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On the “Courting” of Adversaries and “Friends”

The U.S. shouldn't need to be continually "courting" its clients.

Bret Stephens is baffled by diplomacy:

In Cairo on Monday, I spent two hours with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, a geopolitical godsend who wants nothing more than to improve relations with Washington. It says everything about this administration that it has spent so much more time courting enemies in Iran than friends in Egypt.

It says everything about Stephens that he thinks the main priority of U.S. policy in the region should be placating clients and sucking up to the “right” kind of dictators. If the U.S. is spending an inordinate amount of time in trying to reach an agreement on the nuclear issue, that is because it is a more important issue than keeping Egypt’s dictator happy. U.S. diplomacy in the region ought to be aimed at reducing tensions with adversaries, since the consequences of deteriorating relations with them are much more severe.

The U.S. shouldn’t need to be continually “courting” its clients, since they are the ones that benefit disproportionately from the relationship. It is supposed to be up to the client to make sure that the relationship is maintained. Besides, one would think that it should take much more effort and time to “court” adversaries in diplomatic negotiations than it does to maintain good relations with “friends.” Presumably “friends” are aligned with the U.S. because they believe their interests to be aligned with ours, so there should not have to be very much “courting” to convince them of what they already believe. If a particular client government wants the U.S. to do even more for it, that isn’t necessarily proof that the U.S. has been neglected the client. It is usually proof that the client takes the U.S. for a sucker, which is what Stephens would like the U.S. to be here.

It’s worth noting that Sisi hasn’t been a “godsend” for the U.S., but has mostly been a headache ever since he seized power. The administration responded half-heartedly to the coup, hoping that it could somehow express mild disapproval for the takeover without alienating the new leadership, but here as on many other issues the half-a-loaf approach hasn’t delivered the desired results. The U.S. is correctly seen to be backing Sisi, but it didn’t back him as forcefully as Sisi or his newfound hawkish admirers would like and therefore gets no “credit” from them, either. That is why the U.S. should have taken a clear stand against the coup when it happened, but it is now too late for any of that. Doing more now to satisfy a client dictator and his American fanboys would just compound the original error.

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