The military coup in Gabon this summer marked the eighth such revolt in Africa since 2020, a shocking number that is raising questions about the role and impact of US military training in these countries.
While each coup has many local dynamics and political actors, a Responsible Statecraft article by Nick Turse found that since 2008, at least 15 U.S.-trained officers have been involved in coups in West Africa and the Sahel.
Evidence suggests that Washington’s counter-terrorism, military first, strategy in West Africa and the Sahel is actually weakening African states and failing to serve African or American interests on the continent. Isn’t it time for a serious reassessment of U.S. military assistance in Africa and a change in policy that shows civilians that the U.S. can make their lives better?
Thanks to our readers and supporters, Responsible Statecraft has had a tremendous year. A complete website overhaul made possible in part by generous contributions to RS, along with amazing writing by staff and outside contributors, has helped to increase our monthly page views by 133%! In continuing to provide independent and sharp analysis on the major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the tumult of Washington politics, RS has become a go-to for readers looking for alternatives and change in the foreign policy conversation.
Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and Investigative Journalist at Large at Responsible Statecraft. He reports on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy.
Vladimir Putin has been humiliated in Syria and now he has to make up for it in Ukraine.
That’s what pro-war Russian commentators are advising the president to do in response to the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, according to the New York Times this week. That sentiment has potential to derail any momentum toward negotiating an end to the war that had been gaining at least some semblance of steam over the past weeks and months.
“Mr. Putin could intensify his costly offensive in Ukraine to recover some prestige,” says the Times. And he appears poised to do just that. This week, a Pentagon spokesperson announced that the Russians are on the verge of launching its new lethal intermediate range ballistic missile on Ukraine once again, saying they’re “trying to use every weapon that they have in their arsenal to intimidate Ukraine.”
Some Russian analysts say Putin is unlikely to be influenced by outside events, and dismiss calls for him to escalate in Ukraine as “noise.” And those calling for escalating Russia’s war in Ukraine offer few details on how a depleted Russian army can achieve such maximalist aims. But, as the Times notes, “they are united in their calls for the army to step up its assaults.”
Meanwhile, however, Moscow appears to be keeping the door open to negotiations. The Kremlin said this week that Putin’s goals of preventing Ukraine from joining NATO and solidifying control of the four eastern regions it took from Ukraine will be accomplished militarily or diplomatically, with the country’s spy chief even suggesting those goals are within reach.
Regardless of whether Putin decides to escalate in Ukraine, President-elect Trump still appears determined to end the war quickly once he assumes office next month. “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” he said on his social media platform Truth Social. He also said in an interview with NBC that he would be prepared to reduce military aid to Ukraine and withdraw the United States from NATO.
And in a new interview with TIME magazine, Trump criticized the Biden administration for allowing Ukraine to use U.S. long-range missiles to attack targets inside Russia.
“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” he said. “Why are we doing that? We're just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they're doing not only missiles, but they're doing other types of weapons. And I think that's a very big mistake, very big mistake.”
But while Trump appears to want a quick end to the war, he apparently doesn’t want the United States to play a primary role in implementing any such resolution. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the outlines of Trump’s plan are starting to emerge based on his trip to Europe last week: “Europe would have to shoulder most of the burden of supporting Kyiv with troops to oversee a cease-fire and weapons to deter Russia.”
Russian troops are close to taking the strategic eastern city of Pokrovsk, according to Ukraine’s top general, the New York Timesreported. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky said “unconventional decisions” would have to be made to bolster Ukrainian defenses although he did not specify what such actions would be.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the disbursement of a $20 billion loan to Ukraine this week. Former UK diplomat Ian Proud writes in Responsible Statecraft that “the issue of how this latest $20 billion handout to Ukraine will be paid seems entirely secondary to the point that it won’t be the end of U.S. funding to Ukraine.”
The Pentagon announced a new security assistance package for Ukraine worth nearly $1 billion this week as, according to the Associated Press, “the Biden administration rushes to spend all the congressionally approved money it has left to bolster Kyiv before President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month.”
From State Department Press Briefing on Dec. 9
Asked about U.S. pressure on Ukraine to expand the pool of eligible draftees from 25 years old to 18, spokesman Matthew Miller said, “the decisions about the composition of its military force are – those are decisions that the Ukrainians have to make for themselves. What we have made clear is that if they produce additional forces to join the fight, we and our allies will be ready to equip those forces and train those forces to enter battle.”
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Top image credit: Everett Collection via shutterstock.com
Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.
It stands as one of the enduring ironies of the post-Cold War era that this revolutionary and decidedly presentist creed has to shore up its legitimacy by continually resorting to that venerable fixture of World War II historicism, the 1938 Munich analogy. The premise is simple, and, for that reason, widely resonant: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his “lust for peace,” made war inevitable by enabling Adolf Hitler’s irredentist ambitions until they could no longer be contained by any means short of direct confrontation between the great powers.
Professor Andrew Bacevich brilliantly distilled the Munich analogy’s two constituent parts: “The first truth is that evil is real. The second is that for evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it to flinch from duty,” he wrote. “In the 1930s, with the callow governments of Great Britain and France bent on appeasing Hitler and with an isolationist America studiously refusing to exert itself, evil had its way.” This is the school playground theory of international relations: failure to stand up to a bully at the earliest possible opportunity only serves to embolden their malignant behavior, setting the stage for a larger and more painful fight down the line.
The Cold War years saw a feverish universalization of the Munich analogy whereby every foreign adversary is Adolf Hitler, every peace deal is Munich 1938, and every territorial dispute is the Sudetenland being torn away from Czechoslovakia as the free world looks on with shoulders shrugged. This was the anxiety animating the spurious domino theory that precipitated U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam, but appeasement fever was kept in check by the realities of a bipolar Cold War competition that imposed significant constraints on what the U.S. could do to counteract its powerful, nuclear-armed Soviet rival.
These constraints were lifted virtually overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet bloc. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the end of the “Vietnam syndrome,” or Americans’ healthy skepticism of war stemming from the disastrous decades-long intervention in Vietnam, following U.S. forces’ crushing victory in the Gulf War. The George W. Bush administration gave itself infinite license to intervene anywhere against anyone, including preemptively against “imminent threats,” on the grounds that anything less is tantamount to appeasement. “In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war,” Bush said in 2003. “In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth.”
Even as the threat landscape has shifted since 2003, neoconservatism’s epigoni have trotted out the Munich analogy to justify every subsequent military intervention in the Middle East. Where direct confrontation is too costly and risky, as with Russia and China, the historicists insist that anything short of a policy of total, unrelenting maximum pressure and isolation amounts to appeasement.
Thus we are subjected to the insistence, one which was always implausible but comes off as especially fantastical today, that any conclusion to the Ukraine war short of Russia’s total battlefield defeat is redolent of Chamberlain at Munich.
The Munich analogy is potent insofar as it has been used as a neoconservative cudgel to bash all dissenters as craven fools who would sell out their principles for an illusory promise of peace, but that doesn’t make it true. The reality of Munich, if it’s of any help to anyone, is that Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable in the context of mid-20th century European international politics. Nazi Germany was a uniquely dangerous adversary because it was a revisionist power with virtually unlimited, and therefore insatiable, territorial and political objectives. France and Britain could not give Hitler what he sought – to wit, destroying the international system and rebuilding it from the ground up with Germany as the global hegemon – even if they wanted to. Threats and shows of force would have shifted Hitler’s tactical calculations, but they would not have dissuaded him from the conclusion that his objectives could only be achieved through a general European war that he believed Germany could win. Paris and London were caught militarily and geopolitically flat-footed against a resurgent Germany as the U.S. continued to adhere to a policy of neutrality, a united anti-fascist front with Soviets was politically not in the cards, and ultranationalist governments were coming to power across the continent in a way that further tipped the scales against Europe’s remaining liberal powers.
Critics of “appeasement” distort the difficult policy landscape that confronted Britain and France, conjuring up opportunities for deterrence and preemption that simply did not exist in mid 1938. They distill these specious arguments into a historical analogy, the “lesson of Munich,” that doesn’t even work in its own original setting and impose it as a kind of sacred truth through which all U.S. policy decisions must be filtered.
The U.S. has never again faced an adversary like Nazi Germany. The USSR, for all its revolutionary aesthetics and rhetoric, was a status quo power that competed but also cooperated with the U.S. on the margins and never sought to challenge core Western security interests in the way that Nazi Germany did.
The contemporary strategic landscape is even less reminiscent of the 1930’s. China harbors regional ambitions in the Asia-Pacific that are situationally at odds with U.S. interests, and Russia seeks to prevent post-Soviet states from drifting into the Western camp in ways that pose a challenge to NATO. But neither adversary is pursuing objectives that can only be achieved through great power conflict, positioning itself as a global hegemon, or trying to overthrow the international system. As I explained along with my colleagues George Beebe and Anatol Lieven, Russia invaded Ukraine as part of a strategy of hybrid compellence to curtail the West’s influence in part of the post-Soviet sphere, not as a prelude to a larger planned program of continental conquest against NATO states.
The Munich analogy is deeply dangerous not because it is historically illiterate and utterly inapplicable to the challenges America faces today – though it certainly is both those things – but because, in its framing of adversaries as existential enemies that must be pressured, isolated, and confronted at every step, it precipitates the very catastrophe it is supposedly warning against. Managing these complex strategic relationships in a way that does not lead to war between the great powers will require a diverse, flexible policy toolkit that recognizes our limited resources and is able to balance deterrence and engagement, rather than committing to a policy of rollback that would have been appropriate against Nazi Germany but simply does not capture the contemporary threat environment.
The real “lesson of Munich” is how corrosive ideologically-driven historicism, completely untethered from actual history, can be to the foreign policy debate. It is long past time to lay the ghosts of 1938 to rest.
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Top Image Credit: A rebel fighter stands atop a military vehicle as he carries a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham flag in Saraqeb town in northwestern Idlib province, Syria December 1, 2024. REUTERS/Mahmoud Hassano/File Photo
As Islamist, al-Qaida-linked group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) overruns Syria amid President Assad’s sudden ouster, evidence suggesting Ukraine has assisted the group’s triumph continues to mount.
The New York Times reported earlier this month, moreover, that Ukraine and HTS were coordinating efforts including “countering Russian misinformation and providing medical assistance.” The reporting also highlighted Ukrainian intelligence head Kyrylo Budanov’s repeated suggestions that Ukraine would target its enemy Russia internationally.
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius mused that Ukraine’s intentions for assisting HTS were obvious, writing that the war-torn nation was looking for other ways to “bloody Russia’s nose and undermine its clients.” In turn, a source told the New York Times that the HTS offensive in Syria was likewise timed in part to strike a blow against mutual enemy Russia.
Indeed, Russian officials have repeatedly complained that Ukraine and HTS collaborate within an intelligence or military capacity. As Russia’s special representative for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, told Russian News Agency TASS in November: “We do indeed have information that Ukrainian specialists from the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine are on the territory of Idlib.”
“Cooperation between Ukrainian and Syrian terrorists… is underway both when it comes to the recruitment of fighters to the Ukrainian army and to mounting attacks against the Russian and Syrian troops in Syria,” permanent Russian representative to the UN Vassily Nebenzia likewise alleged in early December. “Far from concealing the fact of Ukraine's support, the HTS fighters are openly flaunting this.”
The overall impact of Ukraine support to HTS ultimately seems unclear. On one hand, an anonymous Ukrainian official recently confirmed Kyiv-Idlib cooperation to Middle East Eye, but explained that their engagements ultimately did little to steer outcomes in the militia’s successful December attack. “We might claim less than a fraction of help for [the recent] offensive,” the Ukrainian official said. On the other hand, as Middle East Eye also reported, Turkish observers posit drones gave HTS forces an advantage over Syrian government fighters.
All matters considered, Ukraine’s assistance to HTS may partially be intended to accrue legitimacy with the West amid continued war with Russia.
“Ukraine's alleged assistance to HTS forces is of limited military significance insofar as the SAA was inherently unprepared to resist the rebel offensive,” said Dr. Mark Episkopos, Quincy Institute Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of History at Marymount University.
“But it is part of Kyiv's broader effort to court Western support for its NATO accession bid by demonstrating to the US and other stakeholders its effectiveness in countering Russian interests around the world.”
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