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)
The RAND corporation’s Samuel Charap and Johns Hopkins University professor Sergey Radchenko published a detailed timeline and analysis of the talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators just after the Russian invasion in February 2022 that could have brought the war to an end just weeks after it had begun.
Much of the piece confirms or elucidates parts of the narrative that had previously been reported. In the spring of 2022, the two sides appeared relatively close to a deal, one that, according to the authors, would “have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.”
But due to a combination of changing battlefield dynamics that convinced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he could win the war militarily, Western allies’ hesitance to engage diplomatically with Russia and simultaneous ramping up of military support for Ukraine, and the discovery that Russian forces had committed atrocities in Bucha, the talks eventually fell apart.
On some of these points, the authors contend that earlier accounts have been overstated. The idea that the U.S. and the UK “forced” Zelensky to back out of peace talks is “baseless,” say Charap and Radchenko, though they acknowledge that “the lack of Western enthusiasm does seem to have dampened his interest in diplomacy.”
On the suggestion that the discovery of war crimes convinced the Ukrainian president to abandon negotiations, the authors note discussions “continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”
But taken together, these factors, along with certain details of the agreement that were never finalized, were enough to imperil the negotiations.
In the two years since Ukrainian and Russian interlocutors last convened, the realities on the ground have changed. By April 2022, Vladimir Putin had likely realized that he would fail to achieve his most maximalist war aims. Now, with Western aid stalled and the war tilting in Moscow’s favor, Ukraine is in a less favorable negotiating position than it was and Russia may be less inclined to enter talks.
But, as George Beebe and Anatol Lieven detail in a recent Quincy Institute paper, all sides still have a reason to pursue a diplomatic solution, one that could both end the war and provide for a new European security architecture once the fighting ceases.
As Charap and Radchenko note in their Foreign Affairs piece, one of the reasons the original talks broke down was because the two sides were more focused on the broader endgame rather than on shorter-term solutions.
“A final reason the talks failed is that the negotiators put the cart of a postwar security order before the horse of ending the war,” they write. “The two sides skipped over essential matters of conflict management and mitigation (the creation of humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire, troop withdrawals) and instead tried to craft something like a long-term peace treaty that would resolve security disputes that had been the source of geopolitical tensions for decades.”
The two years of war have only increased distrust between Russia, Ukraine, and Kyiv’s Western backers, and diplomacy appears to be more difficult today than it was in 2022. But, say Charap and Radchenko, Zelensky and Putin surprised us once before with the concessions they may have been willing to make, and perhaps they will do so again.
The consequences of that failed first effort at diplomacy are clear, as Thomas Graham, former senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff, argued this week.
“The great tragedy of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that it will ultimately prove to have been futile. The likely outcome — territorial adjustments in Moscow’s favor, security guarantees for Ukraine and Russia — could have been peaceably negotiated beforehand had leaders had a firmer grasp of the real balance of power or greater political courage,” he wrote in the Hill. “The cost of failed diplomacy is already hundreds of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed.”
In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:
— After months of waiting, the House may hold a vote to give Ukraine another tranche of aid over the weekend. On Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) introduced four separate bills, including one that will provide approximately $60 billion in aid for Kyiv. The House Speaker is already facing backlash from members of his own party, but the legislation is likely to have enough bipartisan support to pass if it is brought to the floor for a vote.
— There are reportedly increasing points of tension between Washington and Kyiv as Ukraine awaits more aid and its war effort falters. Zelensky was frustrated that Washington has not offered his country the same missile defense help as it provided to Israel during Iran’s strikes over the weekend. “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles,” Zelensky wrote in a post on X. “Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.”
Moreover, Kyiv has expressed frustration over Washington’s recommendations that Ukraine not strike Russian oil refineries, according toThe Washington Post. Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly privately made the suggestion to Zelensky in February at the Munich Security Conference.
“The request, according to officials familiar with the matter, irritated Zelensky and his top aides, who view Kyiv’s string of drone strikes on Russian energy facilities as a rare bright spot in a grinding war with a bigger and better-equipped foe. Zelensky brushed off the recommendation, uncertain whether it reflected the consensus position of the Biden administration, these people said.” according to the Post. “Instead of acquiescing to the U.S. requests, however, Ukraine doubled down on the strategy, striking a range of Russian facilities, including an April 2 attack on Russia’s third-largest refinery 800 miles from the front.”
— Russia and Ukraine nearly struck a deal late last month to renew the agreement that allowed for the safety of shipping in the Black Sea before Kyiv suddenly pulled out, according to Reuters.
“A deal was reached in March ‘to ensure the safety of merchant shipping in the Black Sea’, and though Ukraine did not want to sign it formally, Kyiv gave its assent for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to announce it on March 30, the day before critical regional elections, the sources said,” reports Reuters. The reason for Kyiv’s withdrawal is unclear. Russia and Ukraine previously struck a deal to allow for safe shipping in June 2022 but Moscow withdrew from that agreement after one year.
U.S. State Department News
In a press briefing on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel urged the House to pass the aid bill for Ukraine quickly.
“So it certainly would not be hyperbole to say that every day matters, and the House, we believe, needs to act this week to support Ukraine and Israel as they respectively defend against Putin and the Russian Federation and the Iranian regime. And so this is something that we need Congress to provide urgently,” Patel said.
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A woman looks at the almost empty shelves while she looks for groceries and goods in a supermarket in Caracas, Venezuela March 23, 2018. (REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins)
The Biden administration has reimposed economic sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in response to President Nicolás Maduro's attempts to hold onto power by blocking candidates who want to run against him in the July elections.
Maduro’s government is clearly violating the conditions of the 2023 Barbados Agreement that it made with the Venezuelan opposition alliance Plataforma Unitaria Democrática in October and that stipulates that the government create conditions for free and fair elections. The U.S. conditioned its easing of oil sanctions on the Maduro government’s compliance with this agreement.
Experts say reimposing sanctions, however, is the wrong move. U.S. sanctions have already helped to cripple the ailing Venezuelan economy and exacerbated the country’s humanitarian crisis. General License 44, which lifted the sanctions, has not been in place long enough to alleviate the strain on the economy or deter Maduro’s regime, Michael Galant of the Center for Economic and Policy Research told RS.
Analysts argue that the Biden administration should instead undertake a multilateral effort to facilitate negotiations among Venezuelan political leaders so that Venezuelans can take further steps towards democratization as they head into a pivotal election year. Re-imposing sanctions will just be a step backward.
The sword hanging over Venezuela’s head
The U.S. has imposed targeted sanctions on Venezuela since 2005. But the Trump administration expanded them beginning in 2017 as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign against the Maduro government for alleged corruption and human rights abuses.
Trump’s sanctions prohibited oil sales between the U.S. and Venezuelan oil companies. Given Venezuela’s dependence on producing and exporting oil, the sanctions drove Venezuela's economy toward collapse, Galant said.
“There were already significant economic challenges, but there are very clear inflection points in Venezuela's oil output at the moment that additional sanctions are imposed,” he said.
The impact on Venezuelan society and economy has been disastrous. Shortages of basic goods and a climbing cost of living have plunged much of the population into poverty and drove more than seven million citizens to emigrate, most of them to neighboring countries and the United States.
The Biden administration eased these sanctions after the so-called Barbados Agreement between the government and the opposition coalition was signed. But while reimposing sanctions could have drastic consequences on Venezuela’s economy and people, Galant adds that the waiver’s impact should not be overstated, as the relief it has provided has always been limited. Years of sanctions have deterred foreign investment in Venezuela and hampered the country’s capacity to produce oil.
“There's always been this sword hanging over [Venezuela’s] head, the fact that sanctions could be reimposed at any time,” he said.
Certain kinds of sanctions can be effective in holding specific individuals, including government officials, accountable for corrupt practices and human rights abuses, said Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, president of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). But these differ from sanctions on the entire oil sector, sanctions that affect Venezuelan society as a whole, but have failed to deter Maduro’s regime from committing human rights abuses and engaging in corruption.
Reimposing all sanctions means returning to a status quo that doesn’t work, Jiménez Sandoval said. “That means you need to craft something different.”
An electoral year in Venezuela provides a window of opportunity for the U.S. to proceed with a new strategy, she said, adding that it should be one that does not return to economic coercion in hopes that Maduro will change and that instead focuses on facilitating opportunities for Venezuelans to exercise their vote freely and fairly in July.
A window of opportunity
A primary election last October suggests Venezuelans are ready for major change, with an overwhelming majority of the more than two million participants voting for the opposition leader María Carina Machado. But a new opposition candidate will need to take Machado’s place after Venezuela's highest court upheld a decision to bar her from running in the July general elections, alleging she committed fraud and supported U.S. sanctions.
The question now is whether the opposition can unite behind a single candidate, said Miguel Tinker Salas, a professor at Pomona College and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute. The opposition has been divided for years, making it difficult for the population to rally around a single challenger to Maduro.
Given Washington’s close ties to the opposition, the Biden administration may be able to play a role in facilitating negotiations among the various factions to settle on one candidate who can rally the support of all, according to Jiménez Sandoval. “Because [the U.S.] has been their ally, it also has leverage over them,” she said.
Selecting candidates thus far has largely been confined to the political elite in Venezuela, says David Smilde, a senior fellow at WOLA who teaches at Tulane University. He takes a similar view that the U.S. can take advantage of its influence with the opposition. But he also advocates incorporating civil society into those negotiation processes to move Venezuela in the direction of a more democratic society.
These efforts have also involved Venezuela’s neighbors. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose country has been most affected by the outflow of migrants from Venezuela, met with Maduro before sitting down opposition candidate Manuel Rosales in Caracas just last week, the same day that the U.S. officials sat down with members of Maduro’s administration in Mexico to discuss possible democratic reforms.
Reports indicate that Rosales has been “approved” by Maduro to run against him and that the meeting with Petro had Maduro’s blessing too. However, Tinker Salas says the culmination of diplomatic pressure from other Latin American countries carries significant weight nonetheless.
“It has become clear that the entire region has high stakes when it comes to bringing democracy back to Venezuela,” Jiménez Sandoval said, noting concerns that the U.S. and other leaders in the region have over increased migration of Venezuelans and more recently, whether Venezuela will escalate its claims to the disputed oil-rich Essequibo region in Guyana by engaging in armed conflict.
Tinker Salas adds, however, that the issue of Essequibo has long been raised by Venezuelan politicians hoping to harness nationalist sentiment to garner more political support. Maduro’s recent moves on the issue, experts say, is mostly likely politically motivated, as opposed to being a real threat of invasion.
The effects of the political crisis in Venezuela are not confined to within its borders, and how political actors in and outside of Venezuela and Venezuelan civil society will come together by July election remains to be seen. But Galant insists that Washington’s path forward should be one that focuses on facilitating diplomacy rather than proceeding with more sanctions, highlighting the importance of the humanitarian emergency above all.
“That outweighs the other questions. That needs to be what is held at the core of any discussion of broad economic sanctions, is understanding that this is harming millions of people,” he said.
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Protesters rally in support of Gaza in Amman, Jordan, on Oct. 18, 2023. (Omar al-Hyari/ Shutterstock)
Iranian missiles lit up the sky over Jordan this weekend as Israeli jets reportedly scrambled alongside their French, Jordanian, and U.S. counterparts to intercept the unprecedented barrage.
On the ground, regular Jordanians got their first taste of what could escalate to a broader war. Videos showed charred remnants of missiles in Marj al-Hamam, a quiet neighbourhood a short drive from downtown Amman. Some responded with levity, placing ads on the Arab equivalent of Craigslist for a “used missile”.
But the overwhelming response was anger. Jordan’s defence of Israel led to a firestorm of criticism and conspiracy on social media, with posters falsely claiming that a Jordanian princess had participated in the interceptions, while others shared fake images of King Abdullah in an Israeli uniform.
The king and his deputies responded by insisting that they would shoot down any unauthorized objects in Jordanian airspace, but it remains unclear if regular Jordanians are buying that claim.
“Things are very tense right now in Jordan,” said Sean Yom, a political science professor at Temple University. “The Jordanian government is obviously trying to do the best job that it can in just getting out of this, but it's not easy.”
This latest escalation of the Gaza war highlights the ways Israel’s campaign risks destabilizing some of the Middle East’s most conflict-averse states. The strikes, themselves a response to an Israeli bombing of an Iranian consulate, came just a few months after Iran-aligned militias attacked a U.S. base in Jordan and killed three American soldiers.
As the U.S. seeks to forge diplomatic ties between Arab states and Israel, Amman’s situation also offers a stark reminder that normalization with autocratic governments does not equal normalization with those countries’ citizens.
In recent years, the American approach to the Middle East has largely focused on freezing the situation as it stands. The Abraham Accords were designed to give Israel a stronger place in the region, allowing the Jewish state to build on previous peace deals with Jordan and Egypt and establish relations with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Morocco, and Bahrain. The deal is simple: The U.S. will invest in your regime’s stability if you accept Israel as it exists today.
But it’s not clear that these internal tensions can stay on ice as Gaza burns. In Jordan, decades of lavish U.S. aid has done little to mollify the anger that average citizens - many of whom are Palestinians - feel over Israel’s actions.
For months, Jordanians have held daily protests outside of the Israeli embassy in Amman. The government, anxious to avoid a diplomatic crisis with Israel, has cracked down on the rallies with large-scale arrests and even a few clashes with protesters.
Jordan’s role in downing Iranian drones over the weekend has further inflamed sentiments both inside the country and across the region, according to Nader Hashemi, an expert on Middle East politics and a professor at Georgetown University.
“The United States has to realize that its almost unconditional support for Israel in Gaza is producing these types of destabilizing effects,” Hashemi said. “It's going to increase the instability in Jordan.”
A ‘very delicate’ balance
Jordan is built on a series of contradictions. The country has a largely Palestinian population but maintains a close relationship with Israel. It hosts an enormous number of refugees despite barely having enough water to sustain its own citizenry. The royal court convenes a parliament but more or less ignores any decisions that the legislature provides.
These compromises are part of an understandable balancing act on the part of Jordanian officials, who must find a way to govern a small, resource-poor state in a war-torn region, argues Rami Khouri, a Jordanian-American journalist of Palestinian descent and a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut.
“That balance is very delicate, but it's always been there,” Khouri said, noting that he doesn’t expect the latest escalation to cause a major crisis. “The Jordanians have always figured it out.”
This equilibrium has grown unsteady in recent years as deep economic woes have ravaged the country. Jordan’s unemployment rate sits at roughly 22%, with nearly half of young people unable to find a job, according to the World Bank. Authorities have also cracked down on protests and shuttered some of the country’s most powerful unions. The war in Gaza has added significant fuel to this growing fire by highlighting the distance between Jordanians and their leaders.
Even prior to the war, 19% of Jordanians told pollsters that Amman’s primary foreign policy goal should be to champion the Palestinian cause - more than twice the number who said Jordan should prioritize its own security. (It’s telling that fully 40% of those surveyed said the top priority should be facilitating economic agreements that promote growth and jobs.)
This does not necessarily mean that the average Jordanian is opposed to all cooperation with Israel, as Jamal al-Tahat of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) notes. After all, Jordan relies on Israel for water and trade, two essential factors for the desert country. In al-Tahat’s view, the main concern is about whether Amman is getting a fair deal in its relationship with Tel Aviv, coupled with a deep anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza.
But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the latest protests are “very new in terms of size and in terms of the determination of the people,” al-Tahat said.
Between Iraq and a hard place
To understand Jordan’s predicament, one need only look at a map. To its north and east are Syria and Iraq, both of which have long suffered from instability and war. Jordan’s neighbors to the west are Israel and Palestine, and its only port is a thin strip of land on the Red Sea near the border with Saudi Arabia.
These geographical facts have left the monarchy with little choice but to find a powerful patron to protect its interests. The US has been more than happy to fill that role so long as Jordan toes the American line on regional issues.
From America’s point of view, it’s an easy deal. A 2021 agreement gave the US military unparalleled independence for its operations in Jordan, allowing American troops to enter and transit the country as they please. The relationship gives Washington a nearly unlimited base of operations at the heart of the Middle East.
For the royal court, U.S. backing offers a crucial layer of security, especially in moments like today. “The situation is not going to threaten the stability of the country as long as you still have the large-scale American military, financial support for Jordan,” Khouri said.
But close ties with the U.S. and Israel come with strings attached. The regime has little choice but to allow both countries to use its airspace when crises occur, but it must hold onto a certain level of plausible deniability to avoid angering the Jordanian public. “If the government admits this, it would be seen in the eyes of many Jordanians as a collaborator with Israel, and that would contravene the spirit of the Jordanian government's official stance,” Yom said.
It remains unclear how Jordan’s regime could respond if a full-scale war breaks out between Israel and Iran. Experts who spoke with Responsible Statecraft/The New Arab all doubted that Amman would proactively join the conflict, but a strong possibility remains that it could get dragged into battle despite its best efforts to stay on the sidelines. One thing is certain, according to Yom: A regional war would be “cataclysmic” for Jordan.
So how can U.S. policymakers avoid such a disaster? They can start by preaching restraint to the Israelis as they weigh further strikes on Iranian assets in the region, Yom argued. “That’s the only way Jordan is able to get out of this very difficult situation with as little damage as possible,” he said.