U.S. forces were expelled from both Niger and Chad this week, dealing a serious blow to the Biden administration’s diplomacy and counter-terrorism policies in Africa.
Last Friday, the administration of leftist President Joe Biden announced that over a thousand U.S. military personnel would be withdrawn from Niger. The civilian government of Niger was overthrown in a July 2023 coup, leaving power in the hands of Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani.
Western powers and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) soon ostracized the junta. ECOWAS imposed sanctions against the Tchiani regime but lifted them in February 2024 due to humanitarian concerns.
Niger formed a coalition with two other military-controlled governments, Burkina Faso and Mali, which collectively had enough clout to face down ECOWAS and shrug off the Biden administration’s demands for a swift return to civilian government. As relations with America and Europe soured, Niger increasingly turned to the axis of tyranny – Russia, China, and Iran – for security and economic assistance.
Last week, the Nigerien junta signed a $400 million deal with China’s state-owned CNPC oil company to secure its cash flow after losing the U.S. and France as oil customers. At around the same time, Russian troops began arriving in Niger with anti-aircraft weapons, which Niger’s military rulers consider invaluable for preventing ECOWAS or Western forces from invading to restore civilian government.
The Nigerien junta declared America’s security arrangement with the deposed civilian government was “illegal” and “violated all constitutional rules” in March, while mass protests were arranged to demand the departure of U.S. forces from the country, so the arrival of Russian forces clearly meant time was up.
The Biden administration’s last-ditch diplomatic mission in March was a disaster, as junta officials sneered the American delegation was “condescending” and refused to arrange a meeting with Tchiani. Administration officials mumbled off-the-record about the junta possibly allowing small numbers of U.S. operators to conduct counter-terrorism missions from its soil after the main force withdrawal is completed in a few months.
One of the major points of contention between the junta and U.S. officials was a rumored deal to allow Iran access to Niger’s considerable uranium reserves. Progress was reportedly made on this arrangement when junta-appointed Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine visited Tehran in January.
According to some sources, Niger already signed a secret deal with Iran. Junta officials reportedly became very “tense” when U.S. representatives mentioned the uranium deal during the March diplomatic mission.
“I think they asked for our withdrawal because they were not willing to satisfy the concerns that we had. We had concerns about the lack of movement on announcing a transition to democratic rule, and we had some concerns about the external partners that they were seeking to work with,” a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday, obliquely referring to all of the above-mentioned turbulence.
A senior U.S. Air Force officer deployed to Niger filed a private whistleblower complaint with Congress last week, accusing the Biden administration of negligence for leaving American forces at risk in Niger as virtual “hostages” and covering up evidence that Niger’s relationship with the U.S. was rapidly deteriorating.
“They failed to be transparent with U.S. service members deployed to this country,” the whistleblower said.
Biden diplomacy in Africa became a full-blown disaster when the Pentagon announced on Thursday that about 75 U.S. Special Forces operators have been evicted from Chad.
The Chadian withdrawal came as a much bigger surprise than the one in Niger. Gen. Amine Idriss, chief of staff for the Chadian air force, bypassed the usual diplomatic channels to send a memo written in French on his official letterhead to the U.S. defense attache that threatened to terminate Chad’s Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States.
The letter from Idriss did not say all American forces would be required to leave Chad, but it singled out the strategically vital Special Operations Task Force (SOTF) stationed at a former French base.
The leftist New York Times (NYT) quoted “current and former U.S. officials” who speculated the letter could be “a negotiating tactic by some members of the military and government to pressure Washington into a more favorable” Status of Forces Agreement. Some of those observers still think the exit of U.S. troops will only be temporary, but it is definitely not a bluff, as the Pentagon said on Thursday it will begin to “reposition some U.S. military forces from Chad.”
The NYT noted Chad’s move was all the more surprising because its relationship with the U.S. military has been quite robust until now:
Chad’s presidential guard is one of the best trained and equipped in the semiarid belt of Africa known as the Sahel. The country has played host to military exercises conducted by the United States. Officials at the Pentagon’s Africa Command say Chad has been a major partner in an effort involving several countries in the Lake Chad basin to fight Boko Haram.
“U.S. Africa Command remains dedicated to building enduring partnerships with Chad and other African nations in the Sahel to address mutual security concerns and to help promote a peaceful and prosperous future in the region,” Gen. Michael E. Langley, the head of the command, said during a visit to Chad in January, according to a statement from the command.
During the trip, the statement said, General Langley met with Gen. Abakar Abdelkerim Daoud, Chad’s military chief of staff, and other leaders. Discussions focused on regional security challenges and Chadian efforts to counter violent extremism in the Sahel.
On the other hand, while Chad is not ruled by a junta like the Niger-Mali-Burkina Faso bloc, it is not quite a blooming garden of democracy either. It will hold elections on May 6, but the likely winner will be “transitional” President Mahamat Deby, who has held the office since his father Idriss Deby Itno expired in 2021 after 30 years of autocratic rule.
It is possible that Chad wants leverage against the U.S. to secure Deby in power, or at least wants Washington to remember that the axis of tyranny is waiting to welcome dodgy regimes that do not measure up to American standards of democratic purity. The Pentagon explicitly stated on Thursday that it believes “security cooperation” with Chad “will resume after the May 6 presidential election.”
Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor saw “grim tidings” for American security interests in the news from Chad and Niger, as the Biden administration was pushed into “retreat” from the terrorist-infested Sahel region.
Tharoor hoped the business in Chad would boil down to “a bit of nationalist preening by the country’s vulnerable interim leadership,” but the break with Niger is clearly much more severe, and taken together they represent an opportunity for Russia, China, and Iran to spread their malign influence into the Sahel.
China is notching record-high approval ratings in African public opinion polls after pouring billions into development projects and resource deals, while Russia’s eagerness to rent itself out as a Praetorian guard for junta strongmen has made it a popular alternative to former European colonial powers and American moralizing.
Ironically, much as the U.S. initially prospered in Africa as an alternative to the European ghosts of Africa’s colonial past, now the Russians are successfully presenting themselves as an alternative to American bullying.
At the beginning of the year, the Biden administration thought it was securing its relationship with Chad by warning its government that Russia might be plotting to assassinate President Deby or overthrow his government – while Russia was hosting Deby on an official visit to Moscow and boasting that “expanded cooperation” with Chad and other African nations was coming soon. Russian diplomats murmured that America’s “extreme pressure” on the Chadian government was creating an opportunity for Russia to move in.
The story out of Africa right now is the Biden administration’s ongoing surprise that Russia and China have outmaneuvered it across the continent by offering protection and prosperity for juntas and strongmen instead of lecturing them about democracy. Even if one believes Africa’s military dictators and presidents-for-life could stand to hear a few lessons about political freedom, it should be no surprise that they might prefer to deal with amoral and ruthless competitors who promise to keep them in power indefinitely.