Trump returns to a failed playbook in Africa

The Trump administration is reportedly increasing its intelligence sharing and military support to military-ruled Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — all as part of a transactional framework aimed at boosting American access to critical minerals while also contesting Russian and Chinese influence in Africa. The administration’s approach may well find a receptive audience in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey, as well as within hawkish elements of the national security bureaucracy back in Washington. Yet the enhanced support is unlikely to make a meaningful difference in combating insurgencies in the troubled Sahel region.

The central Sahelian countries have been troubled by jihadist activity since the 2000s, and a rebellion in northern Mali in 2012 provided jihadists an even greater role in the region. Intensive French counterterrorism operations from 2013 to 2022 initially knocked jihadists back. Yet from 2015 onwards, insurgency spread from northern Mali into central zones of that country and into Burkina Faso and Niger, eventually spilling over into Benin, Togo, and Cote d’Ivoire as well (although Cote d’Ivoire has achieved some tenuous success in blunting jihadists’ momentum there).

As insecurity intensified in the region, the Sahel’s civilian leaders appeared flummoxed, while national militaries responded with heavy-handed yet inconsistent operations that inflamed, rather than undermined, jihadist mobilization. Mounting insecurity and citizens’ widespread disappointment with their civilian leaders resulted in a string of coups from 2020 to 2023.

The military regimes that took power stressed a message of national sovereignty and empowerment, which involved expelling French forces, challenging the terms of multinational firms’ resource extraction, and escalating the military campaigns against jihadists. The “sovereigntist” message has electrified many citizens in the Sahel and beyond, giving the military regimes significant popular appeal, but its application in counterinsurgency has been a disaster: violence has risen, and Mali and Burkina Faso in particular have progressively lost control of their national territory. A set of coordinated attacks in western Mali on July 1 underscored the expansion and intensification of jihadist violence across most of that country.

Some commentators blame a supposed “security vacuum” for the instability that has mounted under the juntas’ watch. Yet the departure of French troops (and the suspension of various forms of cooperation with Washington, such as the Nigerien junta’s decision to expel American troops) is, at most, one factor among many in explaining rising violence. Neither French operations nor American assistance halted the expansion of jihadist insurgencies in the late 2010s, and the patronizing and distorting effects of Western security assistance helped create the conditions that led to the coups – and to the anti-Western tenor of the juntas.

Meanwhile, even as Paris and Washington (under Biden) decried the Sahelian juntas’ (and particularly the Malian regime’s) embrace of Russian assistance, Russian counterterrorism deployments merely took the logic of the “War on Terror” to its brutal conclusion, as Russian and Malian patrols terrorized civilians in the name of restoring security. All of the Sahel’s would-be external security providers offer more or less the same hollow promise – namely, each external partner promises that it has the most sophisticated recipe for killing jihadists. All have failed. The Trump administration can even mimic Russia by promising security assistance without the kind of preachy rhetoric around human rights, development, and “good governance” that the Biden administration used and that French President Emmanual Macron also indulged in. But “taking the gloves off,” as Russia’s actions have shown, only exacerbates civilian suffering while delivering just as much failure as the French and American version of the Sahelian “War on Terror” did.

Outside powers’ record of failure in the Sahel suggests that the Trump administration’s offers of intelligence and security assistance likewise mean little. Intelligence sharing might help locate top jihadist leaders, for example — but the French killed several dozens of senior operatives without unraveling the insurgency, and the Malian junta has repeatedly trumpeted its kills and captures of jihadist commanders. Intelligence sharing cannot fundamentally address the problem of an insurgency with a mass base of young fighters drawn from both urban and rural communities, able to paralyze key transport arteries, strike military outposts, impose economic blockades on important towns, and ambush both national militaries and foreign “trainers” in remote locations (such as Tinzaouaten, Mali, as the Russians learned in 2024; and Tongo-Tongo, Niger, as the Americans learned in 2017).

Nor is the problem of security one that comes down to either hardware, training, or even money — the Sahelian insurgencies have deep social roots, the region’s militaries (and paramilitaries) are riven with internal problems, and the skeletal states of the Sahel are ill-equipped to restore effective governance no matter whether it is civilians or generals who are in charge.

The kind of transaction that Trump administration officials have in mind may also fizzle out. Security for minerals sounds straightforward enough but ill-fits the sovereigntist mood in the region, where regimes and many citizens are eager to have more, rather than less, control over extraction and profits. As firms such as Canada’s Barrick are discovering in Mali, meanwhile, the juntas are formidable opponents, willing to detain staff, poach senior employees, and demand more taxes.

While Trump officials may hope to pry open new opportunities for American firms, those same firms would be bold, if not outright reckless, to rush into a fast-moving and risky environment. The politics of resource extraction also blur into the murky world of intra-junta rivalries and tensions, and any minister or government interlocutor who promises something ultimately serves only at the pleasure of the military ruler(s).

Finally, it is striking how little changes in Washington’s thinking about security in Africa. If the Trump administration is less concerned with human rights than were the Biden or Obama administrations, fundamental dynamics nevertheless remain the same — particularly the idea that intelligence and security assistance are transformative levers for transforming conditions on the ground and/or for securing other policy goals, whether geopolitical influence or critical minerals.

Even amid Trump’s personalistic and ad hoc policymaking style, meanwhile, the renewed outreach to the Sahel is likely good news for bureaucracies such as U.S. Africa Command, which risked being set adrift (or even downgraded) under Trump. In resuming cooperation without seriously reflecting on past failures, the administration and the bureaucracy may simply fall back into old patterns of security cooperation that fit governments’ wants without addressing ordinary people’s needs.