Led by ex-Khmer Rouge guerrilla Hun Sen since 1985—putting him among the world’s longest-serving rulers—Cambodia is a dictatorship in all but name. The United States, long leery of Sen’s corrupt and sclerotic regime, has begun swallowing its distaste, cautiously upgrading military ties to this Southeast Asian basket case as it confronts a rising China. In 2012, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Cambodia, and he has balked at congressional attempts to cut off some $70 million in annual aid.
Obama's World I A Special Report
America’s 25 Most Awkward Allies
Last December, National Security Adviser Susan Rice offered a
remarkably candid insight into Barack Obama’s foreign policy. “Let’s be
honest,” she said, “at times … we do business with governments that do
not respect the rights we hold most dear.”
But Obama, an idealist at
home, has turned out to be more cold-blooded than most recent presidents
about the tough choices to be made in the world, downgrading democracy
and human rights accordingly. From Syria to Ukraine, Egypt to Venezuela,
this president has shied away from the pay-any-price, bear-any-burden
global ambitions of his predecessors, preferring quiet diplomacy to the
bully pulpit—when he is engaged at all.
He has his reasons. A decade of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan
soured Americans on George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” taking invasion
off the table as a policy tool. And there are broader global forces at
work too: the meteoric rise of China, new tools for repressing dissent,
the malign effect of high oil prices. Freedom in the world has declined
for eight straight years, according to Freedom House—not just under
Obama.
But if the president is troubled by these trends, he shows
few signs of it. “We live in a world of imperfect choices,” Obama
shrugged last year—and his administration has made many, currying favor
with a rogue’s gallery of tyrants and autocrats. Here, Politico Magazine
has assembled a list of America’s 25 most awkward friends and allies,
from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, Honduras to Uzbekistan—and put together a
damning, revelatory collection of reports on the following pages about
the “imperfect choices” the United States has made in each. “I will not
pretend that some short-term tradeoffs do not exist,” Rice admitted.
Neither will we.
***
America’s
worst ally—being home to Osama bin Laden will do that to your
reputation—Pakistan has gobbled up billions of dollars in U.S. aid and
“reimbursements” for services rendered in the war on terror. And while
Pakistan’s powerful military and spy services have often collaborated
with their American counterparts on drone strikes and militant arrests,
they’ve just as often made mischief, hosting the Taliban and other
extremist groups, planting false anti-American stories in the press and
undermining the civilian government. “The cancer is in Pakistan,” Obama
reportedly told his staff in 2009—but he has yet to figure out how to
excise it.
Ever
since 1945, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt huddled with King
Abdulaziz for five awkward hours on a U.S. warship, the United States
has had uncomfortably intimate relations with Saudi Arabia. Seventy
years later, the two countries are trapped in a loveless marriage. No
country buys more U.S. weapons than the autocratic, oil-rich Persian
Gulf monarchy, and no country—with its obscurantist interpretation of
Islam, medieval punishments and harsh treatment of women—makes for a
more embarrassing U.S. ally. But the relationship is in increasing need
of counseling as the Saudis grow exasperated with U.S. policies in the
Middle East, especially in Syria, and threaten to find other partners.
As the Saudi foreign minister put it, “It’s a Muslim marriage, not a
Catholic marriage.”3. Afghanistan
Bribery,
embezzlement, corruption. And that’s just on the part of America’s
partners in Afghanistan. As the United States prepares to wind down its
13-year war on the unforgiving Afghan plains and craggy mountain
hideaways, it has given up on almost any pretense of nation-building in a
country where President George W. Bush once promised to help build a
“free and stable democracy.” The United States is even, it turns out,
giving tens of millions of dollars in cash directly from the CIA to
Hamid Karzai, the mercurial tribal leader it installed as president in
2001. Sure, there have been lectures about good governance and reams of
reports tsk-tsking over the colossal waste, fraud and abuse of the
roughly $100 billion in U.S. aid and reconstruction money that has
flowed into Afghan coffers, but little has changed, and the United
States has basically stopped trying. Standing next to Karzai last year,
Obama summed up America’s diminished expectations, asking, “Have we
achieved everything that some might have imagined us achieving in the
best of scenarios? Probably not.”4. Iraq
In
November 2013, President Obama praised Iraq Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki for “ensuring a strong, prosperous, inclusive and democratic
Iraq.” One has to wonder just which Maliki—and which Iraq—Obama was
talking about. Since his selection in 2006, Maliki has consolidated
power to the point where many alienated Sunnis call him the “Shiite
Saddam,” while the country has exploded anew with sectarian violence
that killed more than 8,000 people in 2013. Just weeks after Maliki’s
visit to the White House, al Qaeda was taking over large swaths of
Fallujah and Ramadi, two cities where American forces had fought pitched
battles in the streets. Never mind that the United States has sold Iraq
some $14 billion in military hardware since 2005 and quietly left
behind dozens of military and CIA advisers since its 2011 pullout—the
spillover from Syria’s civil war has proven too much for the Iraqis to
handle. And in more ways than one: U.S. officials also accuse Maliki’s
government of looking the other way as its close neighbor, Iran,
supplies the murderous Syrian regime with cash, weapons and advisers.5. Egypt
Coup
or no coup, the United States still showers the Arab world’s most
populous state with $1.3 billion in military aid each year—a tradition
owing to Egypt’s strategic position astride the Suez Canal and next door
to Israel. Since haranguing Egypt’s longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak,
to step down “now” in February 2011 amid the inspiring protests in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the Obama administration has largely been reduced
to hand-wringing as the men in khaki reclaimed power, killing hundreds
of Islamist protesters along the way.6. Equatorial Guinea
Teodoro
Obiang Nguema Mbasogo—who claims, “There is total freedom of
expression, there has never been repression” in his country—is in fact a
famously corrupt thug; after toppling his own uncle in 1979 to seize
power in Equatorial Guinea, he has amassed a fortune estimated at
several hundred million dollars, while more than three-quarters of
Equatorial Guineans live in abject squalor and outright repression.
Washington has also cashed in on the tiny country’s massive if
ill-distributed wealth, with American lobbyists, defense contractors and
banks variously taking on Obiang as a client during his more than 34
years of strongman rule. In 1995, the United States shuttered its
embassy in Malabo after threats to the life of the U.S. ambassador, an
outspoken human rights defender. A 1999 State Department report found
that Obiang’s sadistic security forces had, among other horrors, rubbed
prisoners’ bodies with grease to attract stinging ants. But no matter:
In 2003, the United States agreed to reopen the embassy, and Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice later warmly welcomed Obiang to Washington as a
“good friend.” Even President Obama has posed for a photo op with the
dictator, who once won reelection with 103 percent of the vote in some
precincts. Why all the love? Equatorial Guinea’s $9 billion oil and gas
bonanza, almost all of it produced by U.S. companies, has made it one of
the largest destinations for U.S. investment in Africa, and much of
that oil, naturally, finds its way across the Atlantic.
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