The United States retreats in the Sahel in West Africa

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For those who defend American security interests in Africa, the last few days have brought grim news. Late last week, the United States informed Niger's coup leaders that it would comply with their demand to withdraw American forces from the country, which had been operating there in a counterterrorism role for more than five years. Around the same time, reports emerged that Chadian authorities sent a letter this month to the U.S. defense attaché based there, ordering the United States to cease activities at a base that hosts also French troops.

The potential withdrawal of a U.S. special forces detachment based in Chad would be another blow to the Western security presence in the Sahel, the vast arid region beneath the Sahara Desert that has seen a wave of coups of state in recent years overthrowing the fragile countries of the center and the Sahara. West African governments. Chad is set to hold elections in May, and the orders to the United States could amount to a bit of nationalism from the country's vulnerable interim leaders.

But elsewhere, the picture is darker. Successive coup regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have toppled weak, civilian-led governments; he rose angrily against the presence of the former colonial power, France; and turned to Russia and China for support. Before last year's coup, Niger was seen by Western diplomats as a kind of democratic bulwark in a region where juntas and radical Islamist insurgencies were gaining ground. Today, his regime has firmly alienated the poor country from the West, expelling French troops before taking steps to end the significant American footprint in the country's desert highlands.

The deal will mean the end of a presence of more than 1,000 U.S. troops and call into question the status of a $110 million U.S. air base that is only six years old, my colleagues reported. It's the culmination of a military coup last year that toppled the country's democratically elected government and installed a junta that declared the U.S. military presence there illegal.

Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso announced on January 28 that they were leaving the Economic Community of West African States, due to foreign interference. (Video: Reuters)

The US withdrawal from Niger follows the arrival this month of a detachment of Russian military trainers in the country. Le Monde described what preceded this deployment of around a hundred officers from the Africa Corps, the Russian paramilitary organization renamed successor to the Wagner mercenary organization, which had a large and troubled presence in Africa before disbanding at the end of last year.

Their official mission was to train the Nigerien army, notably in the use of an anti-aircraft defense system supplied by Russia, notes the French newspaper. Three months earlier, the Nigerien Prime Minister had gone to Tehran to outline plans for closer cooperation with Iran, without providing details on the nature of the contracts envisaged. This was an obvious source of concern for Western countries, particularly the United States.

These developments constitute a major blow to Western counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel and Libya, Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, told me. Worse still, an American withdrawal would further open the door to Russian and Iranian expansion in the Sahel.

A mess of geopolitical intrigue runs through the region. Like Libya, this part of Africa has become a playground for foreign powers, notably Russia, which ensures the security of coup regimes and orchestrates massive disinformation campaigns leading to the ouster of Western forces, observes a editorial of Le Monde. This is a major trend, the cost of which Americans and Europeans became aware of too late, without knowing how to respond to it.

The Wall Street Journal was more blunt in its own editorial: In the new era of great-power competition, Africa is one of the countries where the United States is losing.

China, less visible than the opportunist Kremlin, has gradually made its way into Niger. The country's junta announced this week that a Chinese state oil company had made an advance of $400 million for purchases of crude from Niger's Agadem field. The deal, structured with additional interest payments to the Chinese company, would help Niger's cash-strapped government deal with rising domestic debt.

Some Nigeriens who spoke to my colleagues in the capital Niamey see the junta exercising a new type of sovereignty after years of excessive French interest. Why is it a problem for the Americans and France that the Russians are helping us? Abdoulaye Oussein, 51, said. I think we are free to make our own choices.

A new Gallup poll finds strong approval for Russia and China in many parts of the Sahel. Last year, China recorded its highest approval rating in Africa in more than a decade, Julie Ray, global news editor at Gallup, told me. It enjoyed substantial support in West African countries, allowing it to lead the United States by two percentage points.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it lost significant support across the continent. But, Ray adds, Moscow's image has improved since then, particularly in the Sahel, where it has achieved high approval ratings in Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad.

Washington was seen in the region as a credible partner without France's colonial baggage, which is disappearing in the region, Laessing, based in Mali's capital Bamako, told me. But U.S. messages to West African governments may not have been particularly effective, and U.S. officials have been accused of perhaps privately intimidating their African counterparts.

Washington lacks awareness of how the situation is manifesting itself, Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told my colleagues this month. They have made Russia the bogeyman in all this, like what the French did, but it is a way of deflecting their responsibilities and avoiding any form of introspection on the policies pursued by United States.

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