After a diplomatic struggle during which service members on the ground were complaining they were being "held hostage," the Biden administration has announced that it is pulling up stakes in Niger at the ruling junta's request.
The junta, which seized power in a coup last August, said it wanted the U.S. out. This occurred last month after a reportedly disagreeable meeting between Niger and U.S. diplomatic officials. Washington has a drone base in Niger and 1,100 Army and Air Force members, who have been conducting counterterrorism operations and training there since the days of the Global War on Terror.
This week, it was reported in the Washington Post that one of those Air Force officers had written to Congress, telling them that service members there were being "held hostage" to the diplomatic back-and-forth and that intelligence on the ground had been withheld by U.S. embassy officials in order to buy time to successfully maintain permission for the American government to stay. This has been denied both the State Department and Pentagon.
The whistleblower also said that deployments had been extended beyond six months because the junta was no longer approving new visas for any Americans.
A woman who said her husband was currently stationed there, contacted RS on Thursday to concur with the whistleblower. She said planes had not been able to fly in or out of Niger for at least two weeks and that the only supplies were getting in via truck. Service members were concerned and told they were not leaving to come home as planned.
"So they're not being told anything other than it could be a few weeks or it could be a few months," she told me. "And that's terrible. Because we already have a problem with getting people to join the military. You might want to take care of the ones we got in."
The DoD press has not returned a request for comment as of this time.
It turns out her husband will be coming home after all, but it is not clear when the demobilization will occur. According to reports on Saturday, U.S. officials have offered no timeline for withdrawal besides talks set to start in the coming days about next steps.
The move will be a blow to the U.S military, which has prized its relationships with the countries of the Sahel and the footprint that comes with it. Washington has poured billions of dollars in aid and equipment into these militaries, but in recent times it has gone sour with coups by commanders who had likely been beneficiaries of American largess and training. Niger has also kicked the French military out, as has Mali. Meanwhile, some of these juntas, including Niger, have been turning to Russia and the Wagner Group for their security needs.
Alex Thurston, a regular RS contributor and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, weighed in on potential impacts in March. "The critical question to ask will not be whether things get worse — security has steadily degraded since approximately 2015 in many parts of the central Sahel — but whether there is any proof that the presence or absence of vast American military expenditures makes any discernible difference."
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft.
Col. Ben Ibrahim, Niger Armed Forces (FAN) director of training, receives a briefing from Senior Master Sgt. Kyle Platt, 724th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron, Civil Engineer Flight, of the CE Flight operations at AB 201, Niger, March 11, 2023. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Michael Matkin)
Last week, analysts from three think tanks penned a joint op-ed for Breaking Defense to make the case for mobilizing the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, a pivot from one exceedingly costly approach to nuclear modernization to another.
After Sentinel faced a 37 percent cost overrun in early 2024, the Pentagon was forced to inform Congress of the cost spike, assess the root causes, and either cancel the program or certify it to move forward under a restructured approach. The Pentagon chose to certify it, but not before noting that the restructured program would actually come in 81 percent over budget.
The Pentagon later revealed that a major driver of the program’s cost growth was a faulty assumption that it could refurbish existing missile silos for Minuteman III, the current generation of ICBMs, to accommodate the needs of Sentinel. Now, the Pentagon is planning to build entirely new silos, at a significantly higher cost.
The three analysts from the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute — we’ll call them the Three Missileers — essentially argue that the restructured plans for the Sentinel ICBM are so over budget that mounting Sentinel on heavy trucks instead of in fixed silos would now cost less than building new silos for Sentinel. Their case rests on two assumptions. The first is that taking Sentinel on the road will cost less than building new silos, a dubious and unsubstantiated claim. The second and more fundamental assumption is that the United States needs ICBMs to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent. It doesn’t.
Regarding cost, the Three Missileers claim that “while a mobile option may have appeared too costly when Sentinel plans were set in 2014, the total cost is likely lower relative to the information we now have about the realistic cost of fixed silos.”
But they offer no evidence to support that conclusion beyond the Sentinel’s cost growth. They also don’t address the potential costs of abandoning or scaling back current contracts for the Sentinel in favor of new ones. Pentagon contracts often include provisions that penalize the government if it backs away from a planned project, and with the vast array of contracts and subcontracts involved in the Sentinel program, those costs could be significant. Without concrete plans in hand, it’s admittedly difficult to estimate the costs of a mobile approach relative to a stationary one. But even if the authors are correct that a mobile option would be cheaper, as they put it, “make no mistake, it will be costly.”
As for the strategic underpinning of their case, ICBMs are simply no longer necessary to ensure an effective and secure nuclear deterrent. As Taxpayers for Common Sense (where I work as a policy analyst) laid out in a report on the Sentinel last year, the combined explosive yield of nuclear warheads deployed on B-52s could reach up to 30 megatons if variable yield bombs are dialed up to their maximum potential. That’s 1,200 times the explosive power of the bomb the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Our fleet of ballistic missile submarines likely carries warheads with a combined explosive yield of 200 megatons, roughly 8,000 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The notion that we need 400 ICBMs on top of all that firepower is absurd. Furthermore, ICBMs used to offer capabilities that our nuclear submarines and bombers didn’t, but no longer. With advances in the range, accuracy, and destructive power of missiles and bombs deployed on the air- and sea-based legs of the nuclear triad, ICBMs don’t belong in silos or on the back of heavy trucks — they belong in a museum.
This isn’t a radical position. As Gen. George Lee Butler, the director of U.S. Strategic Command from June 1992 to February 1994, said in a 2015 interview, “I would have removed land-based missiles from our arsenal a long time ago.”
In fact, the loudest cheerleaders for forging ahead with Sentinel despite its astounding cost growth are folks with a vested interest in the program — lawmakers in states where it’s being developed, and companies who stand to profit from modernizing an obsolete leg of the triad. According to an in-depth analysis of the ICBM lobby, “ICBM contractors have donated $87 million to members of Congress in the last four election cycles alone.” Eleven of those contractors spent $226 million on lobbying over that same period.
As programs to modernize our nation’s nuclear arsenal forge ahead, we also need to modernize our nuclear weapons strategy. That means ditching an exceedingly expensive and outdated approach to nuclear deterrence that views a nuclear triad as the only way to stand up to our adversaries. For those of us without a vested interest, two legs are more than enough to stand on.
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro (Shutterstock/stringerAL) ; President Donald Trump (Shutterstock/a katz)
Donald Trump has long been a fan of using the U.S. military to wage a more vigorous war against drug cartels in Latin America. He also shows signs of using that justification as a pretext to oust regimes considered hostile to other U.S. interests.
The most recent incident in the administration’s escalating antidrug campaign took place on October 3 when “Secretary of War” Mike Hegseth announced that U.S. naval forces had sunk yet another small boat off of the coast of Venezuela. It was one of four destroyed vessels and a total of 21 people killed since late September. The administration claims they were all trying to ship illegal drugs to the United States.
Colombian president Gustavo Petro said publicly Wednesday that one of the vessels was carrying Columbian citizens and that they were killed. Two administration officials confirmed to the New York Times that Colombians were on one of the boats blown out of the water. The White House called Petro’s claims “baseless” and “reprehensible.”
However, Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option in the war on drugs long predates this episode. Mike Esper, who served as secretary of defense during the final stages of Trump’s first term, relayed in his memoirs that the president had seriously explored the option of conducting missile strikes against suspected traffickers in Mexico. Esper recalled that his boss asked him at least twice in 2020 about the feasibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels.
The president considered such a drastic step to be justified because Mexican leaders were “not in charge of their own country.”
Esper’s account is not the only evidence of Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option. After a 2019 incident in which cartel gunmen massacred a family of American Mormon ex-pats in northwest Mexico, Trump reacted with a tweet insisting that “this is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR (sic) on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!” He added: “If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively.”
Just weeks after entering the White House for his first term, Trump adopted a similar stance in a session with then‐Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto — and did so in even less cordial terms. “We are willing to help you,” Trump stated. “But they [the cartels] have to be knocked out, and you have not done a good job of knocking them out.” The U.S. president assured his counterpart that he preferred to assist the Mexican military rather than take direct action, but it was clear that the more menacing alternative existed.
The option of using the U.S. military against drug traffickers in Latin America became a prominent theme of not only Trump but other Republican political leaders in 2023 and 2024. Not surprisingly, Trump quickly joined the lobbying campaign to attack the cartels. He explicitly embraced the proliferation of proposals from GOP members of Congress at that time to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).
Other prominent Republicans, including former Attorney General William Barr and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nicki Haley (briefly a challenger to Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024), embraced the idea of using U.S. military, even special forces, to go after the traffickers.
However, Trump no longer considers an AUMF even remotely necessary. He implicitly believes that the Executive may do virtually anything he deems necessary to defend the United States. Both undocumented immigrants and suspected drug runners fall into the category of being a national security threat in his opinion.
President Trump and his aides have shifted their primary focus from Mexico to Venezuela, however. Indeed, Trump seems reasonably content with Mexico City’s current level of cooperation with U.S. anti-drug efforts, despite his frequently inflammatory rhetoric on the topic during the 2024 election campaign. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mexico’s president, Claudia Scheinbaum, concluded a new agreement to pursue the cartels more vigorously — consistent with respect for the sovereignty of both nations.
The Trump administrationin turn has agreed to take steps to stem the flow of guns from the United States to the drug gangs based in Mexico. Given these developments, Washington’s pressure on Mexico has eased for the moment regarding the drug issue. The massive trade flow between the two nations may have something to do with the White House leaning more into diplomatic solutions here.
Venezuela, on the other hand, is now in Trump’s gunsights. Administration leaders have made it clear that they consider suspected traffickers to be the equivalent of terrorists and are therefore not entitled to meaningful due process protections. By adopting that view, they are building on ugly precedents set during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which mere accusations of terrorist activity became the equivalent of definitive evidence.
There are growing indications that Trump may use the war on drugs and the war on terror as pretexts to have U.S. military forces overthrow the extreme left-wing government of Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolas Maduro. The existence of that regime has been a great annoyance to conservatives in the United States for years, and even moderate liberals are unenthusiastic about excusing, much less defending, Maduro’s corrupt, authoritarian rule.
The current U.S. administration likely is tempted to transform an ostensible anti-drug and anti-terrorist mission into a regime change crusade. In recent weeks, the United States reportedly has deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean that includes 4,500 Marines and sailors, several destroyers, an attack submarine, and 10 F-35 stealth fighters. Such a buildup of U.S. military firepower off of Venezuela’s shores is more than a little ominous.
Pursuing a regime change war using the façade of an anti-drug offensive would be unwise and potentially a disastrous blunder. Donald Trump has owed much of his political success to his promotion of an “America First” foreign policy. His rhetoric in support of such a policy always has exceeded the substance by a very wide margin, as his willingness to have the United States continue fueling the war in Ukraine clearly demonstrates.
However, one consistent central feature of Trump’s alleged America First policy has been condemnation of regime change wars and nation building crusades. A military intervention in Venezuela would entail both elements.
Granted, a U.S. effort to oust Maduro might succeed. An estimated 7.7 million people have fled Venezuela since the leftist revolutionaries led by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power. Venezuela is an economic dumpster fire, a situation not helped by Washington’s myopic policy of imposing sanctions on the beleaguered country. Maduro has endured primarily because of rigged elections and the support of well-armed partisan militias.
However, defeating those militias might not be all that easy. Even more limited options such as seizing selected ports and airfields could prove to be a difficult and bloody venture. A full-fledged regime change war could easily become another Third World fiasco for the United States on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.
When Richard Nixon coined the term “War on Drugs,” he apparently meant it as a metaphor. Trump seems to take the term quite literally, and that mentality poses a great danger to the United States.
keep readingShow less
Top photo credit: United States and Israel flags are projected on the walls of the Old city of Jerusalem in celebration after Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to end the war in Gaza, October 9, 2025. REUTERS/Sinan Abu Mayzer
Two years into the Gaza conflict and perhaps on the cusp of a successful phased ceasefire, what can we say?
On the basis of media reporting about Yahya Sinwar’s strategic rationale for attacking Israel on October 7, 2023, it seems that he believed Israel was on the brink of civil war and that the impact of a large-scale assault would severely erode its political stability. He believed that Hamas’s erstwhile allies, especially Hizballah and Iran, would open offensives against Israel, which, in combination with Hamas’s invasion, would stretch the nation’s military capabilities to the breaking point.
Years in an Israeli prison evidently led Sinwar to think that he understood Israel and what made it tick. There was something Dunning Kruger-esque about his self-confidence.
In the event, his attack unified a divided Israeli society and focused most of its electorate on the task of wiping out Hamas. Incidentally, we learned that hostage-taking works against the interests of the hostage-taker when it motivates the adversary to prioritize absolute victory even at the expense of the hostages’ lives. This was another factor that he did not anticipate. His misunderstanding, however, might be excused given the previous successes Hamas enjoyed by seizing hostages. But these very successes buttressed the refusal of Israel to add another ransom arrangement to the list.
On the Israeli side, there was an analogous story of self-deception. Reporting has focused on two elements. The first was Israel’s conviction before Oct. 7, 2023 that it had found the route to least cost stability on the Gaza front. The linchpin of this strategy was a tacit agreement with Qatar to pump cash into the Gazan economy and therefore into Hamas’s pockets. The premise was an assessment that Hamas had made its own strategic pivot toward governance and away from armed resistance. This strategy would also keep an opponent of Fatah in play, thus hamstringing the Palestinian Authority and dividing the national movement.
This approach seemed to secure quiet in the decade leading up to October 7. When a strategy seems to be working, there is generally little appetite within governments to consider alternative scenarios and hedging stratagems; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it becomes the guide to policy.
The second element was the “Konzeptzia,” the mindset that discounted both Hamas capability and motivation to challenge Israel on the battlefield. This caused Israeli military and intelligence leaders to downplay the risk of Hamas aggression. It also caused the political leadership to think that diverting troops from Southern Command to the West Bank to deal with Palestinian violence triggered by empowered settlers would be cost free.
In the end game, it was not lack of tactical warning, but rather a refusal to take it seriously because it ran against the grain of the Konzeptzia. Once it dawned on senior officers that the game was afoot, all the obstacles to swift preemption and mitigation described by Richard Betts in his work on surprise attack made disaster a certainty.
We know, too, that Hamas’s allies read the security environment very differently. It was clear from the outset that deterrence, which had been holding up relatively well between Hizballah and Israel since their brief war in 2006 and Israel and Iran since the 2015 JCPOA, was still preferred to armed conflict. Both Hizballah and Iran sought to preserve it. This necessarily meant leaving Hamas to twist in the wind. But the need to do something symbolic in lieu of something that could spin out of control, Hizballah initiated fire on Israeli assets in the northern part of the country. But the dynamic could not be fine tuned.
Before long the territory on both sides of the Blue Line had been savaged by artillery and rocket exchanges and, on the Lebanese side, Israeli airstrikes. The depopulation of Israel’s northern towns brought political pressure on the government that compounded strategic incentives to raise the stakes.
Israel had been preparing for a showdown with Hizballah since 2006, but had refrained from going to war. Hizballah’s measured – in its view — support for Hamas, which had just attacked Israeli civilians with sadistic glee, was enough to tip the balance. Iran settled for tough talk until Israel struck one of its installations in Damascus, killing senior IRGC officers. This led to missile attacks against Israel that coincided with the Gaza fighting but were not really organic to it.
We know now that the Israeli public supported Netanyahu’s focus on “absolute victory.” There were differences of opinion within the body politic and to some extent within the government over the place of hostages in this framework. But most Israelis seemed to accept the urgent priority of destroying Hamas. Indeed most Israelis were willing to accept serious tradeoffs in pursuit of this goal. Some sectors of the economy suffered, reservists were exhausted, casualties were high and Israel became increasingly isolated on the world stage.
We know, however, that diplomatic isolation is not an effective deterrent to the policies that invite it. In this instance, when Israeli society experienced October 7 in ways that many foreigners found difficult to fathom, growing isolation was not only a small price to pay but also an affirmation of right wing claims that Hamas was just the tip of an eternal antisemitic spear. We also know there was actually sufficient ambivalence in Europe and the Middle East regarding Israel’s brutal response to October 7 to ensure that isolation never evolved into punishment.
Even after a consensus regarding genocide crystallized in many capitals, punishment came only in the form of empty gestures toward Palestinian self-determination.
In part this was due to the awkward fact of Hamas’s role as the aggressor, in part to avoid clashes with the Trump administration when it was in its anti-NATO, pro-Russia phase, and in part because condemning Israel might come back to haunt them if they ever faced a similar attack. The fact that only Turkey, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Belize severed diplomatic relations with Israel over the course of the war should be the subject of careful study in the months and years ahead.
If we had not already known, we are now aware of American lack of leverage over Israel. The U.S. has been pleading for a ceasefire for at least a year while proffering arms and money in support of Israeli operations. Until now, Netanyahu has defied these pleas. The proposition that the U.S. has no usable leverage is now being debated by the Washington commentariat. Those who believe that the U.S. could control Israeli actions through threats of retaliation or imposed distance, have pointed to Donald Trump’s bluster as evidence that there was indeed a reservoir of leverage from which a right minded president could draw and that Israel’s leadership would respect. Headlines and editorials reflect the pull of this narrative.
What do we know that might clarify things? First, we know that Israel had largely achieved its explicit and implicit war aims by decimating Hamas, transferring the casualty risks of urban combat to Gazans, using hunger as a tool to use against Hamas, and demonstrating to Palestinians that Israel held the power of life and death over them. The war therefore had reached a point of sharply diminishing returns to scale.
Second, that the terms devised by the White House largely mapped onto conditions that Netanyahu had long insisted upon.
Third, Israeli overreach complicated Netanyahu’s options going forward. The attack on Qatar was pivotal in this respect. If Israel had restrained itself Netanyahu would not have faced the pressure he did from the Gulf and Washington. And there was a former British prime minister, Tony Blair, waiting in the wings with a fully fleshed out day after plan that had been coordinated with Israel, Washington and key Gulf states and geared to Trump’s 20 points.
Lastly, it is crucial to remember that Trump was not operating in a domestic political setting that his predecessors ever experienced. The combination of an utter absence of domestic constraints and an impulsive personality helped produce a good outcome for Israel and perhaps for the Palestinians. Also relevant is the interest of both Netanyahu and the Trump administration to cast Trump’s intervention in such epic terms. For Netanyahu, this provides a degree of political immunity for doing politically tricky things he wanted to do anyway; he can tell his partners on the right that he had no choice —“Trump made me do it."
And Trump, as he has said himself, wants a Nobel peace Prize. Given this context, attributions of a decisive role to Trump in bringing a war that was virtually over to provisional conclusion need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Attitudinal shifts are clearest in younger age cohorts and have therefore not reshaped party politics yet at the national level. But they will and historians will identify the Gaza war as a turning point.
Finally what do we know about how the ceasefire arrangements will play out? Based on the past two years, It is likely that phase one will conclude successfully. The 20 living hostages will be returned and an Israeli military presence in about half of Gaza’s territory will have an international imprimatur. And Israeli attacks against Palestinians will stop, or at least slow down. One thing we know from Israeli operations in Lebanon is that from Israel’s perspective, airstrikes and other operations are compatible with a ceasefire.
What we do not know is whether phase two will eventuate. The provisions are still being discussed at the technical level. And the grandiose bits — Donald Trump as head of a “peace board,” the consolidation of a technocratic government, the deployment of a rapid reaction force largely manned by Arab soldiers — these must remain for the moment in the category of unknown.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.