The Irony Of America’s African Policy By Jibrin Moses

       For decades, the United States has approached Africa as a chessboard of security partnerships, drone bases, proxy forces, and strategic corridors. What stretches across the continent today is a widening belt of state collapse, insurgency, proxy war, and foreign intervention stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea.

From Mali and Niger to Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the same themes recur with grim consistency: weak post- colonial states, ethnic and religious fragmentation, weapons flows across porous borders, foreign meddling, and the U.S. repeatedly insisting it can manage extraordinary complex societies with bombs, military trainers, intelligence partnerships, and favored clients. It cannot.

Mali currently faces a severe security and political crisis following major coordinated offensives by al-Qaeda-linked groups (JNIM) and Tuareg-led separatists (FLA).The U.S. previously provided extensive military training and counter-terrorism assistance before ties were frozen due to democratic backsliding and military takeovers.

Niger continues to face regional security challenges, including a deadly attack on its primary airport in June this year that left multiple soldiers and civilians dead, highlighting ongoing security threats in urban centers.After the 2023 military coup in the country, the junta officially terminated its military cooperation agreement with Washington. As a result, the US lost access to Niger Air Base 20, thelargest drone base in Africa built by it for $110million.

Despite that the US supplied 12A-29 Super-Tucano light attack aircraft to Nigeria in 2021 under a foreign military sales program valued at nearly $500million, BokoHaram terrorists remain active in vast stretches of the northeast while banditry and Islamist militancy expand in the north- west.

Sudan show-case today how foreign powers transform internal crises into regional infernos.The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid SupportForces (RSF) is no mere domestic conflict: regional actors back competing factions. The United Arab Emirates supports the RSA. Egypt has backed the SAF. Chad and Ethiopia increasingly serve as staging grounds and logistical corridors for the former. Refugees pour across borders while famine and atrocities spread.

The US works alongside regional partners in the Quad initiative comprising the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to align peace strategies and pressure external actors to halt weapon supplies.What makes the situation particularly revealing is that Washington’s own partners stand on opposite sides of the conflict. American policy makers speak constantly about democracy and human rights, yet their regional clients fuel one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.Regional powers pursue their own interests while ordinary Sudanese civilians are trapped in the middle.

Meanwhile Ethiopia itself edges closer to renewed conflict.Tension with Eritrea are rising again. The fragile aftermath of the Tigray war remains unresolved. Addis Ababa increasingly behaves like a regional power, seeking maritime access and strategic depth, while the US continues cautiously backing Ethiopia because of its perceived geostrategic importance in the Horn of Africa.

Washington long viewed various African governments as useful strategic partners during the Cold War and War-on- Terror, only to watch those relationships contribute to far bloodier outcomes later. Uganda offers a sobering example.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the US supported Yoweri Museveni as part of a broader regional strategy in Central Africa. Uganda’s influencein Rewanda and the region helped shape the political and military dynamics preceding the Rewandan genocide and the later Congo wars.

The same pattern plays out in Somalia. Washington’s efforts to destroy the Islamic Courts Union in the mid-2000s helped the growthof al-Shabaab’s terrorists. Nearly two decades later, the USA continues bombing Somalia at a record paceunder the guise ofcounter-terrorism.

In eastern Congo,horrifying violence persists despite agreements between Rwanda and DRC and separate negotiations involving M23 in Doha. Here again Washington speaks reverently about sovereignty while remaining unwilling to seriously pressure Rewanda, long viewed as a useful partner. M23 continues operating. Civilians continue dying. Ebola outbreaks compound the suffering. And amid it all, foreign powers eye the region’s vast mineral wealth.

A big part of this current round of catastrophe began with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) destruction of Libya in 2011. The regime- change war against Muammar Gaddafi was sold as a humanitarian intervention. In realityit shattered one of the few functioning states in North Africa and unleashed enormous stockpiles of weapons across the Sahel. Tuareg fighters who had served in Libya returned to Mali heavily armed. Jihadist groups flourished in the resulting chaos.

Military coups followed in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, many involving officers who had received American training or maintained ties with Washington’s security apparatus.This is one of the ironies of American African policy. The US spends decades training militaries in the name of‘’stability’’ only to watch those same militaries overthrow civilian governments once conditions deteriorate. Washington then condemns the coups while continuing to insist the answer is still more security cooperation, and even more often than not, going ahead to support the new government anyway.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian consequences spread outward. Mass migration towards neighboring states like Mauritania, threatens to destabilize already fragile societies. Entire regions of the Sahel have become effectively ungovernable.Yet even now, few in Washington seem willing to admit that the Libya intervention was among the great foreign policy disasters of the twenty first-century.

In all the UnitedStates must now recognize the limits of its own power, the unintended consequences of intervention, and the extraordinary arrogance required to believe distant bureaucrats and military planners can successfully manipulate some of the world’s most complicated political environments, as millions of dead over the past two decades attest.

 Jibrin Moses writes from Yola