After Tripping Up in Saudi Arabia, Biden Seeks to Regain Foothold in Egypt

After a face-to-face meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman failed to sway the influential Kingdom's calculus on oil geopolitics over the summer, President Joe Biden's next trip to the Arab world appeared to go far more smoothly, as the United States sought to reassert its influence in the region amid great power competition with China and Russia.

The U.S. leader's interactions on the sidelines of the G20 gathering in Indonesia may have dominated headlines this week, but his earlier sit-down with Egyptian counterpart Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, conducted against the backdrop of the U.N. COP27 climate summit, marked a potentially consequential move to reassert Washington's clout with a key actor keen on promoting its own regional status.

Though their deliberations remain confidential, and were described to Newsweek by Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ahmad Abuzeid as an "ongoing process," the public face of the interactions between the two leaders showed a warm reception for the visiting U.S. leader, even sharing a laugh before the press, as the pair reaffirmed the importance of their relationship.

This comes as timely good news for Biden, coming as Cairo continues to develop its relationships with Beijing and Moscow. Those ties have flourished both in bilateral talks and in Egypt's decision this year to become a dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Cairo has also expressed interest in joining the expanded format of BRICS.

Jonathan Cohen, U.S. ambassador to Egypt from November 2019 until March 2022, serving under presidents Trump and Biden, told Newsweek that Cairo's cooperation with rival powers does not come at the cost of longstanding ties with Washington.

"Egypt's relationship with the U.S. is strong and strategic," said Cohen, now a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, "and the Egyptians don't believe that prohibits them from developing relationships with other groupings and other parties."

"It should not be a zero-sum equation," he added, "though others do not have the same deep, strategic relations or the USD 80 billion, 40-year investment in Egypt's security and development that the U.S. does."

That investment also served Cairo's broader interests.

"The Egyptians have ambitions to be a regional hub for everything from logistics to energy," Cohen said, "which means having diverse trade and political relationships and being able to serve as a bridge between regions and groupings."

As the administration grapples with an array of challenges across the region, Egypt serves as a bridge for Biden in achieving U.S. goals on pressing issues across North Africa and the Middle East, meaning a healthy bilateral relationship "definitely is beneficial," he said.

"To have a less robust relationship would give the U.S. less leverage, including on issues like regional security, counterterrorism, crises in Libya, Sudan, and Gaza, and on Iran and Lebanon," Cohen said. "Egypt has played an important and helpful role in the region, and having a good and robust relationship with Egypt is absolutely in the U.S. interest."

But challenges have emerged in the equation. Among the most prominent is human rights, one of the areas that served as a catalyst for the feud between Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia.

Mostafa Kamel al-Sayed, co-founder of the Civil Democratic Movement, a liberal alliance of political parties and a political science professor at Cairo University, said human rights was "one of the obstacles in the way" of Biden's efforts "in consolidating the relations with Egypt."

"President Sissi wants the Biden administration to recognize that there is some progress being achieved when it comes to human rights issues in Egypt," Sayed told Newsweek. "He is hoping for softer statements from the U.S. about human rights in Egypt."

"I think President Sissi said that there are procedures in Egypt to deal with human rights issues," Sayed added, "and Egyptian authorities are already acting on this."

While the White House's brief readout of the meeting noted that Biden "raised the importance of human rights and respect for fundamental freedoms," the lengthier account released by Sissi's office made no mention of these issues. It focused instead on other issues, including their mutual counterterrorism efforts, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen, a dispute over the Ethiopia's construction of a dam on the Nile river, and international issues, including Russia's war in Ukraine.

Each of these issues speaks to the heart of the strategic partnership forged by the U.S. and Egypt, which remains both a significant player in regional events, and at times a victim of them as well. Egypt's proximity to unrest in neighboring Libya, and Israeli-Palestinian battles over the adjoining Gaza Strip, have made all of them priorities. It is also contending with insurgency inside its own borders, where the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) continues to forge a presence on the very same Sinai Peninsula that Biden and Sissi met last weekend.

Sayed said that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was of particular relevance for both leaders.

"Mediation is becoming difficult now after Israel's elections," he said, "which brought right-wing parties to the forefront," noting the return of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

At a time when Washington's ability to serve as negotiator in the decades-long dispute has waned, Cairo has proven crucial in securing ceasefires between Israel and Palestinian factions led by Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip between Israel and Egypt.

One subject not touched upon by either accounts of the conversation was Egypt's efforts to secure more financial assistance to ease growing economic woes. Sayed said that the Egyptian leader would likely seek "the continued support by the U.S. to help Egypt secure a loan from the IMF."

"Egypt is not only interested in getting the approval for the loan," he added. "Egypt also wants help with receiving more loans from so-called friendly countries."

Unlike Saudi Arabia, whose largely oil-fueled wealth has raised its geopolitical standing, Egypt's economic uncertainties present a vulnerability in dealing with major powers. This hinders the country's ability to project strength on an increasingly multipolar world stage, where world powers China and Russia are seeking to expand their BRICS economic bloc alongside Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia to include prospective members in the Middle East, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

"There are some goals for Egypt to join BRICS, but I don't think any action has been taken along these lines," Sayed said. "Of course, if Egypt joins BRICS then this would be a cause of concern for the United States. But I don't see prospects for this happening, because there are some conditions for a country to join BRICS, and that includes the country being in a good economic position."

"We really missed the opportunity to join the club of countries of emerging economies," he added.

Sayed said that Egypt's strategy has been to court the U.S., China and Russia, and "maintain good relations with those three major powers," as Sissi "is trying to avoid taking any position that would antagonize any of those three countries."

Timothy Kaldas, a policy fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, D.C., said this approach is nothing new, and dates back to the days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who tactfully navigated Cold War politics to elevate Egypt's position.

"Egypt has always historically tried to maintain relationships with lots of rival partners, Kaldas told Newsweek, "and that's partially a tactic or strategy for negotiating and extracting as much support as possible for minimal costs as possible."

"Egypt has been very successful on many occasions in extracting a lot of concessions from their backers without paying much in return," he added. "It is also a way for them to maintain independence despite their financial weakness."

It also helps Cairo deflect pressure over human rights.

"If you talk to U.S. officials, one of the things that they worry about when pressuring Egypt on human rights or on the economy or on anything is that they will turn closer to the Chinese and we'll lose them," Kaldas said.

This, he argued, "is exactly what Egypt wants their western partners to worry about, and which is why Egypt maintains close ties with so many players."

Although Biden has remained relatively quiet on U.S. accusations of Egyptian human rights abuses under Sissi, including allegations of political repression and the detention of activists, Kaldas said that this still constituted "a serious point of tension between the American and Egyptian governments."

In many cases, this went beyond the White House.

"There are a lot of people in Congress who are concerned about that," Kaldas said, "which puts pressure on Biden beyond his own opinion to emphasize this issue."

To demonstrate how legislative positions could impact bilateral ties, he pointed out Senator Patrick Leahy's decision last month to block the dispersal of $75 million in military assistance to Egypt over human rights concerns.

"He basically overrode the Biden administration," Kaldas said.

Biden is not only facing a potentially hostile legislature, with Republicans having won a slim majority in the House of Representatives following last week's midterm elections, but he is also contending with a rapidly evolving region.

Explaining why the U.S. leader struggled to connect with Saudi Arabia during his visit to Jeddah in July, Mohammed Sadik Ismail, director of the Arab Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said that it was time for the U.S. to update its approach to match contemporary realities in the Arab world.

"The Arab mentality changed, in the sense that Arab nations no longer rely on the U.S. as the sole strategic ally in light of efforts to diversify strategic partners," Ismail told Newsweek, "and this might be the result of Arab revolutions and having new regimes in some Arab countries."

He argued that the U.S. role in the region had been tainted over the course of three decades of policy initiatives that were "unable to properly address the Arab mentality." These included interventions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq that brought far-reaching instability, and support for non-state actors during the regionwide series of protests known as the Arab Spring.

These demonstrations came early to Egypt, resulting in the overthrow of longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the toppling of his successor, Mohamed Morsi, in another uprising just two years later that brought Sissi to power.

And while Sissi has maintained and even broadened ties with the U.S. since taking the helm, Ismail said the Egyptian leader has also "worked on a foreign policy that focuses on diversifying Egypt's strategic allies and expanding relations with more partners including China, Russia, and European nations."

Now, he said, "the United States needs to reintroduce itself to the Arab world" and take proactive measures to address issues that matter first and foremost to regional countries, including Egypt. He listed a number of fronts on which this could be achieved, including the Israel-Palestinian dispute and conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen, all issues raised specifically in the Egyptian readout of Sissi's talk with Biden.

"I think the U.S. could restore stronger relations by showing good intentions when addressing those matters and continuously supporting Arab countries," Ismail said. "We do see that Biden has an active role in demonstrating those intentions, but he lacks involvement with Arab nations."

"The United States could still become an effective partner, not the sole partner, in the world," he added, "as it asserts its presence among major players such as China and Russia."