Last week, Acting Deputy Secretary of
State for the United States Victoria Nuland
made her third visit to Niger in the past
two years.
This time, Nuland was in the African
country to respond to the July 26 military
coup, which saw the ouster of the
constitutionally-elected President Mohamed
Bazoum by a group of military officers,
operating under the umbrella of the
newly-formed National Council for the
Safeguard of the Homeland, led by the
commander of the presidential guard, General
Abdourahmane Tchiani, who subsequently
declared himself to be the new head of
state.
Nuland had sought a meeting with the
ousted president, Bazoum, as well as the
leader of the new military government,
General Tchiani. She was denied both, and
instead held a very strained dialogue with
Tchiani’s military chief, General Moussa
Salaou Barmou, who headed a delegation of
lesser officers. Nuland called the talks
with Barmou “frank” and
“difficult.” What she did not do,
however, was call a spade a spade, refusing
to label the Nigerien coup a coup, but
rather treating it as temporary domestic
political mishap which, with a little bit of
US-applied pressure from the right source,
could be overcome.
The reasoning behind the American game of
semantics is that, by law, if the US
recognizes the Nigerien coup as a coup, then
it must cease all military-to-military
interactions between a force of some 1,100
US military personnel currently stationed in
Niger, and their Nigerien military
counterparts, as well as all other forms of
US-funded aid. The law in question, known as
Section 7008 (of Public Law 117-328,
Division K), specifically states that no
funds appropriated by Congress in support of
State, Foreign Operations and Related
Programs (SFOPS) “shall be obligated or
expended to finance directly any assistance
to the government of any country whose duly
elected head of government is deposed by
military coup d’état or decree.”
During her 2-hour discussions with the
Tchiani government delegation, Nuland made
it clear that while US relations were
currently suspended, they were not
permanently halted. In a post-meeting video
press conference, Nuland emphasized the
consequences of the failure to return
President Bazoum to power with General
Barmou, a Nigerien special forces officer
who had been trained at US military schools
and had extensive interaction with US
military trainers in Niger. Barmou’s
personal experience with the US military is
in many ways the personification of a
relationship that today serves as the
foundation of America’s military presence
and mission in West Africa.
The US, France, and other European
partners have been engaged in a years-long
campaign, together with their West African
partners, to combat Islamic extremism in the
Sahel region of Africa. Niger, which hosts
two major US bases, one outside the Nigerien
capital of Niamey known as Base 101, and a
second, Air Base 201, in Agadez – a city
located on the southern edge of the Sahara.
Both bases support US intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)
operations conducted by MQ-9 Reaper drones
and fixed-wing aircraft flown by a Joint
Special Operations Aviation Detachment, as
well as other US military operations,
including military airlift and special
forces training detachments (France also
maintains a significant military presence in
Niger, numbering over 1,000, and there are
several hundred other military personnel
from a variety of European Union (EU)
nations.
With the collapse of the US, French, EU,
and United Nations military presence in
neighboring Mali, and in the aftermath of a
military coup in Chad, Niger has emerged as
the last remaining bastion of the US-led
anti-terrorism effort in the Sahel. If the
US were to cut relations with Niger because
of the coup, there would be no
Western-oriented anti-terrorism efforts
remaining to counter the threat of Al Qaeda
and Islamic State terrorism in the region.
From Washington’s perspective, the
greatest threat that would emerge from any
break in the military-to-military assistance
between the US and Niger is not the
potential spread of Islamic
fundamentalist-inspired terrorism, but
rather Russian influence, especially in the
form of military security support allegedly
provided by Wagner Group, a private military
company whose African operations appear to
operate in sync with Russian foreign policy
objectives (neither the Kremlin nor the
Tchiani government has commented on the
reports of Wagner activities in Niger).
Prior to last month’s Russian-African
Summit, Prigozhin had met with Wagner forces
who had relocated to Belarus in the
aftermath of the abortive June 23-24
insurrection – which resulted in halting
Wagner operations in Donbass – during which
he emphasized the importance Africa would
play in future Wagner activities. Wagner's
presence has been reported in several
African countries, including the
Central African Republic, Libya, and
Mali. Members of the senior leadership of
the Nigerien coup have reportedly met with
Wagner officials in Mali, to discuss
security cooperation between Wagner and
Niger. During her meeting with the Nigerien
coup government, Victoria Nuland singled out
the potential deployment of Wagner into
Niger as a worrisome development and
indicated that she pressed upon her Nigerien
counterparts her assessment regarding the
detrimental role played by Wagner regarding
African security. The reported meeting
between Wagner and Niger representatives
indicates that Nuland’s message did not
resonate with her Nigerien hosts.
The US appears to be caught in the horns
of a dilemma, trying to balance a desire to
maintain relations with a nation whose
government cannot legally receive US aid,
and the consequences that would accrue if
US-Niger relations were severed, as required
by Section 7008. There is an option that
neither Nuland nor her boss, Secretary of
State Antony Blinken, have yet given voice
to. In early 2003, the US Congress amended
Section 7008 to provide for the Secretary of
State to seek a waiver on the grounds of the
“national security interests of the
United States.”
There are two major obstacles for the US
when it comes to any such waiver. First is
the amount of political capital that the US
has expended in trying to return President
Bazoum to power – to reverse now would be
the kind of nod to Realpolitik that the
Biden administration is loath to do. Second
is the fact that Niger, having evaluated its
options going forward, may no longer be
interested in maintaining the close
relations it previously enjoyed with the US.
Niger, like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea
before it, has thrown off the mantle of its
post-colonial relationship with France, a
relationship that was closely linked with US
national security policy in West Africa and
the Sahel. The clock is ticking on the fate
of US-Niger relations, and there seems to be
little Victoria Nuland or any American
official can do to change the outcome.
