Egypt releases aide workers at Trump's request

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance brings us the news that

As a gesture of the shift in relationship between the U.S. and Egypt, and at the request of President Trump, President al-Sisi’s administration released two imprisoned aide workers. They arrived back in the U.S. late last night.

(Via WaPo) […] President Trump and his aides worked for several weeks with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to secure the freedom of Aya Hijazi, 30, a U.S. citizen, as well as her husband, Mohamed Hassanein, who is Egyptian, and four other humanitarian workers. Trump dispatched a U.S. government aircraft to Cairo to bring Hijazi and her family to Washington.

[…] The Obama administration unsuccessfully pressed Sissi’s government for their release. It was not until Trump moved to reset U.S. relations with Egypt by embracing Sissi at the White House on April 3 — he publicly hailed the autocrat’s leadership as “fantastic” and offered the U.S. government’s “strong backing” — that Egypt’s posture changed. Last Sunday, a court in Cairo dropped all charges against Hijazi and the others.

Read more here.

Big focus on foreign policy

There will be a lot of focus on US foreign policy next week, beginning today with the NATO summit in Brussels, where Rex Tillerson addressed the group. Monday President Al Sisi of Egypt will be trump's guest. Al Sisi's friend Jordan’s King Abdullah II will meet with Trump and Tillerson on Wednesday. Then, on Friday Trump and T Rex host the entire China delegation of President Xi Jinping for the weekend in Mar-la-go, the Winter White House. Trump tweeted Thursday that he expects the China meeting to be difficult, since "we can no longer tolerate unfair trade balances and job losses."

hat tip The Conservative Treehouse

Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel against Iran?

Bookworm reports,

There’s land if the Palestinians want it. Did you know that President al-Sisi in Egypt has offered the Palestinians a state that would include Gaza plus 618 adjacent square miles in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula? This offer reflects the fact that the Egyptians, like the Jordanians, Saudis, and every other Sunni Arab state around can’t stand the Palestinians.

With Iran looming on the Iranian, the Sunni nations are becoming more aware that Israel is their bulwark against Iran. If they can get rid of the Palestinian issue — and get the troublesome Palestinians out of their countries — they can unite to face off against Iran. You can read more here.

First international call to president-elect Trump

Guess who made the first international call to congratulate president-elect Trump? Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi!
Read more here.

Could you withstand a sugar shortage?

Ann Althouse has a post about a sugar shortage in Egypt.

Egyptians in "a panic" over a sugar shortage.
According to the NYT, which details the importance of sugar to Egyptians:
Egyptians pile sugar into mugs of tea by the spoonful — or three or five. A staple long subsidized by the government for most of the population, sugar is the chief ingredient of the national pudding, Om Ali. It can feel like the only ingredient. It is also a prime reason that nearly a fifth of Egyptians have diabetes....

“The people are going to snap,” Ahmad el-Gebaly said as he turned away customers seeking sugar he did not have at his subsidized-goods store in Bulaq, a working-class neighborhood of Cairo. “Nobody can stand [President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi] anymore,” he added of Mr. Sisi. “Sugar is like rice and oil and wheat. You can never run out of it. You can never mess with it. Who can live without sugar?”
One solution is to convince people that it's not good to eat so much sugar, but it doesn't sound as though Egyptians are ready to respond well to that advice.

Could you withstand a sugar shortage?

Egypt-Saudi invasion of Yemen imminent

The American Interest informs us this morning that an Egypt-Saudi invasion of Yemen is imminent.

the AP reports:

Egyptian security and military officials say Saudi Arabia and Egypt will lead a ground operation in Yemen against Shiite rebels and their allies after a campaign of airstrikes to weaken them.

American Interest adds:

The Egyptians’ decision to return to Yemen, which is essentially their Vietnam, is extremely significant. It reflects both enormous fear on the part of the Sunni powers and the strength of the Saudi-led alliance.

Events in Yemen continue to accelerate much faster than many experts predicted, and the potential for widespread sectarian war between Sunni and Shi’a grows more acute by the day. In some ways this portends even more trouble than ISIS’s fight against Iran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq: that fight is both bloody and strategically important, but ISIS is also an enemy of the Sunni powers (whose rule it wants to overthrow). Now, the Saudis and their allies are clearly prepared to confront Iran’s allies head-on.

The price of the Obama Administration’s comprehensive failure of strategy in the Middle East may be very high.

Thanks to Instapundit

Obama foreign policy blunders in the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson writes about Obama foreign policy blunders in the Middle East:

President Obama claims he inherited a mess in the Middle East. Not so.

Fracking and horizontal drilling on private lands in the U.S. had taken off in the last years of the Bush administration and by 2009 were set to revolutionize America’s energy future. By 2011, the U.S. had cut way back its dependence on Middle Eastern gas and oil imports, which in turn gave American diplomats a measure of immunity from petro-blackmail, and therefore far more clout in the region. Iraq was mostly stable; in Anbar Province tens of thousands of jihadists had been killed by U.S. troops and their tribal allies. Iran’s scope was limited by a new moderate axis of Sunni states, Israel, and the United States. A bruised Hezbollah faced a huge rebuilding tab in southern Lebanon. Libya was beginning to shed at least some of its bizarre past. The Palestinians had no desire for another Intifada. The Middle East was looking to the U.S. for leadership, inasmuch as the surge in Iraq had regained respect for American arms and determination.

The new Obama administration kept silent as the pro-Western Iranian protests deflated. In herky-jerky style, Obama at first upped the sanctions as Tehran ignored his serial empty deadlines on curbing enrichment. Then, unilaterally and without much warning, Obama relaxed sanctions. He reopened negotiations, even as Iran’s centrifuges multiplied. Currently, Iran is on the cusp of nuclear acquisition, and it quietly advises its supporters that the U.S. is both weak and naïve — and will soon be gone from the region.

...There has never been a greater likelihood than there is now, under Obama, that Iran will get the bomb, that it will create a radical theocratic Shiite alliance from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon, and that it will direct Hamas and Hezbollah to start another war against Israel — this time backed by an Iranian nuclear deterrent.

...Western investors were welcomed in Libya. Westerners were talking of investing in Libyan enterprise zones, improving Libya’s oil and gas network, and reopening spectacular archaeological sites to tourism. Qaddafi had clamped down on Islamists, and seemed increasingly to be leaving decisions in the hands of his progeny. The Westernized next generation of Qaddafis were courted by the international jet set, and were subtly sending signals that even greater liberalization was on the horizon. Qaddafi had become a buffoon, not a beheader.

All that vanished when Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice ordered the bombings that turned Libya into a terrorist paradise, whose ultimate trajectory was Benghazi. They had turned up a day late and a dollar short in piggybacking on the Arab Spring unrest in Cairo. This time around they wanted to ride rather than watch the growing protests against Qaddafi — an odd thing, given their prior warnings about Bush-administration naïveté in trying to promote consensual government in the volatile Middle East by force of arms.

No Westerner in his right mind will set foot on Libyan soil. The Obama administration’s experience in Libya can be summed up by its election-cycle fraud of jailing an obscure video maker for supposedly causing a “spontaneous” demonstration in which the consulate was ruined and four Americans were killed, including the ambassador — a yarn that even its promulgators no longer believe.

The United States’ relationship with Israel is now at its weakest since the founding of the Jewish State. Administration aides leak slurs about war hero and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him a “coward” and “chickensh-t,” as if Obama’s open-mic smear of Netanyahu during the G-20 summit in Cannes was not enough.

The radical Arab world has a hunch that another war launched from Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, or Lebanon would not entirely anger a U.S. administration that is more worried about Jews building houses in Jerusalem than about Iranian subsidies to and military support of Hamas. When an American president characterizes an Islamic hit on a kosher market in Paris as a random attack, then it is clear — both to Americans and to the enemies of America — that Jews and Israel are mostly on their own.

Meet the new Middle East: a soon-to-be-nuclear and ascendant Iran, the spreading ISIS wasteland, Egypt and Libya as Somalia, and the end of Syria and Iraq. This was not foreordained, but instead the result of a series of bad U.S. mistakes.

Read more here.

Making America unsafe

Victor Davis Hanson makes the case that

By continually taking the path of least short-term trouble, the U.S. ensures long-term hardship.

There was no need to “reset” the relatively mild punishments that the George W. Bush administration had accorded Vladimir Putin’s Russia for invading Georgia in 2008. By unilaterally normalizing relations with Russia and trashing Bush, Barack Obama and then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only green-lighted further Russian aggression, which has since spread to Crimea and Ukraine.

There was no need for Obama, almost immediately upon assuming office, to distance the U.S. from Israel by criticizing Israel’s policies and warming to its enemies, such as Hamas and the authoritarian Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan.

Any time Israel’s enemies have glimpsed growing distance in the U.S.–Israeli friendship, they seek only to pry it still wider. We see just that with terrorists in Gaza who launch hundreds of missiles into Israel on the expectation that the U.S. will broker a favorable deal that finds both sides equally at fault.

Sanctions had crippled Iran to the point that it soon would have grown desperate to meet U.S. demands to stop its nuclear enrichment. Instead, Obama eased trade restrictions just as they were coming to fruition. Iran is now on its way to acquiring a bomb, while supplying missiles to Hamas and Hezbollah.

There were once viable choices in Egypt. Instead, the administration managed to alienate the old Hosni Mubarak regime; alienate the elected Muslim Brotherhood, which immediately tried to subvert the democracy; and alienate the military junta that stepped in to stop the Islamization of Egypt. All of these rival groups now have one thing in common: a distrust of the United States.

We could have made a choice in Iraq to negotiate a bit more with the Nouri al-Maliki government, leave behind a few thousand token peacekeepers, and thereby preserve the calm achieved by the surge. Instead, the administration pulled out U.S. soldiers to ensure that a withdrawal would be an effective reelection talking point. The result of that void is the present bloodletting and veritable destruction of Iraq.

The U.S. once had choices in Syria. We could have loudly condemned the Bashar al-Assad government and immediately armed the most pro-Western of the anti-Assad rebels. Or we could have just stayed quiet and stayed out of the mess. Instead, we chose the third — and worst — option: loudly threaten Assad while doing nothing. Now a bloody dictatorship and its bloody jihadist enemies share a general contempt for a perceived weak America.

There were choices on our own border as well. Obama could have advised Central American governments that our southern border was closed to any who would cross illegally, while attempting to remedy the violence in those countries. Instead, the administration opened the border, welcomed in thousands without scrutiny, and has all but destroyed federal immigration law. The result is chaos.

In 2017, Obama may well leave office claiming to have reduced our military while avoiding conflict during his tenure. But will he also be able to assure us that China, Iran, and Russia are less threatening; that the Middle East, the Pacific, and the former Soviet republics are less explosive; that our own border is more secure — and that America is safer?

Read more here.