The United States likes to think of itself as the beacon of freedom and democracy around the world, the one country that will go to bat for the rights of the less fortunate wherever they may reside. President Joe Biden has stressed the theme consistently since he stepped foot in the Oval Office in January 2021, and he isn't afraid to highlight the democracy versus autocracy disparity in his speeches.
Yet one only needs an ounce of self-awareness to grasp the disconnect between what U.S. officials say in public and what they actually do. President Biden is no exception. He may regard democracy as the best system of government humankind has to offer and have contempt for dictators who repress their people, but he doesn't necessarily have a problem signing agreements with authoritarians. Sometimes this is the cost of doing business; other times, it can get the U.S. into trouble and expose the U.S. as a hypocritical power.
Take this week. On Sept. 13, Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed a security and economic agreement with Bahrain, the small island located in the Persian Gulf. U.S.-Bahrain relations are nothing new, of course. The U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet is based there, and U.S. and Bahraini officers have engaged in joint training and exercises for decades. The so-called Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement seeks to bring those strategic ties to a higher level, both to increase deterrence against potential enemies (Iran) and to routinize collaboration between the U.S. and Bahraini defense.
Bahrain, however, also happens to be an absolute monarchy, where the ruling family reigns supreme and dissent is quickly snuffed out. According to the U.K. House of Commons Library, there could be as many as 1,400 political prisoners in Bahrain. Hundreds of Bahraini political prisoners ended a hunger strike on the same day Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa flew to Washington to sign the upgraded security partnership with Blinken. Bahrain was also rocked by grassroot protests during the 2011 Arab Spring. That movement, though, crushed them with arbitrary arrests, brute force, and rapid intervention from the Saudi security forces. Outside of rhetorical condemnations and sternly-worded press releases, U.S. ties with the Bahraini monarchy were largely business-as-usual.
Bahrain isn't the only authoritarian state where the U.S. turns a blind eye to human rights violations. Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive states in the Middle East, hacking into the phones of rights activists and journalists, slapping travel bans on the family members of dissidents to coerce them into returning to the kingdom, and at one point using one of its own diplomatic facilities to kill a Washington Post columnist for critical coverage of the royal family. Yet this gristly record aside, the U.S. is reportedly mulling a defense guarantee to Saudi Arabia in the hope of enticing Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel.
Egypt is one of the world's most authoritarian states. Its president, a former general named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has been in power since ousting the democratically-elected government in a coup a decade ago and is preparing for a re-election that is less "election" than "pro forma coronation." The Egyptian government has built 60 detention centers over the last 11 years to house the thousands of people who have been picked up on infractions as petty as insulting the president. Torture during the course of interrogations is rampant, and the information extracted is used during trails in a judicial system usually prone to rubber-stamping whatever the government wants.
Even so, U.S. military aid to Cairo continues to the tune of $1.3 billion every year. While U.S. lawmakers have conditioned about a quarter of this aid to human rights criteria, Egypt is still one of Washington's biggest foreign recipients. Since 1979, Cairo has received more than $50 billion in military assistance.
Move to Africa and the situation is quite similar. Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya have been critical U.S. partners on counterterrorism since 9/11, and all three have contributed to the various peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions in Africa's conflict hotspots.
Those same three countries, however, aren't exactly human rights havens. Paul Kagame has been Rwanda's president since 1994, partly thanks to rigged elections. Reporters in Rwanda self-censure out of fear of violating copies restrictions on press freedom, and Kagame's opponents have a habit of disappearing or dying under mysterious circumstances. Uganda is for all intents and purposes a family-run dictatorship, with long-time strongman Yoweri Museveni preparing his son to take over. And by the State Department's own human rights report, Kenya's security forces engage in "widespread arbitrary arrests and detentions during counterterrorism operations."
Despite all this, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda are still U.S. partners to varying degrees. The U.S. has spent $280 million training and equipping the Ugandan military since 2011, U.S. and Kenyan defense officials met in April to strengthen their relationship, and Washington is in frequent communication with Rwanda as it pertains to the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The point here is not to suggest that Biden should turn his back on any of the countries mentioned above. U.S. foreign policy involves difficult trade-offs. Collaborating with autocrats can be nasty and awkward but is sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) necessary to achieve U.S. policy objectives. For U.S. policymakers operating in a world where black and white absolutes are fictitious concepts, there is no such thing as a cookie-cutter approach.
But it's precisely for this reason why Biden's harping about the democracy versus autocracy framework is so ill-advised. It unnecessarily exposes the U.S. as two-faced. It also happens to be unworkable.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
