Vladimir Putin’s visit to Egypt this week just pulled Cairo deeper into Moscow’s sphere of influence.
While the Obama team tilts at windmills, the Russian president is well on his way to reversing a decades-old triumph of US diplomacy — and shifting the region’s balance of power his way.
Putin landed Monday night in Cairo for a two-day state visit. He was greeted warmly by President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who received a personal gift from the guest: an AK-47 rifle. Then the two went off to the opera for some culture.
Not that it was all pomp and circumstance. Russia is doing a lot of business with the Arab world’s most populous country nowadays. Its trade with Egypt rose to $4.5 billion last year, Putin noted.
Oh, and the Russian wants all bilateral commerce to be done in rubles, rather than US dollars.
And that Kalashnikov wasn’t the only weapon Putin’s sending Sisi’s way: The $3 billion deal they reportedly signed late last year with Egypt includes Russian attack helicopters and MiG-29 fighter jets.
And on Tuesday the two inked an agreement for Russia to build Egypt’s first nuclear power plant. (Hey, the whole Middle East needs to prepare for the future, as US-led talks will at best leave Iran on the verge of being a nuclear power.)
Wait, how did Sisi all of a sudden become the Kremlin’s BFF? The ex-general rose up the ranks of an Egyptian army that was almost exclusively backed by America. Sisi was even a fellow at the US Army War College in the early 1990s.
Simple: America no longer wants the friendship of a man who, according to his detractors, has reversed Egypt’s progress toward democracy.
To make that point, President Obama suspended for a while the annual $1.5 billion US aid package to Egypt. He also held up deliveries of military hardware like US-made attack helicopters, which Sisi desperately needs to fight ISIS and other Islamist terrorists in the Sinai.
Because, though Washington doesn’t seem to care, Sisi is also practically the only Mideast leader to stand up to the Islamist jihadis.
True: Sisi is no Thomas Jefferson. He’s been hard on opponents and critics ever since seizing power in 2013 in a move widely described as a military coup.
But remember: Sisi took power from a government that, while elected in the aftermath of the Tahrir revolution, was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse, it was an inept government that failed Egypt, and Sisi was widely applauded across the country for ending its rule.
Plus, crucially from America’s point of view, the Brotherhood “shares the same ideology” with al Qaeda, ISIS, et al, as Sisi told Germany’s Der Spiegel this week. The Brotherhood is “the origin of all of it. All these other extremists emanated from them,” he said.
To use an Obamaism, Sisi is fighting (yes, sometimes too harshly) against the core of “core al Qaeda” — whose commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a Muslim Brotherhood alumnus.
In a December speech at Cairo’s al Azhar University, the prominent Sunni religious center, Sisi called for a sweeping revolution across the Muslim world.
It’s inconceivable, he noted, that the Koran “that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.”
No other Arab leader dares to so challenge his fellow Muslims. Meanwhile, most Western leaders, led by Obama, arrogantly pretend that the current wave of global violence has nothing to do with Islam.
So we need someone like Sisi, on that side of the world, to call it as it is. Yet he constantly gets the back of our hand.
Say what you will about Putin. He knows an opening when he sees one.
To continue his fight against extremists, Sisi needs military hardware, money and diplomatic backing. Washington managed to convince the entire Arab world that we’re siding with the Muslim Brotherhood (or with Tehran), rather than Sisi.
So here comes Putin, Kalashnikov in hand.
It wasn’t always like that. Forty years back, America was the smart power, the one that saw the Egypt opening.
With some wily moves, statesmen like Henry Kissinger managed to turn Cairo our way in the 1970s after decades of Soviet influence. It was one of the Cold War’s major events, ending with President Jimmy Carter and that 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that holds up to this very day.
But the members of Obama’s foreign-policy team aren’t worried about losing allies to a rival, even one that behaves like it’s the 19th century. No, they’re busy chasing the fantasy of turning an actual enemy, Iran, into an ally. Good luck
Meanwhile, Putin, who once said that the Soviet Union’s demise was a “geopolitical disaster,” is telling Egyptians that Russia’s always been their friend.
Back to Square One?