these autocratic regimes,” says McFaul.
To critics with a dim view of Rhodes—John McCain once derided him as a “political hack”—his involvement just underscores the folly of Obama’s dances with devils. They point out that when Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in July, he required only modest concessions from the Castro regime, such as the release of a few dozen political prisoners and the promise of broader Internet access, and that the Cuban government continues to make large numbers of political arrests—more than 1,000 in October alone, according to one independent tally. But Obama feels that sanctions and subversion are dead ends. “A good portion of our democracy funding ends up in the hands of the Cuban government,” says one senior administration official. “The old model just doesn’t work in some places anymore.”
Myanmar is a similar story. In July 2012, Obama agreed to end sanctions and recognize its military-led government, perhaps best known for brutalizing saffron-robed Buddhist monks who revolted against it in 2007. Obama’s November 2012 visit to the country was the first by a U.S. president. More recently, the Burmese regime has stalled political reforms, waged new political crackdowns and created an epic refugee crisis by persecuting its ethnic Rohingya minority.
But Rhodes argues that the overall trend is positive. He notes that Aung San Suu Kyi won the country’s November election in a landslide and that the military is honoring the result. (The story is far from over, however: The junta protects a constitutional provision that prevents Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president and reserves seats for itself in parliament.) “Shifting from simply lecturing to engaging got us in the door in a way that made a profound difference,” Rhodes says.
Then there is Iran. Bush refused to deal with Iran, denouncing it in his 2006 State of the Union address as a nation “held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people.” He even implicitly called for revolution there, imploring Iranians to “choose your own future and win your own freedom.” To that end he established an Iran Democracy Fund, with a budget of as much as $66 million, to support the country’s political opposition.
Obama came to office determined to engage, not overthrow, Iran’s regime. The Iran Democracy Fund is no more; it has been renamed the Near East Regional Democracy Program, and Obama’s budget requests have shrunk by nearly a quarter. When mass protests erupted across Iran in June 2009, Obama mostly held his tongue. (The opposition Green Movement was brutally crushed and has never been reconstituted. Clinton has since said she regrets that the administration didn’t offer the Greens more encouragement.) The nuclear talks that culminated in last year’s deal also excluded questions like human rights and political reform, although Obama has expressed hope that they may begin a diplomatic thaw that could gradually liberalize Iranian society.
“If Burma continues its progress, and Cuba and Iran open up years from now, people will see this set of engagements as transformational,” says Jeremy Weinstein, who handled democracy issues on the National Security Council from 2009 to 2011. “It’s not clear that opening up very closed societies can happen in a purely oppositional frame where we say: We’re not going to engage their government, we are only going to engage their civil society.” (Weinstein notes that democracy is a potential outgrowth of the Iran nuclear deal but not its objective.)
Conservatives call that a disastrous miscalculation. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who more than any Republican running for president this year has emphasized values in foreign policy, charges that Obama lacks a “moral” foreign policy, and Rubio likes to pledge that he will invite Cuban, Iranian and Chinese dissidents to his inauguration. “President Obama has made no such effort to stand on the side of freedom,” Rubio said in July. “He has been quick to deal with the oppressors, but slow to deal with the oppressed.”
“What’s missing in the Obama administration is the clear moral argument that this is an evil regime” in Iran, says Elliott Abrams, a Bush White House aide who worked on the Middle East and democracy. “We ought to be clearer that of course we want regime change.”
But even within the Republican party, the Rubio-Abrams view is far from gospel. In a December 15 GOP debate, Texas Senator Ted Cruz bashed Rubio for supporting Obama’s efforts to oust Mubarak, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi and Syrian president Bashar Assad, saying that, whatever their sins, they were clamping down on Islamic terrorists in their countries.
“Instead of being a Woodrow Wilson democracy promoter, we ought to be hunting down our enemies,” Cruz said.
* * *
It was a bold declaration: the start of what Obama called “a new chapter” in America’s approach to the Middle East and North Africa.
At that moment, in May 2011, the region looked like a budding success story for Obama. Popular uprisings threatened tyrants from Tripoli to Damascus. U.S. troops were exiting a stabilized Iraq, Al Qaeda was on the run and Googling “ISIS” would lead you to a Washington think tank.
In a speech delivered from the unusual setting of the State Department, Obama sought to catch the rising wave of the Arab Spring. Throwing himself behind the protesters, Obama said the U.S. would now “promote reform across the region” and “support transitions to democracy.” After decades of fixating on a handful of “core interests,” like defending Israel and fighting terrorism, Obama said, it was time for a new focus on values like free speech, freedom of religion and women’s rights. “Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest,” Obama said, calling it “a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions.” These were not throwaway lines. One former administration official called it “the most hotly litigated speech” he had ever seen.
Few of those concrete actions ever came. The bureaucracy was partly unsure about how to implement Obama’s vision and partly unwilling to do so. Even though Clinton joined the call—saying a few months later that “the greatest single source of instability in today’s Middle East is not the demand for change. It is the refusal to change”—the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs showed little appetite for following through. The same held for a Pentagon mindful of assets like its giant air base in Qatar and the Fifth Fleet’s base in Bahrain.
Obama “never demonstrated leadership to bring about changes in policy,” says Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy. “His heart wasn’t in it.”
Before long, the Arab Spring took an ugly turn that changed the way Obama thought about the Middle East. By the fall of 2013, Syria had plunged into a sectarian civil war. Post-Qadhafi Libya slid toward anarchy, along with Al Qaeda-infested Yemen. And Egypt was in endless crisis. That September, Obama spoke at the annual United Nations General Assembly. His speech acknowledged that democratic transitions in the Middle East had been painful, especially in Egypt, which he said underscored a “larger point: The United States will at times work with governments that do not meet, at least in our view, the highest international expectations, but who work with us on our core interests.”
“The administration was overwhelmed by dramatic setbacks in places like Syria, Libya and Egypt and couldn’t make headway on human rights,” Posner says.
Several months later, in July 2014, Tom Malinowski, a former Human Rights Watch official who had succeeded the disillusioned Posner as Obama’s top State Department official for human rights and democracy, traveled to Bahrain. Things had been tense in the tiny oil-rich kingdom since March 2011, when its Sunni monarchy—aided by troops from neighboring Sunni Saudi Arabia—used force to clear peaceful Shiite-dominated protests. Mindful that Bahrain hosts the 5,000 sailors and Marines of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, Obama was far more tempered in his reaction than he had been after crackdowns in Syria and Libya, while Clinton called for “calm and restraint on all sides” in a very lopsided confrontation. That fall, amid concerns that Bahrain had used U.S.-supplied arms against protesters, Obama halted the sale of weapons to the country—although a few months later, he allowed other purchases, including Cobra helicopters, to proceed.
Still, Malinowski was not exactly a welcome guest in the kingdom. As an official at Human Rights Watch, he had criticized Obama’s decision to restore some arms sales as shortsighted. And the Bahrainis had shown they could play tough with Americans; Ludovic Hood, a human rights specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Manama, was withdrawn after a pro-government website accused him of fomenting protests. (The site called on “honest people to avenge” Hood’s actions, noting that he and his wife, whom it named, were “of Jewish origin.”) Even so, there was nothing especially provocative about Malinowski’s visit to an evening reception at the headquarters of a Shiite opposition group. But it was enough for Bahrain’s foreign ministry to order that he leave the country immediately on the grounds he had “intervened flagrantly in Bahrain’s internal affairs.” Malinowski first learned of his expulsion via Twitter. He was on a plane home the next day. Several foreign policy experts—including Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former top Clinton State Department official—wrote to Susan Rice urging a thorough review of the U.S.-Bahrain relationship and a halt to all arms sales and suspension of visas for Bahraini officials in the United States until Bahrain apologized. The apology never came. The State Department’s Psaki condemned the ejection, even while noting that “our strong relationship with Bahrain is, of course, something that … we want to maintain.” In June—shortly after Bahrain’s king skipped an important Arab leader summit at Camp David for the Royal Windsor Horse Show—Obama lifted the arms ban.
Rhodes made little apology for that outcome, though he sounded exasperated: “Try actually working in government, and find out how hard it is to recognize the need to stand up to Iranian actions and shore up our Gulf partners while taking a strong and forceful approach in terms of pressuring the government of Bahrain at the same time.”
That dance has been even harder with Bahrain’s far more powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia. Relations have been notably cool with Washington, and Obama has, at times, publicly hinted at a belief that the Saudis and their Gulf neighbors must reform or face revolt. In an April interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the president said Arab monarchies have alienated young populations with few good job prospects and “no legitimate political outlets for grievances.” He warned that their focus on Tehran’s regional influence misses a larger danger: “I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. … That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”
But there’s scant evidence Obama has tried to have it. After the Saudi government executed 47 accused terrorists, including the prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, in early January, Obama officials were privately appalled. They believed the death sentences made a mockery of due judicial process, and also foolishly infuriated Shiite Iran. But the White House and State Department declined to condemn the executions publicly.

* * *
“I am not persuaded,” Barack Obama said. “I want to hear the arguments.”
It was late March 2015, and Obama’s national security team had convened in the White House’s Situation Room for yet another meeting about restoring military aid to Egypt. Kerry had continued to drive the point hard, to the point of irritating Rice and other White House officials with public comments that suggested Sisi was making progress toward democracy when that clearly was not the case.
By then it had become increasingly clear that Obama’s leverage over Sisi was painfully limited. Withholding aid had brought almost no change in the Egyptian’s behavior. “It really was a question about, bottom line, what works. And that was the nature of the debate. I don’t recall anyone saying it’s unimportant for Egypt to have political freedom or to be a representative democracy,” says Spence, the former Pentagon official. “And that’s hard, because we don’t have a good track record of knowing what works and what doesn’t.”
“The fairly clear conclusion was that the suspension of assistance was doing more to retard our progress on human rights and democracy than it was helping,” says Prem Kumar, a former top Obama National Security Council aide for the Middle East and North Africa.
Taking the other side with vigor was Power, by then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who argued that both morality and pragmatism demanded at least limiting the aid. What foreign leader will change his thuggish behavior if he sees that Washington never really enforces its values?
One attendee said that, in the end, Obama seemed convinced by his ambassador to Cairo, Robert Beecroft. Beecroft argued that there were real limits to Sisi’s power—including over a judiciary quick to issue draconian punishments against political opponents.
That was enough for Obama. The aid would be restored. One attendee described a sense of weary resignation in the room.
“This gets at the president’s core thing,” says Rhodes of the Egypt decision. “We don’t do things that don’t work just so that we feel pure. And there is an element of realism to that, but there is also an element of pragmatism.”
On March 31, Obama called Sisi to tell him he would get the F-16s and the rest of his money and weapons. There was a new condition: Egypt could no longer borrow from its future annual aid payments to buy expensive weapons, thereby locking in hard-to-cancel long-term defense contracts. It was something.
In May, the State Department sent a report to Congress acknowledging the obvious: “While Egypt has implemented parts of its ‘democracy roadmap,’ the overall trajectory of rights and democracy has been negative.” It also noted that Sisi’s government had arrested 16,000 people since his July 2013 takeover. Nevertheless, the report concluded that “it is important to the national security interests of the United States to provide assistance to Egypt.” As Sarah Margon, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, put it: ‘“We are back to building a relationship with someone who is more aggressive than Mubarak was.”
And so the jets flew over Cairo. Sisi had won. Democracy would have to wait.

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