Chronic. Joe Biden wants to bring human rights back to the international stage. The Democratic President-elect will not sign a “Blank check” to its strategic allies with a dictatorial tendency. He intends to restore the “Moral leadership” the United States. Vast and difficult program, where the display of ambitions collides with the reality of the diplomatic exercise: the absolute necessity of making compromises with those who do not have our values.
Emmanuel Macron was to think about it, Monday, December 7, receiving the Egyptian Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi in Paris. His tyranny over his country is one of the most ruthless in the region: 60,000 political prisoners; atrocious conditions of detention; frequent if not systematic practice of torture and beatings of detainees; police and justice under orders. The pretext is always the same: to fight against political Islamism. But the repression descends on everything that moves in Egyptian society, and particularly on liberal and secular human rights defenders – like Ramy Shaath, tireless and admirable activist of public freedoms and, as such, detained since almost two years.
In Washington as in Paris, the discourse, partially well founded, is identical: Egypt is a key country for regional stability, central to the fight against jihadism, unavoidable by its demographic weight, essential to peace between Israel and the Arabs. Does it require rolling out the red carpet, at the Elysee Palace as well as at the Paris City Hall, for a man who, just before visiting us, had 57 people executed between October and November? Does this make it necessary to become, like France, one of Egypt’s main arms suppliers? Between support with fanfare and the necessary working relationship, where is the right balance?
Trump: a weakness for autocrats
For Westerners, Al-Sisi takes up the old antiphon of the region’s autocrats: it’s me or the Islamists. Which, of course, imposes, to remain in this configuration, to embellish all the liberals … Ally of the United States, just like the Saudi Arabia of Mohammed Ben Salman (MBS), the Egypt of Al-Sisi will test the “moral” ambitions of the new American diplomacy.
Donald Trump had settled in his own way the delicate question of the relationship that diplomacy must maintain with human rights. He did not believe in American exceptionalism – this mission which would fall to the United States, born of the English and French Enlightenment, to be, by example and influence, the promoters of liberal democracy. “We killed a lot of people too ”Trump said in 2016, and it forbids Americans to lecture anyone. He did not hide a big weakness for his autocratic peers. Al-Sissi was his “Favorite dictator”. North Korean Kim Jong-un was writing letters to him ” of love “. Mohammed Ben Salman was like a godson, Xi Jinping was, for a long time, ” a friend “ and Vladimir Putin “A model of leadership”.
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