Africa in the New Cold War

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With a civil war tearing apart Sudan, terrorist threats escalating across Africa, tensions growing between Ethiopia, Somalia, and Egypt, and Russia deepening its involvement in the Sahel, Africa remains a hotbed of geopolitical turmoil.

The United States military’s recent withdrawal from Niger and the Russia-China-Iran axis’s rising influence further exemplify the pressing foreign policy obstacles the US faces on the continent.

How is great power competition reshaping Africa? What major terrorist organizations threaten African security, and why do these groups matter for America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization  and Middle Eastern allies? And most importantly, what conclusions should policymakers draw from the Biden administration’s Africa policy?

Join Hudson for an expert discussion on these critical issues.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Zineb Riboua:

Thank you very much for joining us today. I am Zineb Riboua, research fellow and program manager of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute. I mainly work on Israel-Arab relations, Russia and China’s involvement in the region. And naturally, I pay close attention to what is happening in Africa. Before I introduce our panelists, I would like to thank his Excellency, Ambassador of Djibouti, Mohamed Siad Doualeh for joining us today. We are very honored to have you with us.

So, let’s start with Mr. Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS. He was previously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, and at the State Department he served as the Chief of Staff to successive presidential special envoys for Sudan. He has also worked in democracy and governments with the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the International Organization on Migration.

Second, my colleague Josh Meservey, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he focuses on great power competition in Africa, African geopolitics, and counterterrorism. He was previously a research fellow for Africa at the Heritage Foundation. Before joining Heritage, he worked at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and at the Army and at the US Army Special Operations Command. He’s also a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Zambia and extended his service there to work for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Finally, Mr. Aaron Zelin, the Gloria and Ken Levy Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he also directs the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map Project. Zelin is also a visiting research scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, Founder of the widely acclaimed website, but now he told me it’s at Substack, Jihadology, and a contributing writer for War on the Rock’s adversarial newsletter. He is also the author of the book, Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad.

So before we just kick off this whole conversation, when we look at the map, there is an Israel-Iran War, another one in Ukraine. So, how have these two fronts changed Africa? How would you describe the geopolitical landscape of the continent? Maybe Josh, can start with you.

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, sure. And first, thanks Zineb, for convening this and thanks everyone for attending.

Well, those were big questions. Maybe briefly on the Israel-Iran conflicts, there’s many elements of it, but I think vis-a-vis Africa, I think the one that jumps out at me is that Israel was in the process of a rapprochement with many Afghan countries for this conflict with Hamas and of Hezbollah, sort of reignited let’s say. If you remember Bibi Netanyahu had become the first Israeli Prime Minister in something like 50 years to visit the continent, this was back in 2016, I believe in his first go-around. And they had opened a number of diplomatic missions on the continent and there was some real momentum. I think that’s stalled right now. Everything is sort of frozen on diplomatic front for the Israelis I would say, because of this conflict. The Palestinian issues still have a lot of resonance in many African countries, of course, especially in South Africa for a whole variety of reasons that we could get them to. But so I think that’s been one very obvious ratification on the continent for this.

Iran has made a bit of a comeback recently on the continent, primarily because of the Emiratis and Saudis were able to elbow them out a bit out of the East Africa region where they gained a real foothold for a while, but now that momentum looks like it’s maybe has reversed. And Sudan just re-engaged diplomatically with Iran and there’s been weapons showing up, Iranian weapons showing up in places like Ethiopia and Sudan again. So I think Iran has maybe benefited a little bit from this, but TBD, because the war against Hezbollah right now, Hezbollah has funding networks all across continent, especially West Africa. So I’m very curious to see what the potential ramifications are there because supposedly Hezbollah’s financing networks are getting hit hard during this current phase of the conflict. And so I don’t know if that means, for instance, the West African networks become more important for Hezbollah, or if it disrupts them entirely as well. So, sort of a space to watch there.

Very quickly, Ukraine into Russia, I think when the war broke out, it reminded or maybe alerted the Ukrainians for the first time about the diplomatic importance of Africa. I think people in Washington DC were caught off guard potentially by it as well. Ukrainians have opened up something like six or seven missions on the continent just since the war began. They’ve tried sort of grain diplomacy because African countries are so dependent on Russian and Ukrainian grains. So they’ve made gifts and struck arrangements to supply grain to the continent because they saw that at places like the United Nations, African countries are a huge voting bloc. And it’s very hard to do things like condemn Russian aggression, for instance, without a significant number of African countries on board. I can leave it there, the Russians have been up to a lot as well, but we have limited time, and I’ll let my colleagues come here.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, let Cameron pick up on that because you also followed Sudan very, very closely.

Cameron Hudson:

I do. I would just say maybe on the geopolitics of competition in Africa right now, I mean, that is all true that there is this heightened kind of geopolitical contestation, but I don’t think that it’s unwelcome in Africa. I think how we talk about it, how we frame it, how we prioritize our pursuits on the continent is perhaps questioned, but I think African countries have by and large welcomed these choices.

They have welcomed having a choice in who their security partners are, who their development partners are, who their investment partners are. They have said in their own strategic documents like Agenda 2063, which is the AU’s kind of long-term vision for the continent, they say very clearly in there that the kind of post-Cold War unipolar world has not benefited the African continent. And that for Africa to succeed, how they define success in a variety of ways, requires a multitude of partners. And I have heard many times from them that from a variety of African countries and leaders that whether it’s China or Russia or Iran or Turkey or Saudi Arabia, it doesn’t really matter. They’re looking for the best deal for themselves.

And so we talk, I think in Washington a lot about this geopolitical contest, and I know that many African countries bristle at the notion of a new Cold War and that we would frame our engagement in Africa, not because Africa has inherent value to US national security interests, but we are doing it because we are trying to somehow counter China, counter Russia, counter some force. And so I think that the current administration and hopefully future administrations will do a good job or a better job at and framing our engagement. And Josh touched on a few of the reasons why Africa matters to US national security, and it’s not just the minerals that are in the ground, which is a part of why it matters to US national security. And it’s not just because of a burgeoning kind of terrorist movement that is taking hold across a vast swath of North Central Africa. There’s a host of other reasons to include the large voting bloc at the United Nations.

So there is this contestation that is going on. There are a host of new entrants that have worked their way back to the table, and those new entrants are making the ability for the United States to leverage its traditional hard power and soft power on the continent, much more difficult. And so it means that we have to up our game, we have to up our engagement, we have to have responses that are tailored to these countries.

And just to touch on something that Josh was talking about, that the wars in Gaza and in Ukraine, I think that we, again in Washington in the Africa Bureau at the State Department and across our inter-agency, we ignore how much in this kind of globalized world our ability to have influence and leverage in Africa runs through Gaza and it runs through Ukraine. Africans, I think are in many cases really dismayed at some of our policies in other parts of the world that might not touch Africa in any kind of direct way. Indirectly they do, I think with our sanctions and with other prohibitions that we’ve put on especially on Russia, which affect their ability to buy grain or fertilizer to trade with a traditional partner. But I think in many ways it’s deeper than that. It gets at what they would, I think view as an American hypocrisy.

In a place like Africa, we like to talk about our values a lot and Africa is a great little Petri dish where we can talk about our values because we don’t talk about them everywhere in the same way and we don’t apply our values uniformly around the world. And that’s what happens when you’re a superpower and that’s what happens when you have competing interests in countries and regions, which the United States does. But increasingly, I think Africans watch the policies that we set in the Middle East or the policies that we set in Eastern Europe, and they note the disparity about how US values are applied differently to different regions of the world, and they’re calling us on that increasingly. So this geopolitical contest that is happening, it’s playing out across the world and it’s affecting our policies in Africa in ways that our policymakers on Africa don’t have control over and don’t even necessarily have a say in when it comes to inter-agency conversations. So I think that is, it’s a fact and I think it’s going to be a real challenge in how we manage our relationship with this continent going forward.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, it seemed very clear to me, especially when the Russians came to Mali and Niger and Burkina Faso, that’s something they very much highlighted and got support. So just to stay on this, explaining and describing the geopolitical landscape today, Aaron, you very much follow all the Jihadi threats from the region, especially from the Sahel. How have things changed these last four years, I mean, since the Biden Administration took office?

Aaron Zelin:

Yeah, thank you for having me and thanks for everybody being here. It’s been quite a monumental change, of course. I mean, after 9/11, the US set up a number of counterterrorism initiatives with many countries in North Africa, as well as in the Sahel region, as well as in the Horn of Africa in particular. But what’s been most interesting is that after Al-Qaeda’s branch in Mali took over large swaths of the country back in 2012 and ‘13, and then the French went in, there was a counterinsurgency, counterterrorism campaign going on there. And while it was in no way perfect with what the French or even the United States was doing, it was keeping things relatively at a lower boil.

However, one of the things we’ve seen since the series of coups have occurred first in Mali, then we saw it in Burkina Faso, and then most recently in Niger, and actually, there was a broken up one in I believe, Benin just last month, is that through originally the Wagner group and then more recently, more officially Russia, you’ve seen them become sort of the preferred counterterrorism partner to these local governments. And since 2020, because Russia sort of has a different view on how it conducts war counterterrorism to France or the United States, the level of violence has increased four-fold just in the last four years. And we’ve seen that the expansion of both Al-Qaeda’s branch there, as well as the Islamic State’s branch there, have now continued to spread greater and greater.

So we see attacks not just happening in those three countries, but we’re also seeing things going cross-border into Benin and Togo. You’re starting to see countries like Ghana or Senegal worried about their own security and what that could mean. And part of that is because Russia has a different rule of engagement, vis-a-vis how it conducts its counterterrorism and therefore, a lot of civilians are massacred when they’re trying to go after the actual jihadist groups. And as a consequence, you either have individuals fleeing and they’re foregoing north to try and get a better life, whether it’s stopping in North Africa or even getting into Western Europe, but then there are others that want revenge in what’s going on and they will join up with these different groups.

And you see that while Al-Qaeda hasn’t always been as open about it trying to be involved in sort of local governance or social services because from their perspective it has to be this gradualist process. They don’t want there to essentially be an address where somebody can go and go after them. But you do see at the local level that they are involved in this in different parts of Mali as well as Burkina Faso in particular. And one of the interesting things we’ve also seen is that the Islamic State has been able to take over territory in different parts of Mali as well now. And there, it’s very low level, it’s not comparative to say what we saw in Iraq and Syria a decade ago, let alone maybe what we saw for a year or two in Libya. But you do see them being involved in implementing their sort of vision of life locally.

And one of the thing that many worry about that focus on these issues is that you sort of have the Islamic state in parts of Eastern Central Mali taking control of these areas around the Menaka region, but then you also have the Islamic State in control of some areas in Northwestern Nigeria. And the issue is, well, what happens if they then link up through Niger? So then you have the same scenario that we saw where the ISIS narrative breaking the so-called borders between Iraq and Syria. They tried to do that with Libya and Tunisia, that didn’t really work out, but it’s something that they’re trying to do.

And one of the worries I think for those that follow this beyond just the local ramifications of this destabilization, is that it’ll provide them space and time to potentially plot attacks from Mali or Niger for that matter, into other countries abroad, whether regionally or even in Western countries. I mean, while historically most of the Islamic State external operation attacks were coming from Syria and lesser extent Libya, what we’ve noticed in the last year or two is an increase of attacks coming from Afghanistan, but seven other Islamic State so-called provinces from South Asia to the Middle East to Africa, including IS and Somali has done some external operations.

So it’s definitely an area of major concern, but the issue is that now that Russia is sort of in control of that so-called counterterrorism space, from my perspective, it doesn’t seem that the United States wants to have some turf war over counterterrorism with another country like Russia. And therefore, this creates a scenario where not much can be done from the outside, unfortunately because of this. And that’s one of the questions we have for those that follow counterterrorism is, if say the United States left Iraq and Syria, well, what would that mean if the future of the Islamic state is able to regenerate itself there? And Russia’s already in Syria, so you could see the scenario playing out where the US doesn’t have much maneuverability to deal with these groups in the same way it has over the last 10 or 20 years.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, it was especially interesting to me where you could see Wagner rising. I mean, it’s true, Russia is very much struggling in Ukraine, but they’ve been able to gain impressive footprint in the region, especially after French withdrawal. And there’s also the rise with not just the Islamic State and terrorist groups, but also of separatist groups like the Tuareg, Azawad and so on, which I found very interesting.

But Josh, you talked a bit about how countries like South Africa and others kind of rejoice by seeing all of this unfolding, especially with the Russia-China-Iran axis rising in the Middle East and across the region. How would you explain that? What would be the main drivers of this?

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, I don’t know if I would say they rejoice per se, but they certainly. . . And I think Cameron referenced this as well, many African countries see the global system as currently constructed as unfair, and they have a few specific grievances within that currently. One is, they dislike sanctions, so there are recurring resolutions at the United Nations that decry coercive unilateral action, or I can’t remember the exact phrase of our, but it’s something like that. And African countries usually sign up to that. The fact that most of their debt is dollar-denominated means that their debt is very tied to what the Fed for instance does here in the United States, and their debt can get suddenly much more expensive. And then the lack of representation, what they would say is a lack of representation at the UN Security Council is another sort of frequent criticism that you hear.

And historically, countries like China, which have framed themselves as part of the developing world and in solidarity with African states that are also of course mostly developing, has played on not those specific grievances I just referenced, but the more general idea of solidarity, and the fact that this is an unfair global system. China does this self-interestedly and opportunistically, because they believe that the current global order suppresses its own rise back to its rightful place at the center, really of the globe. Xi Jinping has actually used that exact phrasing, about China being at the center, and they think the US-led system suppresses that. So, and they’ve believed that since the time of Mao. Mao has, you can go back and read some of the things he said, which is really interesting.

And so they believe that areas or they believe the developing world is a natural constituency to help them. And there’s some truth to that because like I said, there are these specific grievances. There’s historical reasons for distrust of the current system. It’s oftentimes linked with in some people’s mind with colonialism for instance, and this is the same system that imposed colonialism on us. In some specific countries like South Africa, probably they would link it to apartheid in some ways because the apartheid government was more aligned with the West during the Cold War. So they have their own specific grievances. Then the Chinese and the Russians and other sort of revisionist powers see opportunities within that.

My contention is that I don’t know if a lot of African countries or anybody really, has thought through all the ramifications of what a profound altering of the current world order would look like, because for all of its insufficiencies, the current world order has overseen an unprecedented era of global prosperity, even though we still have all the poverty issues, etc, etc. it’s largely, I mean, war and violence will always be with us, but I still think you can make a real argument that the current global order has avoided some of the most destructive types of wars. After World War II, this is the system that emerged and we’ve had terrible wars since then or there’s terrible wars right now, but it’s all a relative measure. And I think you can argue that relatively speaking, this has been better for the globe.

I think what happens if we see a true alteration of the current global order, we return to the area of sort of spheres of influence, I think that’s where we go back to. You see China for instance, dominate East Asia, which they think is their sort of God-given right to do. See how they treat the Philippines currently and these disputes over islands that are 20 miles off Philippines coasts and 300 miles off of China’s coast. And then you see again, just whatever regional power can assert itself will assert itself in this of sort of, I don’t know, post-Bretton Woods order. So I don’t know if that’s exactly what everybody who criticizes the international system is signing up for.

I think they have specific grievances with some validity, others I think are less valid. But again, I wonder if anyone has thought through, okay, if you do indeed, somehow the dollar no longer becomes a global currency. What are the actual ramifications of that? Nobody forced the dollar to become the global currency. It became the global currency because it was the most useful one and it best facilitated international transactions and everything else. So I think that’s an area for everyone to think through very carefully. Right? When China talks about democratizing the international system or these other phrases of art that they use, what would the actual real-world implications of that be if they succeeded? And so it’s very complex and historically, African countries have been on board with elements of that, but again, I don’t think they actually subscribe to the entire agenda.

Now I’m speaking on average, so there’s a lot of diversity of opinion within Africa on these issues, but I wonder if they really want a truly spheres of influence sort of international scene, or if they just have specific grievances that they’d like to address without demolishing the entire system. But of course, demolishing the system is essentially what China and Iran and the Russias of the world are largely after.

Zineb Riboua:

Okay, Cameron, just to follow up on what Josh said. So what is the United States doing wrong here? Seems that for Russia and China and Iran, it’s pretty clear how much Africa is very much useful. But for example, right after Wagner took over Mali in Burkina Faso, United States clearly struggled and they had to withdraw from Niger where there is a 110 million air base that they’re invested in. Instead of Sudan normalizing relations with Israel, it normalized relations with Iran. So, how would you describe the situation?

Cameron Hudson:

Yeah, I mean, I think Washington has maybe been a bit complacent in its approach to the continent and I think we were slow to recognize that there were alternatives to the Washington-led approach, the Washington-led financial approach, development approach, security approach. And that, as I said before, this has been a welcome change for Africans to have this diversity of partners that they can choose from, that they can play off of each other because they’re not naive in this either, right? I mean, so they stoke the competitive fires because they want better deals for themselves.

So I think Washington is slow though, to respond to these changing dynamics. Just as we are with respect to the Belt and Road or something, right? Where we missed the boat on that train 20 years ago and we’re playing catch up now in Angola and some select places. And we’ll see if that approach, which is I think very much drawn from the Chinese playbook, if it’s replicable, if it’s scalable, if it’s something that survives this administration and is picked up by future administrations. But I do think that we have been slow to recognize these trends on the continent.

And I think the biggest wake-up call was around the war in Ukraine, when we organized the world to condemn Russia’s invasion. And it was met with a whimper and not a roar, right? And most of that whimper came from Africa. And I think that was a real wake-up call to not just to this administration, but to many of us. And it was a signal of, we haven’t been tending to these relationships to the degree that we should, and you can do the tabulation of how many times Chinese leaders have been to the continent and American leaders and what those visits look like and what those personal exchanges look like. And we can be very critical because there’s a lot to criticize, in terms of how the US has approached managing those relationships with 54 African countries. Right? So we have been slow, we’re playing catch-up now. I think that there has been an uptick in interest and in understanding the strategic value of the continent.

But even if you look at the Biden Administration strategy for Africa, which they released two years ago now, it really defines Africa as the continent of the future, and Africa has always been the continent of the future. The question for me is, when is the continent going to be the continent of today, that we have to prioritize today? That we can’t cancel trips because something else happens in the world, that that’s more important to us, right? Or, I think that’s our challenge is it’s fine to recognize that in 1950 we said in 2000 Africa was going to be important, and in 2024 we’re saying Africa is going to be important in 2050.

And that’s all true but unless Africa is important today to US policymakers, then when 2050 rolls around and one in four people on this earth are African, we will have already lost the leverage game and the influence game and the ability to kind of shape outcomes, create partnerships, create alliances, and expand a community of democracies, of countries at peace. We will be far more disadvantaged than we even are today in trying to do that if we don’t, I think, prioritize the relationship today. And I would just say one thing about how we go about it. Russia is a destructive force in many ways. Yes, they play on the kind of anti-colonial legacy that they have and they are able to kind of pick out and isolate our own hypocrisies and amplify them, and we give them plenty of opportunity and fodder to do that.

But it’s a lot easier to break things than to build things. Right? And I think ultimately what we are trying to do is build things, and it’s a lot easier to throw a spanner in the works and to prevent things from happening and undermine democracy promotion programs that we might do. It’s easier to undermine and it’s cheap, right? You can do it on the cheap and I think that we have seen from Russia an ability to really navigate on a pretty thin budget with pretty thin margins, but to have an outsized impact on the things that we’re trying to build. And I think that that asymmetry in what we’re trying to achieve and the methods that we’re using to achieve it puts us at a disadvantage if we are not making the necessary investments that we’re not yet.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, exactly. It was amazing to me to see how with Wagner, it was really just telegram channels and a few mercenaries that they pay, and then there you have it. It’s a coup and a lot of resentment.

And so Aaron, when I see now the Sahel, it’s obviously the Jihadi threat is obviously blowing up. And for the Burkina Faso military junta and others, it’s obviously an embarrassment because they’re allied with Russia, they thought that Wagner is going to deliver 100 percent on countering terrorism and they got more. Do you think that there is an opportunity for the United States to exploit here?

Aaron Zelin:

Yeah, no, I think it’s a very important question, especially over the next few years as that the Biden Administration’s been talking about diplomacy since they got into the government, but we really haven’t seen a lot of it being enacted in a targeted manner. And I think that in this case, it could be a really important pressure point to, even though the US has withdrawn militarily from some of these countries, diplomatically, it’s key to continue to talk to these governments and be like, “Hey, look, you wanted to gamble on some other model, but it’s been a total failure, whether it’s in terms of you no longer having control of certain parts of your country’s territory anymore because the Jihadi groups do. Or the fact that the Russians’ way of doing counterterrorism has destabilized things.”

I mean, one of the lessons I think that’s important to think through is that Russia was able to try and parlay that they did counterterrorism in Syria with the Assad regime. But the reality is, is much of what they did in Syria was against those that rose up against the regime to try and get their freedoms. It wasn’t against the Islamic state. The United States was the one that took out the Islamic State, it wasn’t the Russians.

And like you just said, it’s a lot easier to break things than to build it back up. And this is the same way with the CT effort in the Sahel region. So I think it’s imperative that us diplomats now talk to these governments being consistent dialogue being like, “Hey, I know that this isn’t going the way that you wanted and maybe you regret it on some levels, but there’s ways of turning this around and trying to go back to how it was previously,” and then trying to go from there because the US does have a lot of experience dealing with these issues. Obviously, it hasn’t been perfect, but it’s a lot better than what we’re seeing now. And hopefully then that could provide a better space for there then to be more development in these locations and also bring in everybody within the society.

I mean, that’s part of one of the reasons why say, Al-Qaeda was able to take advantage in Mali in the first place back in 2012 or so, was that they’re sort of piggybacking off of the Tuareg separatist movement and then going from there. But of course, Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, they don’t really care about these different ethnic groups. For them, it’s about establishing this Islamic State or Islamic Emirate, however you want to describe it. So I think that there’s ample opportunity from a diplomatic perspective to try and push back against this.

The question is, is the United States having an interest in actually putting in those efforts? I think there’s a lot of focus on a lot of other different parts of the world, but one of the problems with the way I think things have been framed, especially in the last five years is that we’ve talked about how the United States needs to get more in on power competition dealing with Russia, China, what have you, regional powers. But the reality is, is that even though post-9/11 there was so much discussion of counterterrorism, you can’t necessarily bifurcate counterterrorism from competition, because the Russians looked at counterterrorism as a way to compete against the United States. And they’ve been able to take advantage and therefore not only reap the benefits of essentially kicking the west out of different parts of the Sahel, but economically they’ve been able to get all these mining opportunities in these regions as well, which has helped their war against Ukraine as well.

So I think that there needs to be a better dialing of the way that it’s sort of discussed in Washington in some ways, and that you can’t sort of look at these as two separate buckets when you’re dealing with it. And hopefully, whoever wins in a month or three weeks, that this is resolved in a better manner. Otherwise, I think that the security situation in the Sahel is going to continue to spread and get worse.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, it’s such a dangerous situation. And I would like now to talk more about the looming conflicts and one that is the most disastrous humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where the Biden Administration tried to have a kind of policy package, diplomatic missions and so on. But obviously, the RSF and the CIF do not want to talk to each other, and to make matter worse, there are more players who are trying to pull each one in their own way. It’s obviously a threat to NATO south members and countries. So Cameron, can you give us just some insights on where things are heading?

Cameron Hudson:

Sure. Can I take a two finger on something that Aaron said just before? Because I think it’s important. When we’re talking about Russia active in the counterterrorism space, I think for them, that’s largely a guise for what they’re doing, which is just regime security. They’re talking about CT as if they are partners in the CT, and there’s I think a service level partnership there. But I think what they’re really doing is regime security. They’re selling their services not in Ghana or in Zambia or countries that are democratic or trying to be democratic, they’re selling it to hunt us. They’re selling it to regimes that lack legitimacy and who can’t tap into kind of Western or they don’t want to tap into the Western security partnerships.

I know from talking to our defense attaches and our DIA colleagues, that when get wind of a country kind of interviewing Russia or Wagner for this, they get this dossier of like, this is how it went in Syria and in Mozambique and in Central African Republic, and this is what it cost in terms of human lives and civilian lives and in terms of mining contracts and timber contracts. And this is the cost of doing business with these guys. Right? And we have opened our books so that countries like Mali or Niger, whomever, go into these partnerships with Russia with eyes wide open.

And the fact is, is that with all of that information, they’re still choosing those partnerships because those partnerships come with things that are valuable to those regimes, most of which I think are illegal or illegitimate regimes. Right? And so I think we talk about Russia doing the CT, being a CT partner, but they’re really a regime security partner, which is not something that we do, really. I mean, we do it in other ways, let’s be clear, but we don’t do it explicitly, and I think that they are doing it explicitly. So just to put a pin in that.

On Sudan, I think where we are today in the course of this conflict is I think it’s turned a corner in many respects, because there is such a huge amount of resources flowing into the conflict from around the region and from around the extended region across the Red Sea. Right? So Sudan with 500 miles of Red Sea coastline across from Yemen, is a highly strategic area of the world now. It’s more strategic now I think, than it was before. And so whether it’s Russia or Iran or China or whoever it is who wants to project power and influence into the Red Sea basin, Sudan is a really good market to do that, and Sudan is kind of open for business in that respect. I wrote something earlier this year that they’re for sale to the highest bidder, because they are trying to prosecute a war that requires constant arming of themselves. And so they’re more than willing to talk to Iran about a port deal on the Red Sea if it means getting drones that are going to help them in their fight.

And the Sudanese have a long history. I mean, Sudan spent almost 30 years on the US State Sponsor of Terrorism list. So they have a long history of doing business with regimes that are kind of outside of the international community, like Iran. They had a very long relationship with Iran before the Saudis forced them to cut off that relationship for a debt bailout about 10 years ago. So they’re back at it.

I think that Washington has lost a lot of its leverage and its influence, not exclusively by errors of omission or commission, but the world is a changed place. The UN Security Council is a changed place. Powers that influence the region now like Turkey or Saudi Arabia or the UAE, they are in many ways partners that we now have to contend with who are pursuing their own set of national interests in a country like Sudan. Whether it’s again, geopolitical or it’s real, it’s agricultural for Arab states or Arabian states who get the bulk of their grain and livestock from Sudan. Right? So they have real skin in the game in ways that we don’t anymore. And they certainly have disposable resources that they can throw at trying to shape an outcome in Sudan that we no longer have.

And so the conditions have changed, and the international kind of politics have changed substantially since we were driving a response to the war in Darfur or ending the North-South Civil War in Sudan, when those were very much, if not US-led, US-driven processes. And we don’t have that same leverage and influence anymore like we did. I think we’re not using some of the tools that we do have available that we could bring to bear. So I think we’re also sitting out in some ways.

But I mean, I guess kind of the distillation of that argument is this conversation that was had two weeks ago when President Biden received the Leader of UAE, and bin Zayed was in the White House for the day, prior to going to the UN, and it is well established at this point that the Emiratis are fueling one side of this war. They’re fueling the kind of genocidal militia in this war, the RSF. And it’s been on the front page of the New York Times, I don’t know how many times now, and this week it was on the front page of the Washington Post. So, that is well established fact in the open source. I think our intelligence community knows far more about the extent of that relationship.

And in a 3,000 word press statement that the White House released, 200 words of it were devoted to Sudan and how the UAE is our good friend and partner in bringing peace to Sudan, when they are single-handedly fueling the war more than any other state. I mean, yes, the Egyptians are playing a role and Turks and the Iranians. We could talk about all of those different countries, but they really are far less significant to the conduct and the outcome of this conflict than the UAE is. And so we issue press release and communique after communique about how we stand with the people of Sudan and how we want the war to end, but then we have a day-long love fest with the Emiratis in the White House and say, “No, they’re on the right side of history in Sudan.” And so that more than anything else undermines our ability to have leverage.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, it seemed to me very early on when the war started that the RSF especially played a huge role for the Emiratis and the Saudis to counter the Houthis. And for that, they are simply are going to always be useful in that sense. And for Washington to start picking which side it’s going to be on, I couldn’t see how it could be done without having a sort of neutral way and that we work with the UAE, we work with Saudis, we work with others, and then it should be a US-led effort so that all of them kind of agree that at least a ceasefire should happen.

But also, Josh, if you have any comments on that as you follow it fairly closely. And also since we’re talking about the current conflicts, there is a looming one between Ethiopia and Somalia and Egypt, if you can also say a few words.

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, sure, and I think there’s actually a common theme here regarding US action. So on the Sudan piece, yeah, I think the Emiratis are far more consequential players actually than the United States even is, because they have real things that they can give, meaning weapons and money and etc, to the RSF. It didn’t have to be that way though. I think if we remember back to the beginning of this conflict, or even before the conflict began, a lot of the outside powers that were interested in Sudan were hedging between the two, including the Emiratis actually, to an extent. Even the Russians were hedging. So we know Wagner was sort of tied up with the RSF, but the Russian government itself talked to the SAF and etc. So the Emiratis were not all in on the RSF.

What I think happened was this war broke out. It became clear to everybody observing that no one was going to step in decisively, which then opened the space for somebody else to assert their own interests. And I think that the US, I don’t at all subscribe to the idea that the US should be going around trying to solve every single conflict. I don’t even think we do that in most cases. I think this civil war, there was a lot of criticism of the US when this war broke out. Some of it justified, but I think fundamentally the reason there’s a war is because Hemedti and Burhan decided they were going to fight a war. No matter what, right? Unless the US was going to land Marines or something there, which God forbid, we would never do, it was going to happen.

So I don’t subscribe to that criticism, but I do think at the beginning of this war, there was a lack of clear thinking maybe, or energetic action. And I wrote a report on this and I had a provocative thesis, and I still stand by it. I think the US actually should have chosen a side in this, and I think it should have gone with the SAF because of two very bad options. Both are horrific, I’m under no illusions about the SAF. I think the SAF was actually the better option for American interests. I also think that, and I said this in the report, that this war had a potential to go for a very long time unless someone won quickly and decisively on the battlefield. They are not going to negotiate an end to this war because both believe that they can still win on the battlefield.

So to Cameron’s point about the UAE, the RSF can only sustain itself because of the UAE, and they believe and they see that the UAE is continuing to back them, so they think they can still win this thing. The SAF still believes they can win this thing on the ground. Until they are both disabused of that notion, the negotiations will never work. The US has been involved in this JETA process, along with the Saudis obviously, which I think is a farce, essentially. The conditions are not right for a meaningful negotiation between these two sides. For a negotiation to succeed, both sides have to be committed to having it succeed. Neither side is committed to having it succeed.

We have a recent example that the Tigray War in Ethiopia. They were able to reach an agreement after a horrific war because Addis Ababa basically won that war. That was just the reality, and the Tigrayans suddenly realized, we’re losing so many of our citizens and etc, that we’re not going to have a region left to defend. And so they went to the table and they really were highly motivated. Addis was highly motivated to end it. So those were the conditions. It was an awful, terrible way to get there, but at least it’s over now, let’s say.

I think the US engaging in this JETA process when the situation is so obviously not conducive to a successful negotiation, harms American credibility. I think it potentially crowds out other possible solutions, and I think it sort of signals that the US is out of ideas and is just going through this process because that’s what you do when wars break out. No, this is hard. I’m not pretending it’s easy, right? And I understand how risky it would’ve been to-

Zineb Riboua:

Yes, that’s what I. . . Because me and Josh had a long debate around-

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, we’re rehashing old debate here.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, so we’re on different sides.

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, so the through line, I think the connection with the Ethiopia-Somalia thing that you just referenced, is also the lack of realism in how the United States approaches some of these issues. So the Ethiopia-Somalia problem, it’s complex like everything, but the trigger was this Ethiopia-Somaliland, MOU. And Mogadishu, predictably I would say, was very upset at the idea that Ethiopia might recognize Somaliland. And the US went all in on backing Mogadishu as it has since 2013, essentially.

Now, my beef here and my critique that there’s a lack of realism is that Somaliland has not been a functional part of Somalia for three decades. There is no plausible scenario where it is a functional or integrated part of Somalia within our lifetimes probably. Mogadishu has no practical authority over Somaliland. So I understand why Mogadishu is upset. What I don’t understand is why American diplomats won’t acknowledge that fundamental reality on the ground, especially when it would be to America’s interests to recognize that reality. And I think because they’re not recognizing a reality, the policy they build off of that is just inherently flawed, it cannot be successful. If your policy is not based on what’s actually happening, then by definition it’s going to fail. And I think that’s unfortunately a bit of a trend where there’s a lack of realism, a lack of sort of perspicacity about what’s actually happening.

And again, to the Sudan thing, the Ethiopian war didn’t end because sophisticated, clever American diplomats convinced the two sides to sit down and talk. The US was actually very ancillary to the Pretoria Agreement. The facts on the ground dictated that that negotiation would be successful. You have to look at what’s happening in Sudan the same way and understand, the facts on the ground are not conducive to an actual negotiation. Anyways, that’s my Sudan rant. I’ve given it.

Zineb Riboua:

Okay, that’s great.

Cameron Hudson:

Turkish drones did more in the war in Ethiopia than the United States did.

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, exactly. Right, there was a win on the battlefield and it was quite decisive, right?

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. So before we get some questions from the audience, I’d like to each one of you talk a bit about, so what will change if Trump is elected. This is an election year. This is I think a question everyone has in mind, but it’s true that the Trump Administration had a whole strategy when it came to Africa. They had the whole vision of it, so especially because of the competition with China. So yeah, what would be your speculation? What would change? Or it would get worse, I don’t know.

Aaron Zelin:

Well, I think that the impulses from those in Trump’s camp are mainly focused on China than maybe the Russia angle. The question though is, is whether those that surround Trump and sort of have his worldview are interested in competing in the same way that China has. Where the issue with Russia is more of a security problem in some ways, more of a messaging problem maybe because the Russians have poured so much into local language, news outlets, social media sites, what have you. Whereas China, it’s all about building infrastructure in a lot of these places, and that’s just not what the US has done historically, it’s all about aid. So I’m skeptical that that much would change, personally.

I mean, rhetorically, I think that there would be a lot of anti-Chinese discussion, vis-a-vis what China’s doing in Africa and people getting held up in debt loans and things along those lines. But the actual trajectory of it, I don’t know if that they would change that much, honestly.

Zineb Riboua:

Cameron?

Cameron Hudson:

Well, fortunately, I wrote a paper about this not long ago, which you can go on the CSIS website and read. Obviously speculative, but listen, I think, I mean, I agree that I think on the sort of macro level, I think there’s going to be a great deal of continuity. I don’t mean that because we have a great policy. I think it’s again, that it doesn’t rise to the level of such a high priority that we’re going to go change everything.

If you look at to the extent that we think that this is the policy blueprint for the Trump Administration, the Project 2025 website, which I did, it has an Africa section, and it’s lifted by and large out of the Biden strategy for Africa. I think that would surprise many people but I mean, if I were a college professor, I would say that there was plagiarism in this. And it’s not because, because I think the Biden team recognized some fundamental truths about Africa’s strategic importance, whether it’s the voting bloc at the UN, the minerals that are there, the growing population, the strategic location along the Red Sea and these massive trade corridors. So, those are facts. And so the fact that the Trump Administration or people around it in the orbit of it have recognized those facts is a good thing, and that creates a shared understanding and dare I say, a bipartisan understanding which Africa has traditionally had in Washington. Right? So I think that that’s a good thing. I think how that gets operationalized is obviously the challenge.

When the Trump Administration was in office, we had four US service members killed in Niger conducting counterterrorism operations. It was a very different time because they were actually shoulder to shoulder, they were pulling triggers in those operations, they weren’t kind of flying drones and things. But that woke the Trump Administration to the fact that many Americans are like, what the hell are we doing with American troops in Africa? We didn’t know that, Congress didn’t know that. There were a lot of people that didn’t know that we had active combat troops conducting counterterrorism operations in Africa.

So that woke up a lot of people, and the Trump Administration called for what they called a blank slate review of our force posture in Africa. It resulted in a lot of US troops being pulled out of Somalia, being relocated to Kenya, and they were on the precipice of fully moving out all US troops from the Sahel region. And I think DOD kind of slow rolled that review process so that they didn’t have to do it, and they were able to outlive the administration and the Biden Administration has kept those forces. Although the pivot has been clear, we are no longer conducting counterterrorism operations. We have moved to a full kind of ISR intelligence gathering, which is why our drone base in Niger was so central to that effort.

So we also have the introduction of Russian forces and lots of other outside actors that we’ve been talking about. So I think the region has changed. The big question for me is, will the administration view the stability threats and the CT threats in the Sahel the same way that the current administration does? That I don’t know. Right? Robert O’Brien, the post, the past national security advisor for Trump, perhaps future, I don’t know, wrote in Foreign Affairs this summer in an essay that kind of shapes some of the Trump world thinking on some of these issues, that we should remove all US forces from North Africa and reposition them to the Pacific. Right? Now, that’s a provocative idea, whether that gains traction, I mean, it’s in a 2,000-word essay in Foreign Affairs. But so you can find some clues to what might be coming, but it’s really hard to say.

I do think though that the rhetorical piece is the thing that I think tripped up Trump the most in his time in office, on a whole host of things, but specifically with respect to Africa. And so I do think that there’s going to be a kind of form versus function. But again, in my essay, I offer a couple of kind of provocative ideas about some ways I think that Africa might welcome a Trump Administration. I hear it a lot from Africans actually, that they will welcome a Trump Administration.

Zineb Riboua:

That’s interesting.

Cameron Hudson:

And this idea of transactional-ism, that he’s a very transactional leader, and I think a lot of African countries are, that’s how they do their own diplomacy. It’s certainly how they’re doing it with China or with Russia. So we are coming to them on this values-based argument when these countries are just looking for transactions. They’re not looking, that values-based argument doesn’t have the same appeal that it did I think a generation ago. And so this idea of somebody who’s a transactional leader, where if I can help you understand how this is good for you and it’s good for me, then we can do this deal and let’s not let our values get in the way of that. I think that has a certain appeal to certain African leaders, maybe not all African leaders.

And then his statements about not starting new wars, ending wars in the world, ending the Ukraine war, ending the war in Gaza, that has a strong appeal in Africa. Africans don’t want to see these wars because as they say, when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. And so that’s what they feel like. Right? They feel like when the US imposes sanctions on Russia and it drives up commodity prices for them, they are suffering unduly because of, as they would say, a white man’s war in Europe. Right? And so for Trump to come in and say, obviously short on details as to how all these things end, but the fact is, is I think some of his rhetoric has significant appeal on the continent. So, other parts of his rhetoric have been problematic with respect to Africa, so we’ll have to see on ballots how that shakes out if he were to come in.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah. So for you, Josh, last?

Joshua Meservey:

Yeah, a codicil to the Niger tragedy is that there were Congressmen saying they were unaware of US servicemen there, except the Trump Administration has sent them multiple letters informing them, but, which came out later publicly. And I agree, I think there’s going to be a lot of continuity, that’s the reality of sort of American foreign policy in general, and especially US policy towards Africa. You look at the main flagship programs that the US has for Africa, PEPFAR, Feed the Future, Power Africa, even Prosper Africa, which was a Trump Administration thing and Biden retained it. Those survived switches even from Democrats to Republican to Democrat. So I think a lot of that continuity will remain.

I’ll for a few points of departure. I think one, you will see less of American culture wars being prosecuted in Africa. And there’s a couple of specific issues where this happens that really aggravate our African partners, and as far as I can tell, achieve no benefits for American national interests, but does please a domestic political constituency. So things like pushing sort of a western conception of LGBT rights, or flying a pride flag in Niamey, right? These sorts of things, again, it’s unclear to me what the US achieves by doing that other than irritating African countries that are generally socially conservative. I think we’ll see less of that.

I think you’ll see more openness to things like supporting gas and oil projects on the continent, which is another grievance that African countries, and I think very rightfully so, have with the US, with the Europeans, who have said, “No, you shouldn’t be developing these projects. We’re not going to finance them. We’re discouraging you actively. Here, put up some solar panels.” I’m all for solar panels if that’s the most economically wise and efficient and quickest way to get energy, but I’m also an all-of-the-above guy and I think oil and gas will have to be part of the equation for the foreseeable future. And it could be a real revenue booster for cash-strapped governments in Africa. So I think that you’ll see potentially some of that. More wariness of multilateral types of engagements and more of a desire to have bilateral interactions.

And I absolutely agree with Cameron, and maybe we’re talking to the same people, I don’t know, but I’ve had some of the same conversations with African delegations or representatives or whatever, and the idea of having a transactional relationship is actually really appealing to them because everybody does sort of understand the parameters of a bargain. Whereas with the values stuff, that can be really hard to pin down because there is a very real inconsistency. There are certain countries, it seems like we go after like crazy. You can look at Uganda right now, right? The US put a business advisory on Uganda. They cut aid to Uganda because of a draconian, yes, absolutely a draconian, anti-gay bill. But then you have other countries that are engaged in terrible human rights violations that the United States does not do that sort of thing to.

So there’s that inconsistency, which Cameron referenced earlier. That makes it very hard, I think, for some African countries to figure out where they are with the United States and how to navigate that. Whereas a deal, an interest-based approach is easier to understand. Look, I have something of value that you want, you have something of value that I want. Let’s see if we can make this work. So I think there’s actually a fair amount of potential for a new administration. Now, it is going to run into all the same challenges that every administration has. A lack of prioritization, a certain inertia within the bureaucracies that you need to achieve these things, I think that’s a huge challenge.

I think the Trump Administration will try to be more, again, on the interest thing, will try to be more focused on trade and investments, which every administration says it is. But then again, you get into those bureaucracies and you start talking about budgets. You want to have a knife fight, tell the global health people at USA that you’re taking some of their money for a commercial venture and you’re in it. So that’ll be a challenge of implementation, but maybe they can get it done. And I will give the Biden Administration credit, they’ve had some of their own initiatives in this vein that I think are the right idea. Again, implementation very, very hard, but at least they’re thinking in that direction. So hopefully there’ll be some more momentum behind that type of activity.

But again, I think there will be these constraints of prioritization. And people complain about budgets for Africa and etc, etc, and I say, “Yeah, but this is how it’s always been. So you just need to make your plans around the idea that this is how it will be. Don’t base your plans on hope that suddenly there’s going to be an influx of money for Africa initiatives or some high-level diplomatic attention. That might happen, you should be prepared to take advantage when it does happen, but you should plan for what the actual reality has been for decades.” So we’ll have to see, right? I think there’s reason to be positive and there’s reason to be concerned as well, for Africa policy forward in a future Trump Administration.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, before we take some questions, I just wanted to add that I also think that Trump’s entire Iran stance will have a direct impact, especially in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, when it comes to counterterrorism. So maybe that’s something also to watch.

So yeah, please ask your questions. Please introduce yourself and where you are.

Speaker 5:

All right, thank you.

Zineb Riboua:

Sorry, I think-

Speaker 5:

Thank you guys for this talk. My name is Uganeza, I’m a lawyer here in DC. I actually served in the last administration in the White House. This was a fascinating conversation. I guess I had a, I’ll keep it super, super condensed, but just two points related to the question I want to ask, which is first, I wondered to what degree we’re following into the trap of the heart of darkness or continent of darkness kind of trope, right? And I think you mentioned earlier, 54 countries, you might say 56, it’s a massive continent. US interests with Nigeria, which is a member of OPEC, might look different than US interests in Kenya, versus US interests in Sudan. And so kind of related to that, are we constraining ourselves as to how we think about US policy in Africa?

Because for example, we talk a lot about government to government relationships, but we have a very successful diaspora within the United States and across the west, which is very interesting, has developed skills, very loyal to the home countries here in the west, but have skills that could be kind of force multipliers for diplomatic influence in many of these countries, in terms of project finance, development and the like.

And then related-ly, in terms of being too constrained in our thinking, we talked a lot about kind of counterterrorism interests and maybe distrust from a lot of African countries towards the west with regards to those, but we didn’t talk much about the history of the relationship between these African countries and the IMF and World Bank, and the kind of history of debt politics, which might fuel distrust and might lead a leader to say, “Rather than go with another round with the West, I can go and do work with the Chinese which are not putting as many constraints on me and not going to constrain my ability to serve my people like 10, 20 years from now.” So to what degree does the US and the west need to be more creative and be more strategic as to how we think about our relationship with these countries, rather than just thinking strictly in terms of military and counterterrorism operations?

Joshua Meservey:

Very quickly, just on one element. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think the US should be much more focused on trade and investment relationships with the continent because there is immense potential there, and it’s just the basis of a true partnership, rather than what we have now. I tell African delegations this a lot because they’ll say, “Well, the US doesn’t see us as a true partner.” I said, “But you get $500 million in aid from the United States.” “That’s correct. We’re not going to see you as a true partner given that dynamic.” And that’s just the reality of how these situations work. So and I think that’s a less positive basis for relationship than we could have otherwise trade and investment.

The other element of it is, we’ve sort of shot our shot with development aid and security cooperation. Those we need to continue as necessary, but the one underutilized element I think the US has is its private sector, which is unmatched, it’s unparalleled in the world. It could be doing so much more. Now, how does the US motivate and support American private sector on the continent? That’s a whole other, an entirely separate discussion and I’ve already decried the bureaucracy and how slow it can be and etc, and that’s a huge problem and with some of these initiatives, but I do think that’s where the US needs to be going.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, the lady there.

Speaker 6:

Thank you, thank you. My name is Tegest, I’m an assistant professor in peace and conflict and also international consultant in peace and security with the UN. Thank you for the excellent one. I really enjoyed the very pragmatic issues.

So my question is related to the great power competition and the shifting new world order. As you know, given the context of the growing tensions in the Horn of Africa in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, and in the context of the growing importance of the Horn of Africa and the Gulf relations. My question is, in particular amid the growing tension, how does the US see or the policymakers, advisors see issues related to inter-regional security, economic and migration issues? So if you could say a few things, thank you.

Cameron Hudson:

Maybe you could unpack a little for me. I didn’t quite understand. How do we view inter-

Speaker 6:

Regional security.

Cameron Hudson:

Inter-regional security?

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Cameron Hudson:

Yeah, I mean, listen, I think that it’s easy to sit up here and kind of just talk about what America gets wrong in our policies, and that’s fun to do. But at the end of the day, the Africans themselves have a lot of responsibility in managing their own continent and their own affairs. Right? And we could have another panel about the failures of regional institutions in Africa and continent-wide institutions in Africa. Right? And this gets back a little bit to our discussion earlier about Sudan.

20 years ago when the United States was having what felt like a leadership role and was driving solutions in a place like Sudan, in this North-South conflict and in Darfur, those were actually African-led initiatives that drew the United States into support them. It was IGAD that led a mediation, it was Rwanda and Nigeria that sent peacekeepers to Darfur before George Clooney knew where it was. Right? And so where I think we can be most effective, where Washington can be most effective is working through those regional organizations and those partners. Right? But when those partners don’t step up, when those institutions aren’t functioning, which they are not right now. IGAD is not functioning, IGAD is not doing the job that it was created to do to mitigate conflict. And there are multiple conflicts that we’ve talked about that are on the horizon in the Horn of Africa and some that are already happening. It’s not playing any kind of role in those.

And I would say that the AU similarly is not playing those roles. And so that makes it even harder for policymakers in Washington to affect those conflicts or shape them. Yes, we have a special envoy to the Horn of Africa, which is a new position, and I think we would want to rethink how that’s structured and what that person does in a future administration. But ultimately, we’ve talked a lot about our loss of leverage and the increasing competition among other countries that have come into these regions that are offering their own solutions and their own services to these countries and giving them choices. So all of these things have diluted our potency and our ability to have influence.

But I think we haven’t spent enough time talking about African regional initiatives and where they have gone. And I would point out even at the multilateral level, the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which has done some of the most serious research about the crimes that were committed in Tigray, but also in Sudan. Every time that those things come up for renewal, every single African country votes against them. Right? They vote against multilateral instruments to investigate human rights violations in the context of wars that are tearing Africa apart. Right? I mean, there was this World Bank assessment today that they’re downgrading Africa’s growth potential for the coming year because of the war in Sudan. How that doesn’t wake up the African Union to say this is costing our membership dearly by not having a durable solution to this conflict, this festering conflict. It’s not motivating African regional institutions to take action, and I can’t explain why that is. I can’t explain what’s going on inside.

But I mean, across the board, whether it’s ECOWAS, IGAD, SADC, maybe to a lesser extent, but, and the AU for sure. I think that we have not seen the leadership that we in Washington need to see from those to make our own efforts that much more effective.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, actually one of the reasons I thank you for coming, I’ve organized this, is really because I think that today it’s impossible to think working with institutions in Africa while dissociating it from the great power competition precisely because Russia and China have been able to build a parallel system. Especially with, for example, the alliance of the Sahel states that actually competes directly with the ECOWAS. I mean, compete’s not the right word, but kind of really is an obstacle for the African Union to operate and ECOWAS to operate normally.

One last question, Michael Doran.

Mike Doran:

Thanks, I’m Mike Doran, I run the Middle East Center here. I think it was Cameron who mentioned the challenge of operationalizing some of these concepts. And so I want to offer you guys the opportunity to do that. Could you just, for all of you, just go down the line and say if you were advising the next president, whoever it is, what are the one or two concrete things you would like to see done in the first 100 days that might set a new tone in a new direction? Thank you.

Aaron Zelin:

I guess I could start. I think one of them, which I alluded to a little bit earlier, I think we need to take more seriously our diplomatic efforts locally so that the US can actually have eyes and ears on the ground of what’s actually going on, vis-a-vis its own competition with Russia, China or any other regional countries that might be deemed as adversarial. Because I think one of the reasons why the US was so flat-footed with the coups and everything going on in the Sahel is that there just wasn’t a lot of coverage of what was actually going on beyond just sort of the operational aspects of the fight against ISIS or Al-Qaeda or what have you. So I think that’s one of them.

Two, I do think that before something large-scale does blow back to the US or Western Europe for example, while I don’t think that the US needs to pour resources into these spaces in the way it was post-9/11, I do think that because there’s so much less people focused on terrorism issues now, there’s just a blind spot. And I think that just a little bit more budget, a little bit more personnel could go a long way in making sure that this doesn’t happen.

And I think that there needs to be. . . We’re sort of in this transition now, especially when you look at global counterterrorism issues and the global coalition against the Islamic state and how that’s sort of closing down in Iraq and Syria with the recent announcements last month, vis-a-vis the US withdrawing from Iraq and Syria, whatever that means since we’ve been talking about this for forever now related to Iraq in particular. But I think that there needs to be this new conception of how we think about global counterterrorism architecture because the reality is, is that while people might be skeptical of what the US is doing, it’s still very much a professional operation.

For example, the US warned both Iran and Russia that an attack was going to come from the Islamic State in Afghanistan. Both of them ignored the US and so the attacks were successful. On the other hand, the US warned Germany or Austria of attacks, they were stopped and nothing happened. So I think it’s important to recognize and remember that while there is a lot of historical baggage, vis-a-vis economic stuff that you’re talking about, but at least in the counterterrorism issue, it’s not very politicized in many ways. It’s very professional and the US goes in and does its thing. So I think it’s important to remember that, even though domestically in the domestic US political context there’s a lot of baggage, vis-a-vis the post-9/11 wars as well as people describing as endless wars or whatever. But the reality is, is that there are a lot of lessons learned over those 20 years that if implemented correctly, which I think most people in the field do nowadays, are important to try and stem the tide of what we’re seeing in various different regions of Africa right now.

Cameron Hudson:

It’s a great question. I mean, I think the easy answer would be, get on a plane, go there, and take 50 American CEOs with you, and don’t take Samantha Power and don’t take. . . You know what I mean? Don’t take the, no slide on Samantha, don’t take the aid administrator, don’t take those people that harken back to the kind of dependency relations that we have built up over the last 50 years in Africa. Take those CEOs with you.

We haven’t talked a lot about it but there was a good article in the Wall Street Journal, I think today, about a Congolese cobalt mine that’s for sale that we can’t get anybody to buy. We the United States government can’t get anybody to buy this mine because of all of our own domestic legislation on what it takes to operate a mine, not just, leaving aside that it’s a very difficult operating environment in Congo. And I interviewed a CEO of a mining company that owned the last cobalt mine, the last American-owned cobalt mine in the Congo, and he sold it to a Chinese company because he couldn’t get the EPA to give him a license to refine it anywhere in the United States of America because it’s like the dirtiest thing in the world to refine and it causes all kinds of emissions. And Nevada, California, Montana, he couldn’t refine it anywhere in this country and so he unloaded it to the only country that was the only offer that he could take, which was the Chinese.

And now 15 years later, we’ve come full circle, decided we have to have reliable access to this mineral, and there’s no amount of incentive to get an American company to want to operate this mine and to work there. And so I think that we have to square that, we have to figure out how to get around that because it’s not just a national security imperative for us in something like mines, it touches a whole host of sectors, and it’s part of the D development that we need to change the way we think about doing development, right? And it can’t just be about USAID type development programs, which is not, I think what Africans are looking for. It has to be the development that comes from investment and because that puts us on a peer-to-peer relationship that our traditional development giving just doesn’t do. And I think we have to, and that’s what the Chinese are doing, that’s what the Russians are doing to a large degree, and that’s what we’re not yet doing.

Joshua Meservey:

Well, Cameron stole mine. That’s the peril of answering a question like this last. So I’ll maybe add a few extra thoughts on that because I agree. I think that would be actually the single strongest signal you could send is send a pure business delegation, well, along with US government, appropriate US government officials. But maybe find four or five specific countries, and those are the ones that are getting delegations. They should include a diaspora component, etc, and make it clear that this is indeed going to be the focus.

I think to Cameron’s point about the mining, this is where I think we really need to institutionalize partnership with close allies. And the US cannot deal with all of these challenges or these deficiencies that we’re facing alone, at all. But we have very close partners that have complementary strengths and industries. Just in the mining field, you can think about the Australians and the Canadians, two of the US’s closest partners, and they are mining superpowers. So I think that’s one potential way to get around some of these problems.

I think there’s a domestic element you need to cut through some of this crazy regulation in the United States that has prevented the creation of mining juniors. Right? You cannot essentially in this country just start a mining company if you’re just going to be working domestically. And it’s without that sort of pool of companies, you’re not going to have many American companies going out and chasing some of these more frontier-type projects, which DRC certainly is and many other African environments are. But again, you’re not going to see a mining industry in the United States without getting through some of this regulation. I’ve read studies that show it might take you 10 full years in the United States to unearth your first rock, if you’re lucky, to get all the necessary permits and etc. And even by mining standards that have very long time horizons, that’s a long time to get started.

So yeah, I would just sort of reiterate that, Cameron’s point and say, looking at institutionalizing this type of cooperation with partners is critical. And the GCC countries could play a role here with their financing and other areas of expertise.

Zineb Riboua:

Yeah, even on the security side working with partners is crucial now. I mean, even for country in Wagner, it’s clear that, for example, Turkey has BMCs. They know how they operate in Syria, they know how they operate in the Sahel. For example, with Morocco and the West Africa angle. There are partners that United States can clearly work with.

Well, Josh, Cameron, Aaron, thank you very much, this was wonderful and thank you all for joining us. Thank you for your questions and hope to see you soon.

Joshua Meservey:

Thank you.