Trump will host Egypt’s military dictator today:

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is visiting the White House for the first time since he led the military’s overthrow of his predecessor in 2013.

Trump is seeking closer ties with the dictatorship in Egypt, and that is consistent with what he has been doing in his dealings with other bad regional clients over the last two months. It also promises to deepen U.S. complicity in the abuses and crimes of those client governments, and it practically guarantees that the clients’ behavior will become worse than it already is. While Trump’s approach to these states is different from Obama’s in degree, it is also the case that he is taking U.S. policy in the wrong direction in every case. All of these relationships need to be downgraded or even ended all together, but Trump is strengthening them to our country’s detriment.

Obama was wrong when he failed to cut off military aid to the coup government in Egypt as the law required, but he also didn’t fully embrace Sisi as Trump has. Throwing more weapons at Bahrain would be a questionable decision by itself, but it is even more worrisome because it is part of a broader pattern of looking for places to pick fights with Iran. Increasing support for the war on Yemen is obviously the most horrific and destructive example of how Trump has managed to take terrible policies he inherited from Obama and make them even worse. The client states are undoubtedly pleased to be indulged and rewarded with more support and even less criticism, but it is difficult to see what the U.S. gets out of this embrace except to be tarred with the abuses that our support helps make possible.

The U.S. has a long, unfortunate history of working with and supporting abusive and authoritarian regimes, and in retrospect we can see that doing this was often a foolish mistake or at best a short-sighted arrangement that ended up causing more problems for the U.S. over the long term than it solved. There may be occasions when it is necessary to cooperate with these governments, but these relationships are not ends in themselves and we should always be questioning their value. When they become liabilities as many of our relationships with these clients have, we shouldn’t be afraid to curtail or end them. The U.S. shouldn’t go in search of monsters to destroy, but neither should it embrace and support monstrous regimes.