Three West African coup leaders — a general, a colonel and a captain — gathered last weekend to formally ally their regimes in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Their meeting dramatized two realities for Americans and allies who hope to see our children live in a world governed by laws rather than brute force. First, any strategy toward that less violent world must elevate Africa to the status of a front-line priority, not unlike Europe. Second, we must calibrate our support realistically, based on the conditions in each country. That realism means avoiding automatic, unilateral disengagements when democracy efforts are set back, as by an armed coup.
How Africa Will Shape Our Children’s World
American policy debates seldom include Africa alongside top-priority issues such as Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine, U.S. tensions with China or Middle East wars. Yet more than any other continent, Africa — with its enormous crises, resources and opportunities — will shape the world our children will inherit. Africa’s population is the world’s fastest-growing and will form a quarter of all humanity within 25 short years. Its globally critical supply of strategic minerals offers opportunities for international partnerships to accelerate economic and human development in Africa and a more sustainable global economy. Its unfarmed arable lands form a huge portion of our planet’s total — 60 percent by some estimates. Yet unless its farmers can adapt to (and help reduce) climate change, Africa is likely to suffer productivity losses in this century that could increase malnutrition, the U.N. agricultural agency has reported.
In short, the continent’s massive scale of simultaneous possibility and risk means that international investment in Africa’s strivings for effective democracy and rule of law can help make it a 21st-century engine of stability and prosperity, at home and beyond. By contrast, an Africa that is ignored and allowed to slide into chaos will multiply global catastrophes of recent years: wars, unprecedented human displacement and migrations, unaddressed climate disasters and risks of epidemic disease.
These global stakes make Africa a front line in efforts to save the 80-year-old experiment, led by America after World War II, of international institutions and a “rules-based order” to reduce global violence. The United States and other rule-of-law advocates must urgently help reform and revitalize that multinational system by making it fairer to a “global south” excluded from its formation and, still, from its power centers. The alternative is to risk seeing authoritarians — from Russia, China or elsewhere — force the system’s collapse in part by recruiting help from African and other governments that find too little hope in it.
As 30 years ago, following the Cold War, a “global struggle to define the future of the international system is driving disorder in Africa,” notes the National Security Council’s recent Africa director, Judd Devermont, in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. Yet “with Western powers focused on addressing the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, they are not directing enough attention and resources to meet the current challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa.”
West Africa: Democracies and Coups
No region dramatizes Africa’s contrast of opportunity and risk more than the continent’s west. Last week’s meeting of three defiant military rulers reflects a commonly seen image of West Africa. Their countries are part of the world’s largest contiguous region of direct military rule: six Sahel countries governing 150 million people from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Russian forces of the former Wagner Group support at least four of those coup-installed regimes in their militarily unwinnable fights against decade-old jihadist insurgencies. This gives Russia an open-ended opportunity to manipulate these conflicts for lucrative mining concessions, political influence, U.N. General Assembly votes, or disinformation warfare. Russia’s roles in the Sahel firmly disprove, if it were necessary, any illusion that the 21st-century world permits such a thing as an isolated conflict.
But West Africa’s often-overlooked good news is that a vibrant arc of evolving yet resilient democracies — from Senegal to Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria — weighs against authoritarianism. West Africans are already doing the heavy lifting of building democracy. International support, within and beyond the region, has helped win progress.
West Africans are already doing the heavy lifting of building democracy.Liberia this year accomplished its second consecutive peaceful transfer of presidential power, this after an excruciatingly close vote tally. Liberian civic groups, with U.S. diplomatic support, allied with West Africa’s 15-nation bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to press Liberia’s political parties to sign and respect the Farmington River Declaration, committing them to avoiding inflammatory rhetoric and ensuring peaceful elections. Weeks later, ECOWAS and other international partners backed Senegalese citizens in nonviolently defeating an attempt by President Macky Sall to unconstitutionally extend his rule. Peaceful street protests and a campaign by civic groups helped steel a constitutional court into overruling Sall’s attempt, leading him to accept a peaceful election and transfer power to his opponent, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye.
Sahel Coup Regimes Dig In
Amid current global crises, the July 6 meeting of coup leaders from Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso stirred only modest headlines. The men proclaimed that they had formed a “confederation,” the Alliance of Sahel States, in defiance of ECOWAS, which adamantly opposes military coups and from which they are withdrawing. ECOWAS vowed to intensify its efforts at dialogues to achieve transitions to civilian rule.
The three officers seized power between 2020 and 2023; they accuse their elected civilian predecessors of surrendering their countries’ interests to their former colonial ruler, France, and to ECOWAS, notably its heavyweight member, Nigeria. The three army regimes now rule in defense of “national sovereignty,” declared Niger’s ruler, General Abdourahmane Tiani, and with support “from sincere partners such as Russia, China and Turkey,” according to Mali’s coup leader, Colonel Assimi Goita.
The Sahel militaries’ new alliance reflects their entrenchment in power. In Mali, Goita’s army regime promised in 2020 to hold elections for a civilian government within 18 months, but has twice extended its rule, most recently in May, and now says it can rule until 2027. Days later, Burkina Faso’s army regime extended its originally promised 21-month transition period to five years.
Sustained, Calibrated Engagement
To support African democracy, prosperity and security, the U.S government should tailor engagements in each country to fit the local conditions, which vary widely. This means assessing the state of democratic governance — accountability, rule of law, citizen participation, human rights and public services, including citizen security — and the efforts that a government is making or permitting for improvements. Wherever U.S engagement can use (or open) space for those improvements, even under armed rule, the United States should stay in the game. While U.S. law rightly halts aid such as “train and equip” missions to any military that commits a coup, democratic partners should intensify other engagements to build incentives and relationships that can advance transitions to more inclusive and effective democratic governance.
These engagements should use the classic U.S “three D’s” of foreign policy — diplomatic, defense and development efforts to build capacities of government and civil society that will be important to a transition. This could include elections personnel; human rights and anti-corruption activists; peacebuilders; representatives of politically marginalized groups; police; journalists and news organizations; legislators and judicial personnel. Even soldiers could be invited for training that builds relationships and understanding that military rule is a dead end. People-to-people engagement — through programs such as the Peace Corps, the Young African Leaders Initiative, fellowships and visitors programs — strengthen relationships and underscore the shared values of Americans and Africans. Such programs should be elevated and can be part of a broader narrative to counter disinformation campaigns, which the Africa Center for Strategic Studies finds have quadrupled over just two years ago, exacerbating anti-Western ideas and poisoning political atmospheres continent-wide.
America’s toolbox should include a “fourth D.” Diaspora communities nationwide offer a powerful advantage over America’s authoritarian competitors for influence. We should find creative ways worldwide to engage these resources, which on Africa are deeply under-recognized and unused. A first step, with many more needed, is that a White House advisory council on African diaspora engagement, named last year, convened in March and discussed with business and other representatives ways to bolster investment in Africa from within America’s Black business communities.
U.S. and allied engagement with African democracies should add the “heavy pro-democracy tool” of focused investment. Promoting investment “flips the script” of traditional development programming, responding to Africans’ own priorities — and it can be designed to bolster their local efforts to consolidate the rule of law and transparent governance. African democracies also should be invited as close partners — in high-level meetings such as the state visit to Washington in May of Kenya’s president, and in Kenya’s designation as a U.S. “major non-NATO ally.” It is these democracies — South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria are other examples — whom we should make our closest partners in the reforms of international institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank and Group of Twenty nations.