On February 11, 2011, shortly after 3 P.M., President Obama stepped before a microphone in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had just resigned after weeks of mass protests, in Tahrir Square and nationwide, and a final nudge from the White House. “There are few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place,” Obama said. “This is one of those times.” He compared the peaceful overthrow of Mubarak—who had been the centerpiece of U.S. policy in the Arab world for three decades—to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gandhi’s civil disobedience against British colonialism.
“The wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights,” Obama said. Two months later, Mubarak was detained on allegations of corruption, embezzlement, abuse of power, and negligence for failing to stop the killing of hundreds of peaceful protesters. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The wheel of history is now turning, at an equally blinding pace, in reverse. Mubarak was freed last month; he returned to his mansion in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. His two sons and other Mubarak-era officials, also jailed for corruption, are free now, too. On Monday, President Trump hosted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the former field marshal who orchestrated a military coup, in 2013, against Mubarak’s successor. In 2014, Sisi ran for President and won. Since then, he has amassed a far worse record on human rights than Mubarak had. The annual State Department Human Rights Report, released last month, faults Sisi’s regime for arbitrary arrests, “unlawful killings and torture,” politically motivated trial verdicts, “enforced disappearances” of dissidents, and restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly, the media, and civil liberties. Obama refused to invite Sisi to Washington for just those reasons.
In contrast, Trump invited Sisi into the Oval Office, where, on Monday, as they sat next to each other before the press, Trump said, “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President El-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.” He added, “You have a great friend and ally in the United States and in me,” and then reached out his hand toward Sisi. They shook hands warmly for the cameras.
The first tangible steps in Trump’s Middle East policy are taking shape in his visits, this week, not just with Sisi but also with Jordan’s King Abdullah; last month, he met with Saudi Arabia’s powerful young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The President wants to foster a bloc among often fractious Sunni leaders to counter the influence of Shiite Iran, take a larger role politically and physically in fighting extremism, and help navigate peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
“The closest U.S. allies in the Middle East—apart from Israel—are Sunni countries,” an Administration official told me this week. “Strengthening those relationships is certainly something that this Administration wants to do.” The goal is to help Sunni regimes assume greater responsibility in shaping the future of the world’s most volatile region.
Trump’s strategy could, however, rejuvenate the old authoritarian order of sclerotic autocrats and impervious monarchies in the Middle East. These days, a common lament among Sunnis themselves is that they lack a vision, an ideology, or a leader to guide them out of the deepening morass from North Africa to the Gulf. Bitter rivalries for regional influence run deep, even among Sunni sheikhdoms that have oil wealth and share regional security challenges.
The sense of political fatigue and dysfunction was captured in a literal and symbolic way at an important Arab League summit in Jordan last week. A quarter of the assembled heads of state, all in their seventies or eighties, were photographed sleeping. The Emir of Kuwait’s mouth was agape. The Palestinian Authority President’s head had fallen on his chest. The President of Yemen was slumped in his chair. The President of Djibouti’s head was atilt. Pictures went viral on social media.
A broader danger is that the Trump strategy—designed at the National Security Council, with almost no input from the State Department—could backfire. “We have traditionally acted in the Middle East in defense of interests and principles. We’ve never explicitly aligned ourselves with a bloc defined in religious terms,” Tom Malinowski, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2014 to 2017, told me. “It’s another thing to create the impression that we are aligning with Sunnis against Shiites—that we are effectively taking sides in a civilizational battle.”
Trump’s embrace of Sisi does follow a pattern of American leaders looking to Egypt—which accounts for a quarter of the Arab world’s four hundred million people—as the linchpin of Middle East policy. Results have been mixed. “Both Obama and George W. Bush came into office saying Egypt is important,” Michele Dunne, an Egypt expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “Both soon figured out that Egypt’s internal problems and mismanagement hindered its effectiveness as a regional ally, and was even becoming a problem for the United States and its interests. I think Trump is going to figure out the same thing about Egypt.”
Despite Sisi’s military history, his campaign against an Islamic State affiliate in the Sinai has only intensified in the past three years. In 2015, ISIS bombed a Russian Metrojet flight from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all onboard. Last week, it released a twenty-five-minute (http://www.madamasr.com/en/2017/03/29/news/u/province-of-sinai-militants-release-footage-of-religious-policing-in-north-sinai/) of beheadings, raids, and the desecration of graves. It has also targeted Coptic Christians.
“Sisi has refused to take advice from the Pentagon to adopt counterinsurgency tactics instead of simply blasting away with weapons and alienating the local population,” Malinowski said. He called Egypt a “dysfunctional state that sees U.S. assistance as an entitlement, not as something that obligates partnership or reciprocity on anything, domestic or regional.” Washington has given Egypt some seventy billion dollars in aid—mostly for military equipment—since it made peace with Israel, in the late seventies.
In the past week, the Trump Administration has publicly rolled back three other tenets of Obama’s Middle East policy. The White House formally abandoned the call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down—as demanded by the Syrian opposition—to end the six-year war. “With respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept,” Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Friday.
Since Assad unleashed security forces on his own people, more than four hundred thousand Syrians have been killed. Five million have fled Syria altogether; another six million are displaced from their homes inside the country, according to World Vision. Half of all children are out of school, and more than thirteen million people rely on humanitarian aid for daily subsistence. On Tuesday, at least fifty people, including children, were killed in a chemical-weapons attack in northern Syria that the White House blamed on the Assad regime. Spicer said the White House condemned the attack, but told reporters that “these heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the last Administration’s weakness and irresolution.”
The Administration has made clear it is not interested in regime change. “Do we think he's a hindrance? Yes. Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out? No,” U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said of Assad last week. "What we are going to focus on is putting the pressure in there so that we can start to make a change in Syria." The Administration’s foremost priority, Spicer said, is “counterterrorism, particularly the defeat of ISIS.”
The Administration has also formally backed the creation of safe zones inside Syria—redubbed “interim de-escalation areas”—that the Obama Administration ultimately rejected, because of the complexity of protecting them and creating an infrastructure to house and support tens of thousands of people—or more. The zones will be discussed with King Abdullah on Wednesday, a senior Administration official told reporters on Friday. U.S. officials are now developing options, he said, to “provide security, safety, and humanitarian access” for displaced people, as well as encouraging refugees outside the country to return. It may be a tough sell, even in the event of a sustained ceasefire, for refugees fearful of giving up security outside the country to return to live under Assad’s rule.
The White House has also made clear during the past week that upholding human rights is no longer a priority. The State Department told Congress that it would lift human-rights conditions that had been imposed by the Obama Administration on Bahrain to facilitate a multi-billion-dollar sale of F-16 warplanes and other military equipment. The tiny island nation, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, is ruled by a Sunni royal family that has engaged in a crackdown on its Shiite majority.
President Obama made human rights a central theme of his famous speech in Cairo, in 2009, two years before the Arab Spring uprising. Under Sisi, at least forty thousand political activists have been detained, according to human-rights groups. Among them is Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American who founded the Belady Foundation for Street Children. She was arrested in 2014, and tried for using children in street protests and human trafficking. On Friday, a senior Administration official said that the Trump Administration’s “approach is to handle these types of sensitive issues in a private, more discreet way.” He refused to respond to questions about Hijazi.