When It Comes To U.S. Military Policy In Africa, Trump Is Just Following His Predecessor
On Trump’s African inheritance
One of the adjectives most often used to describe Trump and his administration is “unprecedented.”
What people perceive as the shock and horror of living in a country whose commander in chief regularly denigrates his own citizens and dehumanizes immigrants feels most perfectly articulated as a fresh aberration on the American scene.
Of course, it isn’t entirely true.
For all of his bluster about building a wall, Donald Trump is actually deporting fewer immigrants than Barack Obama. And many of the progressive accomplishments which occurred during the Obama administration, such as gay marriage, continue unabated. One of the most conveniently overlooked ways in which Trump has achieved a nefarious continuity with the Obama administration, however, is the continued militarization of Africa.
When four American soldiers were killed in Niger late last year, the response was a mixture of disgust and confusion.
What were American forces doing in Africa in the first place? The blowback of public opinion was so swift and agitated that a Republican-controlled Congress even deigned to hold hearings on Trump’s “African strategy,” as if elected officials weren’t already well aware of the military sprawl they had been green-lighting legally and financially for decades.
This congressional exercise in feigning shock was another pathetic example of public servants pretending to share the same amnesiac response to the continuously sprawling Long War as their constituents. But the problem isn’t new.
As Nicholas Grossman put it in a piece for Arc last October:
[the political move] to use Niger to weaken Trump would obscure the debate we should be having about global operations.
Certainly, Trump’s relationship with Africa seems tendentious (“shithole countries,” anyone?), and the optics are made worse by what many Americans consider their president’s odious associations with racialized nationalism. But even as recently as right before the election, people were warning that then-candidate Trump was distracting from Obama’s African militarization.
In fact, Middle East analyst Daniel DePetris wrote as much for Quartz, citing Obama’s expansion of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) — which gives the president the right to use military action against al Qaeda and its affiliates — into use in Somalia in a piece appropriately headlined “President Obama is quietly expanding the war on terror in Africa while the world is distracted by Trump.”
Obama’s creative interpretation of AUMF — as applying to any number of terrorist organizations around the globe — played a major role in expanding America’s military footprint in Africa. It provided flimsy but real legal cover for Obama to do things such as build a drone base in Somalia and increase American troop presence on the continent by 200 percent between 2008 and 2014.
Trump’s “African strategy,” if you can call it that, is bad. But it’s also an inheritance from his predecessor.
Journalist Nick Turse, writing about the uptick in military operations in Africa under Obama back in 2014, explained why, exactly, American troops were deployed to the continent:
U.S. troops carry out a wide range of operations in Africa, including airstrikes targeting suspected militants, night raids aimed at kidnapping terror suspects, airlifts of French and African troops onto the battlefields of proxy wars, and evacuation operations in destabilized countries. Above all, however, the U.S. military conducts training missions, mentors allies, and funds, equips, and advises its local surrogates.
In other words, in 2014, American troops were deployed to Africa to do the exact set of things that the soldiers recently killed in Niger were doing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Obama’s expansion of military activity in Africa didn’t go entirely unnoticed. As Anakwa Dwamena writes in the New Republic:
The Obama administration’s approach to Africa has also been colored by the issue that has dominated American foreign policy since September 11: counter-terrorism. Grieve Chelwa, the Harvard economist, notes that if Obama’s hands were tied early in his administration with regards to promoting African development, they certainly weren’t when it came to a huge ramping-up of the U.S. military presence in Africa via the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Some of the U.S.’s closest counter-terrorism partners on the continent — governments in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Egypt — have made blatant power grabs and extended the terms of aging leaders, in direct contrast with Obama’s aspirations for Africa’s youth. A kind of Cold War framework of engagement remains in place, in which African countries are seen as dominoes to be protected in the War on Terror. And it’s hard to disentangle whether increased insecurity on the continent has come despite or because of the growth in the U.S.’s military presence.
In other words, things like secret drone bases and an uptick in deployments and joint-military exercises most likely had the same destabilizing effect the public assumes Trump’s actions are having. A terrible continuity remains unbroken.
Even scarier than the prospect that Trump isn’t necessarily to blame for pioneering our military presence in Africa is that Obama isn’t responsible either.
After all, the U.S. Africa Command which Dwamena mentions was formed by the George W. Bush administration, as was the AUMF which continues to provide legal cover for military adventurism. In other words, Obama’s legacy may not even be his own, or only partially so.
A much more terrible scenario than any one single president making bad decisions is the possibility that between AUMF, AFRICOM, and a relatively pliant public easily distracted by the next sentence crawling across the news ticker, the American government has been taken hostage by the animating logic of constant low-scale, world-wide warfare: that the American military can and should be spread across the globe and that most geo-global issues have a military solution.
If it’s the case that we’ve backed ourselves into a perpetual war footing, then what’s most disturbing about Trump’s strategy is its continuity. A truly unprecedented position concerning the American military presence in Africa would come as a welcome relief.
