Washington is steadily losing influence across large swaths of Africa thanks to incentives advanced by Russia, China, and even the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Chad is the latest autocratic African government to push American military missions away after many years of cooperative interactions. Niger did so earlier this month and Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, and Mali have all shifted their primary diplomatic and military attention to Russia, rejecting long-time French involvement and close relations with the U.S.
The Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe are tilting decidedly toward China (and also toward Russia in Zimbabwe’s case), as is Equatorial Guinea. One side in Sudan’s major internal and famine-inducing war is close to Russia, as well as receiving arms and cash from the UAE.
South Africa, having attempted foolishly to mediate between Putin’s warring Russia and Ukraine, has adopted a moral and diplomatic initiative against Israel, putting it at odds with the U.S. South Africa has also welcomed Russian investments and telling visits from Russian naval and commercial vessels.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Africa Command is still actively assisting the Federal Government of Somalia in its long-running battle to resist and reclaim territory from al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliated collection of committed jihadists. The U.S. assists the Somali army and attacks al-Shabaab positions with drones launched from Djibouti.
In nearby Ethiopia, our envoys have been attempting unsuccessfully to persuade Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to promote peace rather than further internal conflict in the southern Tigray and northern Amhara regions, and to negotiate meaningfully with the Oromia Liberation Army. Abiy has welcomed and has preferred Russian help, and secret backing from the UAE.
Similarly, we keep trying to bring a halt to Sudan’s year-old civil war, but neither fighting side, nor the UAE, agrees to halt killings or relieve an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Fully 8 million people have been displaced and at least 15,000 Sudanese killed. Millions have fled from Darfur province in the west, to Chad, and new battles broke out last week in el-Fasher, the major city in northern Darfur.
The Biden administration has welcomed and promised to pay for the interminably delayed Kenyan police mission to rescue collapsed Haiti from gang control. With a transitional quasi-government now in place in Port-au-Prince, just conceivably 1,100 Kenyans, some Beninois, and a smattering of police from Caricom nations will soon arrive and confront the massive insecurity of that city and much of central Haiti.
U. S. relations with Tanzania are still normal, but Washington recently removed Uganda from duty-free privileges under AGOA – the African Growth and Opportunity Act – because of the country’s thoroughgoing criminalization of homosexuality.
In North Africa, Washington aids Egypt despite its kleptocratic autocratic regime, relying on it for assistance in constraining Hamas and for being a part of possible solutions in Gaza. Nearby Libya is a much more difficult country, with a warlord running its western half and a weak administration in the east. Tunisia has slipped backward from democracy and Algeria remains a militarily-run autocracy; our influence over the last three countries is limited. Only monarchical Morocco is unquestionably friendly to the U.S.
Washington has also finally managed to nominate and persuade the Senate to approve the appointment of ambassadors to a range of African countries that have been waiting -- in some cases years -- for new heads of mission to take charge.
The last is a helpful development, giving the Biden administration and Secretary of State Antony Blinken more heft and presumably more influence at last in a large number of Africa’s fifty-three countries. But our attempt beyond Somalia to curb al-Qaeda and Islamic State-initiated violence in the countries of the Sahel -- Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger (and now Chad) --- is today under threat from the soldiers who have taken charge of those countries after a series of coups, forced out the French who had protected their governments for decades, and have now sent American troops packing.
Only a small 75-person Special Forces advisory detachment is at risk in Chad, but its withdrawal at the request of the Chadian army will handicap our ability to monitor not only jihadist actions in and around Lake Chad (where Boko Haram has caused mayhem in northeastern Nigeria and southern Niger and Chad since at least 2010), but also the activities in eastern Chad, where the UAE has established a base to receive materiel of war to support the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) across the border in western Sudan (where ethnic cleansing is dangerously fundamental to RSF attempts to take the country from Sudan’s regular army).
Next door in Niger, being ousted is much more critical to the U.S.’ global battle against militant fundamentalist Islam. Near Agadez, in the north of Niger, the Pentagon constructed an expensive air base from which to fly drones to surveil and (hitherto) battle jihadists based in southern Libya and Algeria. The drones enabled us to assist the governments of the Sahel, and French and British contingents in northern Mali, in their attempts to hold off al-Qaeda and Islamic State conquests. But now Niger has insisted that the U.S. pull more than 1,000 airmen and soldiers out of the northern base. Russians have with lots of loot and promises of more, given the ruling junta a great feeling of accomplishment in replacing France and the U.S. with outsiders who never criticize coups and non-democratic military pretensions.
The winners throughout the Sahel are Russia’s Africa Corps, successor to the Wagner Group. It assists the RSF in Sudan and guards the presidency of the Central African Republic (CAR). The Corps, like the Wagner Group before it, is reliably accused of massacring Malians in several documented instances, and of looting diamonds and gold, plus trafficking illegally in ivory throughout the entire region. It has shipped as much as $3 billion worth of gold back to Moscow – to fuel Putin’s invasion – from Sudan and Mali, plus a wealth of diamonds from the CAR.
These are neither positive nor effective times for the U. S. and its Western allies in contemporary Africa. Turning this diminution of customary American influence into a more satisfactory direction will hardly be easy, in the months ahead, because of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, our close collaboration with Israel, and – most significantly – because Russia, China, and the UAE are able to provide the kinds of hard payoffs to the leaders of military juntas across the Sahel and throughout Africa that we cannot and must not match.
This is a truly exhaustive and immensely valuable chronicle of just where we stand across an entire continent where, sadly, much of the west, but certainly America and France, have largely washed its hands, leaving a sea of trouble--opening immense opportunities to China, and especially Russia.