Arab autocrats are gleeful. Islamic extremists seem ecstatic. Israel’s right-wing government is exuberant. Only Iran seems nervous about the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to transform U.S. policy in a region with four wars (in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen), rising extremism, the return of authoritarian rule after the collapse of the Arab Spring, economic instability, and demographic challenges transforming almost two dozen societies.

The first world leader to telephone Trump after his victory was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former field marshal who orchestrated a military coup, in 2013, against a democratically elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi then ran for the office himself a year later. Thousands were killed during the bloody transition, and more than fifty thousand have since been imprisoned in “one of the widest arrest campaigns in the country’s modern history, targeting a broad spectrum of political opponents,” Human Rights Watch reported this fall. In September, Sisi met with both Trump and Hillary Clinton in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. The candidates’ positions on Egypt—the Arab world’s most populous country, with more than ninety million people—reflected their widely divergent foreign policies. During a primary debate with Bernie Sanders, Clinton charged that Egypt had become “an army dictatorship.” Trump, after his meeting with Sisi, called him “a fantastic guy” and commended their “good chemistry.”

With an apparent touch of envy, Trump added, “He took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it.”

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When six senior Italian detectives arrived in Cairo in early February, following the discovery of the brutally battered body of 28-year-old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, they faced long odds of solving the mystery of his disappearance and death. Egyptian officials had told reporters that Regeni had probably been hit by a car, but clear signs of torture on his body had raised an alarm in Rome.

The Egyptian authorities guaranteed “full cooperation”, but this was quickly revealed to be a hollow promise. The Italians were allowed to question witnesses – but only for a few minutes, after the Egyptian police had finished their own much longer interrogations, and with the Egyptian police still in the room. The Italians requested the video footage from the metro station where Regeni last used his mobile phone, but the Egyptians allowed several days to elapse, by which time the footage from the day of his disappearance had been taped over. They also refused to share the mobile phone records from the area around Regeni’s home, where he disappeared on 25 January, and the site where his body was found nine days later.

One of the Egyptian chief investigators in charge of the Regeni case, Major General Khaled Shalaby, who told the press that there were no signs of foul play, is a controversial figure. Convicted of kidnapping and torture over a decade ago, he escaped with a suspended sentence.

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