The Senate’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act empowers the Pentagon to establish a strategic competition initiative for the U.S. Africa Command. If the bill passes, this will be the first security initiative expressly authorized by Congress since the Cold War to funnel military aid to African forces to counter Beijing and Moscow. The proposal lays new legal groundwork for a long-term bid to expand U.S. military influence in Africa. But the security initiative it authorizes will likely be dogged by U.S. military and diplomatic negligence and sow instability in Africa and U.S.-Africa relations. It should be cut from the bill before the 2022 NDAA is signed into law.
The proposed initiative aims to fight “coercion by near-peer rivals” against African governments by strengthening their militaries and addressing myriad “sources of insecurity” across the continent. If it’s established, high bipartisan consensus around both U.S. Africa policy and the threat posed by China and Russia suggest that its scope and funding are poised to grow quickly. This proposal warrants more public scrutiny than it has received, particularly given that the United States charted a similar course during the Cold War and African reformers are still facing the aftermath. A long history suggests that the proposed military aid for Africa will escape congressional oversight while the Pentagon and State Department will do little to monitor and account for its consequences.
Near the Cold War’s conclusion, while the Reagan State Department publicly deemed U.S. military aid to Africa “measured and moderate,” a classified Pentagon memo labeled key aid programs “a tragic joke,” “not demonstrably necessary and not sustainable,” based in “intuition and popular wisdom,” with “no success stories to date and none on the horizon.” There has been progress since then but much of that memo could have been written yesterday. U.S. training for coup leaders in Mali and Guinea, funding for rampaging battalions in DRC and Cameroon, and military aid to repressive governments in Uganda and Niger tell much the same story. It’s one that reflects not only a U.S. impulse to prioritize counterterrorism over peace and democracy in Africa, but also inept monitoring and assessment of U.S. “train and equip” programs for African armed forces.
The Pentagon, for example, rarely fails to tout its human rights training for African militaries. But the Government Accountability Office recently deemed its assessments of the scope and quality of this instruction unreliable. The Pentagon has no protocol in place to assess the impact of its human rights training on the “behavior, practices, or policies” of African militaries. It simply doesn’t know, and it doesn’t have a good means of finding out.
According to a Pentagon Inspector General report released through FOIA, the U.S. Africa Command also has a “personnel accountability” problem and is often unable to track the whereabouts and status of the numerous military contractors it employs throughout the continent.
State Department surveysofU.S. defense articles and services licensed for commercial export to Africa often indicate good chances of them falling into the wrong hands. Surveys during the Trump administration revealed record highs in the percentage of these exports deemed “unfavorable,” primarily because they were delivered to “unlicensed” or “unreliable” foreign parties.
Likewise, the State Department often had little idea where military equipment donated through its flagship Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership ended up. Rather than conducting site visits or relying on satellite technology to keep track of the armored vehicles and other equipment it donated to states like Cameroon and Niger, the agency often trusted social media to determine if it was being misused. Earlier this year, the House passed a reform bill for this floundering security partnership. The bill was rightly opposed by a handful of Africa experts and progressive House members because it would’ve also formally authorized the initiative. Its key reforms were written into the House's 2022 NDAA, but they aren’t in the Senate version, and they are sorely needed.
The 2017 NDAA passed even broader reforms to improve monitoring and assessment of U.S. security cooperation programs. Two years later, the Senate Armed Services Committee deemed the Pentagon’s progress toward this goal “wholly inadequate.” Nonetheless, this year the Biden administration requested budget cuts for these activities, from a paltry $8.9 million to $7 million out of a security cooperation budget of more than $6.5 billion.
This void of oversight should be kept in mind when assessing the failures of U.S. security policy in Africa. It should be scrutinized before U.S. soldiers are killed during security cooperation missions in Africa and U.S.-trained troops commit human rights violations and overthrow governments. The Senate’s new security initiative will inherit this legacy of negligence. It's more than enough reason to discard the proposal before the 2022 NDAA reaches President Biden’s desk.
Sobukwe Odinga is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a PhD in Political Science, and his research examines African security politics and the role of race in US foreign policy.
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DJIBOUTI (May 12, 2010) Marine Cpl. Robert Wood, assigned to the armory of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), instructs Ethiopian Lt. Col. Sultan Ebu, a coalition officer for strategic communications at CJTF-HOA, on the proper procedures for firing an M-16 service rifle before a U.S. Marine Corps Enhanced Marksmanship range evolution at the Djibouti City Police Department gun range. Nearly 20 military members deployed to Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti participated in the exercise, which focuses on advanced tactical weapons training. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Marc Rockwell-Pate/Released)
MUNICH, GERMANY — During his keynote speech at the Munich Security Conference today Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky repeated the need for a “European army” — also framed as “an Army of Europe.”
What this specifically means is unclear, but the Ukrainian leader delivered the message home, if we are to judge by the headlines of the main European newspapers this afternoon. Zelensky tried to further raise the stakes by saying that Ukraine has intelligence that next summer Russia plans to send troops to Belarus. On that, he noted: “Is this Russian force in Belarus meant to attack Ukraine? Maybe, or maybe not. Or maybe it's meant for you. Let me remind you, Belarus borders 3 NATO countries.”
Zelensky walked a tight line between not directly antagonizing the United States and making clear to European leaders that the continent’s security is up to them, not Washington and that they might very well be left alone.
“Let's be honest, now we can't rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on issues that threaten it,” he pointed out. Similarly, Zelensky asked: “Does America need Europe as a market? Yes, but as an ally? I don't know. For the answer to be yes, Europe needs a single voice, not a dozen different ones.”
Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, at first appeared to have brought some clarity on some of the open questions regarding Europe’s role in future peace talks. Asked about whether Europe would be present at the planned talks, Kellogg said he was from “the school of realism, and that is not going to happen.” Later on, in a panel discussion, he was far less clear. It is also uncertain to which extent Kellogg is directly speaking for the White House, and European officials appear somewhat at a loss when seeking to tell apart Washington’s main messages to Europe from simple background noise.
Regardless of which course events take, there seems to be a lot of challenges facing NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has a reputation of knowing how to approach U.S. President Donald Trump. On Saturday, before Kellogg commented on Europe being off the negotiation table, Rutte seemed to know or guess where things might be going and positioned himself as the bridge between the European and the American pillars of NATO.
In a panel discussion, Rutte said: “To my European friends, I would say: get into the debate, not by complaining that you might, yes or no, be at the table, but by coming up with concrete proposals, ideas, ramp up [defense] spending.”
Before Zelensky’s address, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz opened the day in what was most likely his last speech at the international meeting. Although he is running for re-election in Germany’s national elections next weekend, his center-left Social-Democratic Party (SPD) istrailing by 15 points in the polls the conservative Christian Democratic Union and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU). Scholz hasindicated he will retire from politics if he does not remain chancellor.
At the beginning of his speech, and in a reference to Vance’s address to the conference yesterday, Scholz said Germany will not accept people who “intervene in our democracy,” adding that “where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.”Scholz then moved on to discuss how to fund increasing defense expenditures in Germany. Last November, the issue played a major role in the collapse of the German ruling coalition, made of Scholz’s SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP). The latter party pushed for cuts in social programs rather than taking new public debt (the option favored by the SPD and the Greens) to increase the military budget.
When Scholz fired FDP leader and then Finance Minister Christian Lindner from the government, the ruling coalition lost its parliamentary majority, leading to the early elections to take place next weekend. Regarding the future of Ukraine, Scholz remarked that “there will only be peace if the sovereignty of Ukraine is assured, a dictated peace would therefore never get our support.” He added that “we will also not accept any solution that leads to decoupling European and American security.”
MUNICH, GERMANY — The Munich Security Conference started this Friday in a city recovering from an attack in which a suspect drove his car into a crowd of people, leaving 36 people injured on Thursday morning.
The international meeting also takes place against the backdrop of the German parliamentary elections on Feb. 23. Friedrich Merz, the chancellor candidate of the center-right Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) — which comfortably leads the polls with around 30% of support — could be spotted in the first row of the conference hall. Merz held a short meeting with United States Vice President J.D. Vance earlier in the day.
Neither yesterday’s car attack, nor the coming elections, were left unaddressed by Vance in his speech Friday. The vice-president described the attack (committed by an Afghan asylum-seeker), as one of the “horrors wrought” by Europe's migration policies. He noted that “no voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.” In addition, Vance expressed his fears that the German election results could be annulled, similar to the Romanian presidential elections in November.
Vance also accused European leaders of abandoning the core democratic values that led to the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War. "The threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America," Vance said.
Although Vance had provided a preview to Friday’s remarks in an earlier Wall Street Journal interview, his words were received with some arched eyebrows in the media center serving as a working place for the journalists covering the conference. “Undiplomatic announcements” was the headline topping an article about Vance’s speech published by the liberal Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The vice-president’s words also sent shockwaves in the conference hall. One of the first to respond was Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister. Pistorius, scheduled to speak less than two hours after Vance, described the vice-president words as “not acceptable.” He added that “democracy was called into question by the U.S. vice-president for the whole of Europe earlier.”
In the panel discussion that followed, which focused on Europe's defense policy, participants expressed bewilderment about the lack of attention to Ukraine in Vance’s speech.
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen had taken a radically different approach earlier in the day focusing on what she sees as commonalities between the Trump administration’s approach to the Ukraine War and that of the EU. She noted that “both the EU and the U.S. want an end to the bloodshed. We want a just and lasting peace, one that leads to a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. And Ukraine should be given solid security guarantees.”
In another attempt to establish a bridge with the Trump administration, von der Leyen added: “Ukraine needs peace through strength. Europe wants peace through strength. And as President Trump has made clear: the United States is firmly committed to peace through strength.”
Asked about whether European countries would increase defense expenditure to 5% of the GDP as demanded by Trump (the U.S. currently allocates 3.4% of its GDP to such a purpose), the president of the European Commission did not want to provide a specific figure. Still, von der Leyen announced that the Commission plans to allow extra fiscal room to the EU member states by activating the escape clause for defense investments.
The EU’s GDP increased by only 0.9% in 2024 (with negative growth in Germany, the bloc’s largest economy). It remains to be seen whether European citizens will support lifting strict EU rules on public debt for defense spending (and not for social policies, for instance) at a time of low economic growth.
Von der Leyen’s conciliatory tone towards the U.S. regarding Ukraine contrasted with her remarks about Trump’s tariffs policies. Building on a statement released early Friday, the Commission president announced her preference for a negotiated solution to avoid a trade war between the U.S. and the EU but noted that, if needed, “we will use our tools to safeguard our economic security and interests.”
After rumors that the initially announced meeting might not take place after all, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a bilateral encounter with Vice President Vance in the evening. Before the meeting, the Ukrainian leader said that his country wants “security guarantees” before any talks to end the war. Zelenskyy also noted that he is only willing to have an in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with U.S. President Trump.
Meanwhile, CNN reported Friday that the Russian government is assembling a high-level negotiating team that would engage in direct talks with the United States to put an end to the war in Ukraine.
On February 12, President Trump revealed he had talked to Putin about a peace deal in Ukraine, and Defense Secretary Hegseth gave a speech about what a peace settlement would not entail (NATO membership, US protection, return of occupied territories).
This left Ukrainians reeling with feelings of betrayal and being steamrolled, while European leaders looked shellshocked at finding themselves sidelined. I thought the right moment had arrived to finally write a long-planned article, on inclusive, people-centered peace-making, with my co-author Wolfgang Sporrer.
The next morning, I woke up to the inconceivable news that Wolfgang had died in his (and my) hometown, Vienna. The cause of his death, three days earlier on February 10, has not been publicized. He had been posting pictures from his latest assignment in the Middle East just days ago, along with his usual pithy comments on matters of war and peace.
In Europe, where the canceling of experts arguing for a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine has been far more ruthless than in the US, only a few brave souls have been sticking out their neck. Wolfgang was easily the most knowledgeable among them, having sat in on the consultations under the Minsk accords after 2015 and implemented the OSCE’s monitoring along the pre-2022 frontline in Ukraine, and later teaching conflict management, negotiation and mediation at the Hertie School, Germany’s premiere foreign policy school. He was also optimistic and constructive to a fault, convinced that peace was always possible if one approached it with a seasoned negotiator’s toolkit and attitude. His last article was titled “No War is Inevitable”.
Wolfgang first contacted me in summer 2022 on Twitter, as it was. Later, I realized there were curious parallels in our lives. We are not just both from Vienna, but our homes are just blocks from each other in the city’s 7th district. We had both studied law at Vienna University and Belgium’s University of Louvain-la-Neuve and then international relations in the US. Wolfgang served as the head of the human dimension unit in the OSCE special monitoring mission in Ukraine, and later at the EU delegation in Moscow.
In both places, I might have run into him when I dropped by to raise awareness about the human rights and peace issues I had found in my work with activists in remote regions. But I never did. I would have remembered a fellow Austrian, larger than life, with a twinkle in his eyes and an unending supply of shrewd anecdotes and thoughtful observations about the business of making peace, told in his old-school, gregarious Viennese accent.
What brought us together were the lessons we had learned from communities affected by armed conflict, he as a senior OSCE diplomat, I while working with grassroots women activists. Wolfgang took peace seriously, as an essential objective that should inform our grand strategies, as the fundamental condition for a good life and as a hands-on, skilled practice.
Wolfgang loved his craft. He stood out for always looking at peace from the point of view of average people: how they are affected by armed conflict, how their lives are in danger, and how we can restore their safety and security. He began and ended every conversation about war with ordinary people.
When asked about his ideas for ending the war in Ukraine, he declined to offer a peace plan and instead focused on process. He looked at it as a mediator: how do you get the parties to agree to sit at the same table? That would already be a first successful step. He kept reminding people that Ukraine and Russia were talking every day, at the Istanbul hub of the Black Sea Grain Deal. Wolfgang was a glass-half-full kind of guy, spotting openings and opportunity where others see only violent deadlock.
Last year, he proposed we write an article together, about inclusive, people-centered peace-making. We both thought this approach was curiously missing from discussions about ending the war in Ukraine, despite being recognized by many governments, the UN and academics as the gold standard for making peace: not only is inclusive peace-making better at ending armed conflict, with settlements that last longer and lower relapse rates.
It also produces a better peace, one in which countries rebuild faster, communities thrive more and enjoy greater safety and reconciliation. Examples of the sturdy settlements this approach produces include Northern Ireland in 1998 and Colombia in 2016.
How does inclusive peace-making (or inclusive diplomacy) achieve all this? By placing the human security, well-being and rights of people living in conflict-affected territories at the center of war-ending diplomacy. Peace has to deliver for the people who suffered from war. We achieve this by bringing these people right into the peace process, to the negotiation table. There, their concerns can be heard, put on the agenda and addressed, and they can envision creative solutions to intractable problems.
As a result, communities emerging from war will not be plagued by typical post-conflict dysfunction, deprivation and injustice that translate into friction and a renewed conflict. Ordinary people at the table and bread-and-butter issues on the agenda make the atmosphere calmer and more constructive overall.
Because men will be at any negotiating table by default, inclusive diplomacy means including women: comparative data from 40 conflicts shows that when women were part of peace processes, there was a far higher likelihood that an agreement will be reached, that agreement was more likely to be implemented and it was 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years. These numbers are so remarkable that anyone serious about making peace cannot afford to ignore them.
While Western governments seem to have forgotten all about inclusive diplomacy and people-centered peace-making, countries from the Global South did not. A range of governments brokered prisoner exchanges. Last summer, Qatar prepared to mediate a partial ceasefire to halt attacks on energy infrastructure in both Ukraine and Russia, to protect civilians during the upcoming winter, though the attempt collapsed when Ukraine launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. When China and Brazil invited others from the Global South to endorse their peace plan in September last year, it was updated to reference “inclusive diplomacy”.
Last month, Oleksyi Arestovych, one-time advisor of Zelensky and now one of his harshest critics, talked on one of his wildly popular YouTube streams about how any ceasefire or peace agreement would need to address everyday problems caused by war, occupation and displacement: regulate free movement of people, goods and services between territories occupied by Russia and those controlled by Ukraine, the mutual recognition of vital records and diplomas earned by young people on either side, protect the rights and interests of those forced to leave property behind and those buying such abandoned homes.
Government, he said, sounding like the aspiring presidential candidate he is, has to exist for the people, not the other way around.
I never got to write that article about inclusive, people-centered peace-making with Wolfgang. In this current moment, with Europe’s ruling elites aghast at the specter of peace and Ukrainians feeling betrayed and abandoned, he would have looked for openings to do things right, to build a good peace. He was fearless, brilliant and original, kind and supportive, and one of the most persuasive proponents of peace and diplomacy in Europe. Rest in peace, Wolfgang.
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