323 - The State of the World, 2025, II: Consummate Crises
This Substack column continues our exploration of global crises of concern, begun on Monday with a report on Ukraine and the Middle East.
Africa
There are numerous other hotspots to which Trump and his team should turn. French troops are exiting Africa (except for Gabon and Djibouti), so the U. S. Africa Command is left increasingly alone to combat Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and United Arab Republic (UAE) political and military ambitions in both North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The French will no longer be readily available to help the U.S. keep an eye on the proliferation of jihadism in Africa's Sahel -- Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger -- and to help to guard against its spread into Benin and Cote d'Ivoire. By booting the French out of the Sahel, and now Chad, Senegal, and Cote d'Ivoire, the military and civil leaders of those countries are catering to the sentiment of their youngest adult citizens but kneecapping themselves in the continuing civil wars against determined sets of Islamic fundamentalists. Chad is especially vulnerable. Already, thanks to misplaced initiatives by the military men who usurped power in the Sahel and sent French troops home (plus ordering Americans out of Niger), the Islamists are winning. They control perhaps half of Niger and Burkina Faso, and a third of Mali.
Former Wagner Group troops from Russia are no match for the jihadists. They plunder resources anyway, and are more interested in grabbing gold, diamonds, and oil than they are in defending coup leaders. The Wagnerites "protect" the Central African Republic's president, too, but are more concerned with that country's gold and abundant diamonds. Russia's war in Ukraine in part is financed by Africa's gold.
Gold also drives Africa's other enormous war and massive humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Nearly 200,000 Sudanese civilians are dead, 14 million are displaced, and 25 million are experiencing acute hunger and starvation after twenty months of completely senseless but deadly fighting between the regular Sudanese army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the irregular Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Lt. Gen Muhamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti). Both have fighting forces of just over 100,000, but the RSF has benefitted in its warring by critical support from the UAE. Without arms, drones, helicopters, and financial deliveries from the UAE, there would be no massive civil conflict in Sudan and Africa's third largest domain would be at peace. Instead, Bashir and Hemeti, once yoked together in ruling the Sudan from 2019 to 2023, are now at each other's throats. The U. S. has declared the hostilities genocidal in intent and execution, a correct designation.
This is a war more than Ukraine's that Trump could end quickly, by cutting deals with or threatening the UAE. He would do much for himself, for the U.S., and for all of Africa if he spent time brokering a peace in Sudan that has escaped mediators and well-meaning officials from the UN and surrounding countries. He could also forestall or mitigate the culmination of the globe's second horrific genocide in Darfur, Sudan's westernmost province. More than 700,000 Africans have fled there from RSF Arabs. Western leadership is critically needed here, as in much of the rest of today's troubled world.
Trump would do well to force the UAE out of Ethiopia, too, where its backing of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's unholy grandiose ambitions is furthering wars between the central government and Amhara rebels, not to mention continued unrest in a subdued Tigray province and among Abiy's own Oromo people. Somalia and Ethiopia have an unresolved dispute over a port in Somaliland (a breakaway country from Somalia), as well. And then there is the long-running (since 2006) insurgency in Somalia itself involving al-Shabaab, a successful Islamist attacking force that menaces the American-supported state. Trump's military legions need to continue to reinforce the legitimate Somali government against the jihadists.
A similarly named sometime offshoot of the main al-Shabaab (the word translates as "youth") is harrying villagers and authorities in northern Mozambique. A Rwandan peace enforcement contingent has been helping to curb the territorial aims of these young Islamists.
The Kivu provinces of eastern Congo, where much of the world's coltan minerals, plus gold, cobalt, and copper, come from, is also embroiled in conflict. Thousands of non-involved rural Africans plus innumerable independent artisanal miners have been killed by roving gangs seeking to plunder coltan, gold, and the rest for sale in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. One of those gangs is M23, a Rwandan-backed Tutsi legion that preys on much of North Kivu and recently conquered a major town near Goma. The West needs to lean heavily on President Paul Kagame of Rwanda to halt his incitement of the Kivu mini-wars and his financing of M23.
Myanmar
Far away from Africa and the Middle East, a conflict of six or seven decades' duration is finally coming to a close, conceivably with the ouster of cruel military rulers (as in Syria) and the achievement of a new, civil ruled, state. Myanmar's military junta overthrew an elected government in early 2021 after briefly transitioning Myanmar (Burma) from a harsh, autarkic, rule by soldiers that had lasted since 1962. Ever since the coup in 2021, an alliance of students, professionals, and military movements from Myanmar's dozen most powerful ethnic entities (the Wa, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Shan, and Rakhine peoples), have been attempting to oust Myanmar's Tatmadaw army leaders. Now, after three years of mobilization and accelerated combat, about three-quarters of Myanmar is in the hands of the freedom fighters. Exactly when and how Myanmar's junta will be ousted, and where its generals will flee, is uncertain. But more and more it appears that the people who seek freedom and democracy will prevail in their Southeast Asian struggle. The Trumpers should prepare, and help.
The Caribbean
In our own hemisphere gang violence has consumed Haiti, the poorest country between Canada and Argentina, and has now convulsed Trinidad and Tobago, a faltering oil producer and place of tourism just north of Venezuela.
An American financed policing effort reliant on Kenyans and a handful of Jamaicans and Belizeans has accomplished very little. Gangs run Port-au-Prince and much of the countryside in 2025 just as they have almost continuously since Juvenal Moise, Haiti's last president, was assassinated in 2021. The UN says that 85 percent of Haiti's territory and people are controlled by one or more of twenty marauding gangs.
Kenyan's police detachment, a mere 400 instead of the promised 1,100 officers, has been unable to overcome 12,000 or so gangsters intent on extortion, kidnapping, ransoming, and sheer theft. Last week 158 additional police arrived from Guatemala and El Salvador; they may be able to help the Kenyans keep the peace. But their total number are still too few to overthrow the gangs.
For the gangs, narcotics trafficking is a potent incentive -- plus the extortion and kidnappings for ransom that provide the gangsters with cash. What Trump needs to do is straightforward: to send shock troops not to the Mexican border, but to Haiti, and there to knock heads hard, to subdue the gangs and imprison their leaders while shipping ordinary gang members to internal exile on Ile de la Gonave or Ile de la Tortue. Once it has pacified Haiti, the U. S. then needs to let French-speaking Canadians and North America's Haitian diaspora guide the island nation back toward civilian rule.
Haiti has a nominal population of 11 million, although thousands have escaped to the South American mainland and to the U. S. Trinidad and Tobago only holds 1.5 million former slaves and former indentured servants from India; the nation has been independent from Britain in 1962. But gang violence erupted in 2024, and 623 Trinidadians were killed that year -- one of the highest per capita totals in the world. [In 2023, St. Kitts and Nevis was the most murderous place in the world, with 65 killings per 100,000 people. It was followed in somber international homicide rankings by Jamaica (60), St. Vincent (50), the Turks and Caicos, Ecuador (44), Lesotho, St. Lucia, Haiti (40), Belize, Trinidad and Tobago (37), South Africa (36), and Nigeria (34), in that order. Trinidad and Tobago's 2024 number would be 41, but Haiti and other places may have also lost more civilians in 2024 than in 2023.]
Trinidad and Tobago is plagued by180 gangs with more than 1,750 members; although that total is but a fraction of Haiti's gang member totals, amid a much smaller national population and in a nation where stable order has long been the norm. The government of the two islands declared a state of emergency last week, enabling police to stop and search at will, and for soldiers to join police in keeping order. The Trump administration should assist Trinidad and Tobago; calling it nasty names will hardly help.
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Just another tour d’horizon of the stakes of what we are facing from the masters of the genre! Bravo, Professor !!
Thank you for the information about the global crises and in particular those in our neighboring countries suffering from terrible violence. We could readily help end this growing threat if only the US executive and legislative branches know their ability to do so would have long term benefits to all. But it will be almost impossible to get the new president to do or even say anything that won't give him and his buddies personal material benefits.