Mali’s Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop, shown in November, met this week with Nick Checker, head of the State Department’s Africa bureau.Francis Kokoroko/Reuters
The Trump administration has launched a charm offensive in West Africa, seeking to revive U.S. relations with the mineral-rich countries in the Sahel region where military juntas have seized power and recruited Russian troops.
A senior diplomat in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Mali this week, meeting the country’s foreign minister and pledging to respect its sovereignty. The State Department said it wants to “chart a new course” after making errors in the past.
Then-president Joe Biden had suspended military co-operation with the juntas in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso after a series of coups. But this policy has been abandoned by Mr. Trump’s administration, which now cites counterterrorism as its top priority in Africa.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly pushed for U.S. companies to acquire mineral rights in Africa and elsewhere. Analysts say the latest diplomatic campaign seems to be aimed at gaining access to West Africa’s vast mineral resources in exchange for U.S. military support to battle the Islamist extremist groups that threaten the regimes.
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Canadian companies, including Barrick Mining Corp., have invested heavily in Mali and are currently the biggest mining producers in the country. But the Malian army has struggled to contain the Islamist insurgency, despite Russia’s help. Extremist groups have moved close to Mali’s capital, Bamako, and have disrupted the supply of fuel to the city.
The three junta-led countries in the Sahel have long been hostile to the West, accusing it of “neocolonial” policies. In a signal of a thaw, however, the Pentagon recently offered to share military intelligence with the Sahel governments to help them battle the jihadists.
Nick Checker, a long-time CIA analyst who was promoted to the top post in the State Department’s Africa bureau last month, arrived on Monday in Bamako, where he met Malian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop.
The department said Mr. Checker would convey a U.S. desire “to chart a new course in the bilateral relationship and move past policy missteps.” It said Washington would pursue a similar policy in Burkina Faso and Niger “on shared security and economic interests.”
After their meeting, Mr. Diop said the talks focused on “issues related to the fight against terrorism, as well as the promotion of economic and trade exchanges within the framework of a win-win partnership.”
The leader of Mali's ruling junta, Lt. Col. Assimi Goita, centre, attends an independence day military parade in Bamako, Mali, on Sept. 22, 2022.The Associated Press
Bruno Charbonneau, a Sahel expert and professor of international relations at Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Quebec, said he suspects that the U.S. diplomatic efforts in Mali are aimed at mineral access as part of the Trump administration’s transactional approach to foreign policy.
With jihadist groups gaining ground, and the Russian troops unable to defeat them, Mali’s government is “running out of options” and desperate for military assistance, Prof. Charbonneau told The Globe and Mail.
Similar campaigns in the past, including by French forces and United Nations peacekeepers, have failed to bring peace and showed the limits of the military option in deterring the jihadists, he said.
Ebenezer Obadare, an Africa analyst at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations, said the détente between Washington and the Sahel countries “marks a remarkable volte-face on the part of all parties.”
The United States has made a “a conscious, if deeply misguided, decision to abstain from democracy promotion” and to sacrifice its principles “on the altar of economic calculation,” he said in a commentary on Tuesday.
Military juntas struggling for support as Islamist rebellion gains ground in West Africa
The U.S. defence department’s latest global strategy, released last month, says that its priority in Africa is “to prevent Islamic terrorists from using regional safe havens to strike the U.S. homeland.” It says the United States “will stand ready to take direct action against Islamic terrorists” in close co-ordination with foreign partners.
The Pentagon’s actions over the past year have confirmed this counterterrorism focus. It has sharply increased its air strikes in Somalia, targeting the al-Shabaab radical militia, and it also launched a missile strike in Nigeria, again targeting a jihadist group.
At a media briefing on Tuesday, a senior U.S. military officer said the United States was ready to work with “willing partners” to fight the expanding Islamist threat in the Sahel.
The insurgents are applying more pressure “especially across the Sahel, threatening the capitals in the region, spilling down into some of the other countries,” General Dagvin Anderson, head of U.S. Africa Command, told the online briefing.