America must counter Moscow’s ongoing advances in Africa

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union wrestled for influence in Africa. For example, the Soviets signed an agreement in 1962 with Somalia to construct a major port and military base at Berbera, and later signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1974. But in 1977, Somalia expelled the Soviets as a result of USSR support for Ethiopia in the Ogaden War. Three years later, the U.S. had replaced the Soviets as Somalia’s major power ally.

Earlier this week, in a kind of reversal of what took place in the late 1970s, Russia appeared set to replace American military personnel in the West African state of Niger. The pending expulsion of all American forces from the landlocked Sahel state follows upon a July 2023 military coup that overthrew the country’s civilian government. Not long after, on September 16, the military government joined its counterparts in Mali and Burkina Faso to create “the alliance of Sahel states.”

The common denominator among all three nations is that they are ruled by officers who seized power in a coup d’etat and have fallen under Moscow’s influence. Indeed, in January of this year Russian troops arrived in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, the first such deployment since the junta took power early in 2023. As for Mali, it has hosted Russia’s Wagner Group since December 2021. Thus, the new tripartite alliance, which nominally is meant to fight terrorism in the Sahel, is equally a sign of Moscow’s growing dominance in central Africa.

Russia’s increasing activity in the region is coming at the expense of America for two main reasons. First, the ousting of democratically elected civilian governments in all three members of the Sahel Alliance has limited Washington’s ability to provide any form of assistance to these states, especially given alleged human rights violations in all three. Moscow has no qualms about human rights violations, or autocracies for that matter; it is indeed a model for both.

Second, there is no denying that Africa is simply not high on Washington’s list of priorities. It is preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and continues to view China as the so-called “pacing threat.” Traditionally, America relied on French leadership in preserving Western security interests in its former colonies and, more generally, on its continued post-colonial influence in Francophone Africa. That is no longer the case.

In the past, Paris occasionally toyed with the notion of exiting Africa, but it did not begin to do so until recently. In February 2023, French forces left Burkina Faso, with whose junta Paris’s relations had deteriorated rapidly. Then all 2,400 French troops departed from Mali after failing to defeat terrorists in a counterinsurgency campaign. A year later, the military junta’s leader, Ibrahim Traore, vowed never again to permit “Europeans” to dominate his country. Evidently, he does not consider Russians to be “Europeans” — but then again, neither does Vladimir Putin.

Despite Russian gains in Africa, and in addition to its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, America refuses to recognize that Moscow poses a long term threat to both its own interests and those of its allies. The 2022 Biden administration National Defense Strategy painted Russia as an “acute threat” to those interests. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has asserted that “we chose the word ‘acute’ carefully.” Yet in the next breath he said that “unlike China, Russia can’t systemically challenge the United States over the long term.” Yet that is exactly what Russia appears to be doing.

It is arguably high time that the Biden administration came to grips with the reality that Russia’s expansion in Africa, like that of China, poses a serious and long-term threat to the interests of both the United States and its allies. Doing so, however, would require Washington to commit more sustained resources across what it terms “the whole of government” if it is to compete in a serious way with both Moscow and Beijing.

Such an undertaking flies in the face of the real budget declines, especially in defense, that the administration has laid out for fiscal year 2025. Yet America has no other alternative, unless it is willing to cede ever more African ground to its two most powerful adversaries in the years to come.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.