Senegal and Chad just sent the French military packing. Why?

In late November, both Senegal and Chad – independently of one another – moved to profoundly alter their longstanding relationships with the French military.

Senegalese President Diomaye Bassirou Faye, evoking the 80th anniversary of the massacre by French soldiers of Senegalese troops recently freed from German prisoner-of-war camps, at the Thiaroye camp near Dakar, told Le Monde that “soon there will be no more French soldiers in Senegal.”

Nearly 3,000 miles to the east, Chad’s government announced that it was withdrawing from a 2019 defense cooperation agreement with France. “Sixty-six years after the proclamation of the Republic of Chad,” the statement read, “it is time for Chad to affirm its full and complete sovereignty, and to redefine its strategic partnerships according to its national priorities.”

“Sovereignty” is a word that Washington should reflect upon carefully when assessing its own Africa policy. The incoming Trump administration may not have much of an Africa policy, especially early on – but U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the permanent civilian bureaucracies at State, USAID, and elsewhere should know that their version of “partnership” may not land as intended in the current political climate of Africa, and especially in the Sahel region.

Since 2020, major political changes have swept the Sahel. Coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger toppled presidents who had been democratically elected in a procedural sense, but who had also been seen by large numbers of Sahelians as inept and corrupt – as successive rounds of the major Afrobarometer survey project made clear. All three of the overthrown presidents, meanwhile, had been fixtures of their respective countries’ politics since the 1990s, and all had been largely deferential to France.

The ruling juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger all experimented with a populist politics that leaned heavily on the idea of reinvigorated sovereignty, which included expelling French troops, rejecting the Western-backed Economic Community of West African States, and leaning more on partners such as Russia. In Niger, the junta also kicked out American troops, undermining Washington’s massive investments in a drone base and years of training programs and military-to-military collaboration.

In Chad, the sudden battlefield death of President Idriss Déby in 2021 produced a different kind of coup – one that preserved the regime, with Déby’s son Mahamat taking charge. Yet Chad’s politics have shifted too, as the younger Déby adopts some of the new sovereignty discourse. While French support was important in the early, delicate days of the reconsolidated Déby regime in 2021, since then Mahamat Déby has not hesitated to reassess Chad’s relationships with its patrons, including not only France but also the United States. In April 2024, Chad told U.S. soldiers to leave, although some may return. The shared theme with other Sahelian countries is that N’Djamena wants to set the terms.

Senegal remains free of coups. Yet a presidential election earlier this year brought a parallel kind of upset; the long-harassed opposition scored a breakthrough victory in March after then-President Macky Sall had tried to upend the electoral calendar. While Senegal has seen opposition victories before, this one is different, as Faye (and his even more prominent prime minister, Ousmane Sonko) do not come out of the familiar political class but out of a left-leaning, Pan-Africanist and yes, sovereigntist kind of politics. It remains to be seen how radical Faye and Sonko will prove, but their party recently streamrolled the snap legislative elections, giving the duo a chance to implement what they have promised will be a wide-ranging reform agenda. Across the region, then, politicians and military officers have come to power who are tired of business as usual with France, its colonial master.

For the United States, the impact of these changes has been somewhat less dramatic than for France – although the juntas have been fairly cool towards Washington. As elsewhere on the African continent, Washington benefits from not having France’s colonial baggage, and also from not having been the main face of counterterrorism in the Sahel during the past decade; France’s failures in that sphere have generated considerable mistrust and outrage in the region. At the same time, Washington easily risks being perceived as an imperialist power, or even just as an imperious one – U.S. diplomats’ bearing was apparently one factor in the breakdown of negotiations with Niger in 2023.

The point, however, is not for Washington to maintain basing and deployments in Africa by feigning greater humility. Better still would be for the U.S. to pull back. Massive training exercises and intensive security assistance do not win long-term allies, as the experience with Niger proves. And the perception that a Western power is using its military to exert a kind of neocolonialist pressure upon African countries can undermine prospects for other forms of cooperation.

The United States needs Africa not as a theater for combating Chinese and Russian influence, or as a landscape across which to chase al-Qaida and the Islamic State, but as a genuine partner in an unstable world.

Significantly, even as France faces rebukes in its former colonies, French President Emmanuel Macron was playing host to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu in a successful (at least in a diplomatic sense) state visit that focused on what the two heads of state called “a Partnership Between Equals Supporting Our Strategic Autonomy.” Now, no one should take that rhetoric at face value from either side – but it is striking how decentering security allows other aspects of a relationship to blossom. Macron, meanwhile, has also showed uncharacteristic humility in responding to Faye over the Thiaroye massacre, and Faye has appeared to leave a path open for France to chart a new course in its relations with Senegal, although a path more oriented to trade than to security.

The U.S. could even find that the current wave of “sovereignty talk” in Africa can be an asset to U.S. Africa policy, opening paths for the U.S. to move from the lopsided, counterterrorism-driven “partnerships” of yesteryear to a more robust engagement with the continent.