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.”

American presidents have long wrestled with this dilemma. During the Cold War, whether it was Dwight Eisenhower overthrowing Iran’s duly elected prime minister or Richard Nixon winking at Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, they often made unsavory moral compromises. Even Jimmy Carter, who said America’s “commitment to human rights must be absolute,” cut deals with dictators.

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.

1. Pakistan

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.

2. Saudi Arabia

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.

7. Uzbekistan

During President Islam Karimov’s 24-year reign of terror in Uzbekistan, his government has imprisoned thousands of political opponents and people who practice their religion outside the state’s strict rules; many of them have been tortured or brutally killed—even, in a case famously documented by Human Rights Watch in 2002, boiled alive. Karimov also refuses to take responsibility for the 2005 massacre of several hundred peaceful demonstrators by Uzbek forces. Nor has the United States held him to account; instead, Washington annually funnels some $500 million in transit fees to Central Asian states that host parts of the Northern Distribution Network, the land route into and out of Afghanistan—including Uzbekistan, through which the majority of NDN-bound U.S. supplies pass. In her 2011 trip to Uzbekistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a friendly tone, welcoming “a great opportunity that we have to try to help develop democracy here in Uzbekistan.” Few others would say that: Even Karimov’s daughter, in the midst of a bizarre family feud, alleged in December that her father’s “scary” security forces had tried to poison her.

8. Bahrain

This tiny Gulf country crushed its local Arab Spring in March 2011, unleashing hundreds of troops and armored vehicles on mostly Shiite protesters, dozens of whom were killed and many more injured, tear-gassed and jailed. Activists—around 2,000 of them still in prison—have even accused the government of torturing them with electric cattle prods. To the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy, often hailed as Arab moderates by the West, the unrest was but a devious plot unleashed by Shiite Iran. President Obama has spoken out against the abuses—but done little else, while continuing to sell arms to the wealthy Gulf country, some of which were used against demonstrators. Not coincidentally, Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet at an 80-acre base undergoing a $580 million expansion.

9. Myanmar

Once a pariah state most often compared with North Korea, Myanmar over the past few years has made a dramatic transition from decades of junta rule; its new president, Thein Sein, shed his general’s uniform, freed political prisoners, scaled back press censorship and opened the country’s economy—not to mention releasing from house arrest the Nobel Prize-winning dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, who now holds a seat in the country’s parliament. Washington has been Myanmar’s chief cheerleader, with Obama and Thein Sein making a historic exchange of visits but the transition, while laudable, is by no means complete. After rolling back sanctions, the Obama administration is now exploring a closer military partnership with Myanmar, even as the country’s security forces brutalize ethnic and religious minorities—just like the bad old days.

10. Azerbaijan

“Azerbaijan’s investment in the energy sector holds the promise of further integrating Azerbaijan into the world economy and raising living standards for your nation and its citizens,” Obama said in 2011. Indeed, Azerbaijan rakes in some $20 billion in oil revenues each year, but Aliyev’s government has played it fast and loose with all that cash: The details of the state oil company’s partnerships with private companies are not public, making it impossible to track exactly how the oil money is spent. What’s clear is that the capital, Baku, is booming, with the government spending $6 billion a year on extravagant architecture projects. Hundreds of middle-class homes have been razed in recent years to make way for these gleaming structures, many of which bear the name of Aliyev’s strongman father and predecessor, Heydar, including an airport, sports complex and new spaceship-like arts center designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid.

So what if it’s small? Azerbaijan is both awash in oil and gas riches and located in an extremely geopolitically useful spot for the United States—a former Soviet state that’s willing to stand up to the Russians, and a key listening post for neighboring Iran. The man in charge is Ilham Aliyev, a former playboy who inherited his position from his dictator father. Aliyev has aimed to please not only by steering oil contracts to American companies, but also by providing troops for the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and allowing the U.S. military to move goods through Azerbaijan en route to Kabul. One leaked diplomatic cable compares Aliyev to two sons in The Godfather: Michael, the dutiful favorite, representing Aliyev’s pro-West foreign policy, and Sonny, the impulsive hothead, representing his domestic repression. “[T]his Michael/Sonny dichotomy complicates our approach to Baku and has the unfortunate effect of framing what should be a strategically valuable relationship as a choice between U.S. interests and U.S. values,” the cable reports. While U.S. officials often dutifully call on Aliyev to respect human rights, it’s clear the United States has made its choice. In a 2010 visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded Azerbaijan’s “tremendous amount of progress” toward democracy while acknowledging “a lot of room for improvement.” That was charitable: Last year, voting authorities posted the results of Aliyev’s reelection victory a day early (just a “test,” they claimed).

11. Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a democracy at least in name and has had Western (and Chinese) companies salivating at its recent double-digit GDP growth. But longtime strongman Meles Zenawi, who died in 2012, and his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, have leaned on a sweeping anti-terrorism law to stamp out opposition, imprisoning journalists, activists and politicians who dare speak out against the government. Ethiopia has made itself useful to the United States, though, invading Somalia in 2006 at Washington’s behest and disastrously fueling a rise in terrorism that prompted another intervention in late 2011. Rights groups accused the U.S.-trained and -equipped Ethiopian military of war crimes in stomping out an ethnic rebellion in 2008, but Washington has only hugged Addis Ababa tighter: In 2012, Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest states, was the top sub-Saharan African recipient of U.S. aid—and the seventh country overall—raking in some $707 million.

12. Vietnam

Nearly 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War, that conflict’s most articulate critic—John Kerry—now finds himself spearheading an unlikely reconciliation effort, as the United States seeks to pull Ho Chi Minh’s heirs into the American orbit. The sight of U.S. warships docking in Vietnamese ports has become oddly familiar in recent years, much to China’s consternation. But communist Vietnam remains one of the world’s most repressive states, making this particular Asian pivot point politically tricky. Secretary of State Kerry summed it up best in December, when he described the feeling of revisiting the place where he had once fought: “Weird, and it’s going to get weirder.”

13. Tajikistan

One of the poorest and most backward states in Central Asia, Tajikistan has cashed in on the U.S.-led war in neighboring Afghanistan. And now, with illicit drugs surging to as much as one-third of Tajikistan’s economy, it is perhaps drug traffickers who have benefited most from tens of millions of dollars in U.S. investment in the country’s infrastructure; the very roads that feed America’s war machine allow smugglers to carry heroin out of Afghanistan. The drug lords have formed a mutually beneficial partnership with high-level officials in the Tajik government, which is responsible for widespread detention and torture of political dissidents. President Emomali Rahmon, a colorless ex-Soviet apparatchik, has been in power since 1992. According to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, “Rahmon and his family control the country’s major businesses, including the largest bank, and they play hardball to protect their business interests, no matter the cost to the economy writ large.”

15. Cambodia

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.

16. Honduras

There are few places you’d rather end up than a Honduran prison, where the conditions are miserable and vicious street gangs call the shots. 

Since the United States controversially recognized Porfirio Lobo, the president who came to power after Honduras’s 2009 coup, Lobo and his successor have unleashed a repressive police state—and yet managed to remain the world’s murder capital. Honduran officials, particularly the military-controlled police, have deep ties to organized crime and drug traffickers, and have been accused of a range of human rights abuses, allegedly targeting political opponents for imprisonment or even assassination. But the United States, which used Honduras as a staging ground for the “dirty wars” of the 1980s and still hosts an air base there, remains the country’s largest donor, with tens of millions of dollars in annual aid, including to the military—no small figure in a place where the entire police budget is just $151 million.

17. Uganda

Yoweri Museveni has been Uganda’s president since 1986, and not because of his winning personality: He has brilliantly manipulated the election system to perpetuate his power. Still, Museveni gets a lot of credit in Washington for his anti-poverty work and his fight against HIV/AIDS, not to mention his willingness to back U.S. counterterrorism goals in Somalia. (As for personal probity, not so much: One particularly vivid State Department cable published by WikiLeaks is titled “Uganda’s All-You-Can-Eat Corruption Buffet.”) And just this month Museveni signed a harsh anti-gay law, prompting the White House to undertake a review of its Uganda relations. Museveni is now widely seen as plotting to turn over power to his son, and the United States has kept mum. But hey, at least he’s not Idi Amin.

18. Qatar

Once derided by a Saudi prince as “300 people and a TV station,” this tiny, fantastically wealthy Persian Gulf emirate makes a lot of noise through its Al Jazeera satellite empire. Qatar was a big backer of the Arab uprisings (remember those?) but has had far less to say about democracy and human rights back home. And its dalliances with radical Islamists and warm relations with Iran make it a particularly awkward host for a massive U.S. air base.

19. United Arab Emirates

The glittering towers and megamalls of Abu Dhabi and Dubai tend to overshadow this absolute monarchy’s tight grip on the reins of power: There are no real elections to speak of, and those who speak ill of the royal family soon find themselves in jail. But the UAE, a top oil producer, is one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and an eager buyer of U.S. goods and weaponry. The UAE also hosts Jebel Ali, the most frequented American naval facility outside the United States, and the Al Dhafra Air Base, a key launching point in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and presumably, potential air strikes in Iran.

20. Kyrgyzstan

Since 2001, the United States has used Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base for transit to the war in Afghanistan—access it has maintained by bowing to the demands of two Kyrgyz autocrats whose governments were both accused of jailing and killing political opponents and journalists. In 2009, amid a de facto bidding war against the Kremlin in Russia, the Pentagon agreed to a steep rent hike for the base, from $17.4 million to $60 million, in addition to ponying up nearly $37 million to expand Manas, which doubles as the country’s main international airport. When a popular uprising installed a new president in 2010, the United States was seen as so cozy with the government that anti-U.S. sentiment became a rallying cry of the new leadership, which soon instructed the American troops to pack up and get out by this summer.

21. Kenya

When Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s independence leader, was elected president in March 2013, the United States faced an exquisite dilemma: how to deal with a popular figure accused of crimes against humanity for his role in whipping up the ethnic violence that rocked Kenya in 2007 and 2008. Obama chose to split the difference, keeping up counterterrorism cooperation but pointedly skipping his father’s homeland on his trip to Africa later that year. The United States, while maintaining its diplomatic presence in Nairobi, the largest in Africa, and making Kenya one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid, has nonetheless backed the International Criminal Court’s case, despite Kenyatta’s complaint that it’s a “toy of declining imperial powers.”

22. Djibouti

A one-party state that ranks among the world’s poorest countries, Djibouti is essentially a French satrapy with a drone base, leased to the United States. The country has little to offer other than its strategic location on the Horn of Africa, north of war-torn Somalia and west of al Qaeda-infested Yemen. But for a United States more concerned with its security than with Djiboutian freedoms—and there aren’t many to speak of—that turns out to be good enough.

23. Morocco

When uprisings spread across Arab countries in 2011, Morocco worked hard to convince the world that it was a stable exception. To appease protesters in dozens of cities and towns across the country, King Mohammed VI quickly reworked his constitution—winning much praise from a Washington desperate for an Arab Spring success story, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called Morocco “a model” for the region. As it turned out, the king retained much of his power, which he duly exercises through a Potemkin parliament, police abuses against dissidents, press constraints and his own investment holding company, which has stakes in virtually every sector of the country’s economy. The king’s ardor for reform may have cooled, but the United States has upgraded ties anyway, holding a “strategic dialogue” with Morocco in September 2012 and, a little over a year later, rewarding “King Mo” with a prized White House visit for the first time in nine years.

24. Kazakhstan

Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled this Central Asian powerhouse since 1989—that’s two years before the fall of the Soviet Union—is nothing if not a clever autocrat. He’s marketed himself brilliantly as a man the West can do business with, from giving up his post-Soviet nuclear stockpiles two decades ago to splashing money around Washington, D.C., to helping the United States ship supplies in and out of Afghanistan. Much of Kazakhstan’s immense oil wealth, meanwhile, reportedly makes its way into the hands of Nazarbayev’s cronies. At a March 2012 meeting in Seoul, South Korea, President Obama said it was “wonderful” to see Nazarbayev again, tactfully not mentioning that his government has rigged elections and imprisoned political opponents to stay in power, or that his party holds nearly all the seats in both houses of the legislature. U.S. companies have invested heavily in Kazakh oil: Chevron led the way in 1993, and last year ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips started pumping crude in a Kazakh oil field that is the world’s largest outside the Middle East.

25. Turkey

Obama seems to have a soft spot for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the voluble and volatile Islamist leader of this longtime U.S. and NATO ally. As Erdogan has trampled on basic freedoms, fended off dubious “coup attempts” and feuded with Israel, Obama has indulged his Turkish friend while keeping public criticism to a minimum. No longer, at least, do U.S. officials voice their always questionable hope that a Muslim, democratic Turkey could inspire an Arab world in the throes of revolution.

Photos from list via Associated Press unless otherwise noted. Pablo Martinez Monsivais; Ron Edmonds; Charles Dharapak; Pablo Martinez Monsivais; Jim Watson/AFP; Lawrence Jackson/White House; U.S. State Department; Sameh Refaat/U.S. Embassy Egypt; Charles Dharapak; Spencer Platt/Getty Images; U.S. State Department; Charles Dharapak; Lawrence Jackson/White House; Lawrence Jackson/White House; Carolyn Kaster; Charles Dharapak; Lawrence Jackson/White House; Pablo Martinez Monsivais; Pete Souza/White House; Cherie A. Thurlby/U.S. Department of Defense; Sayyid Azim; Pablo Martinez Monsivais; Evan Vucci; Pablo Martinez Monsivais; Pablo Martinez Monsivais.

Source: politico.com