Late to the Table: Washington's Attempt to Rebuild in the Sahel

France has withdrawn, Russia is struggling to deliver, and the United States is back at the door. Our new report asks whether a partnership built on counterterrorism and critical minerals can succeed where earlier approaches did not.

In July 2026, the newly confirmed U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Frank Garcia, made his first official trip to the continent. The itinerary was short — Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali — but the choice of stops carried more meaning than the length of the visit suggested. One anchor state, one emerging coastal partner, and one capital where Washington's influence had all but evaporated.

In a new report, political science researcher Kawthar Ahmed treats that trip as a window into a broader question: what exactly is the United States trying to accomplish in the African Sahel, and can it realistically rebuild a position it spent the better part of a decade losing? The answer is neither dismissive nor optimistic. Washington has real openings, but they are narrower than the rhetoric of great-power competition implies — and they close quickly if the United States reverts to the security-first habits that eroded Western standing in the first place.

What Changed, and How Fast

The Sahel of 2026 bears little resemblance to the Sahel of 2020. Military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger dismantled the political architecture that had underpinned French influence for decades. Operation Barkhane, France's counterterrorism mission across the region between 2014 and 2022, ended without producing the security improvements it promised, and French forces subsequently departed from one country after another. The United States lost its own foothold when it withdrew from Niger in 2024, giving up the drone base at Agadez that had served as its principal surveillance platform for the region.

Into that space stepped other actors. Russia positioned itself as a security partner willing to work with governments the West had sanctioned or isolated, and to do so without attaching conditions on governance or democratic reform. China took a different route, deepening its economic presence through infrastructure financing, mining, and trade while staying largely clear of domestic political disputes.

The result is a region that has become less a Western sphere of influence than a genuinely contested one — and one where instability has continued to worsen regardless of which outside power holds the security file.

Three Drivers Behind the Return

The report identifies three interlocking motives behind renewed U.S. engagement.

The first is competition with Russia. Moscow's model has produced limited results: armed groups have continued to expand despite Russian support, which U.S. policymakers read as evidence that military assistance alone cannot address the underlying causes of instability. The American approach is pitched as an alternative — combining security cooperation with economic partnership and institution-building rather than resting on force alone.

The second is counterterrorism. The Sahel has become one of the world's most active theatres for groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, a product of weak institutions, porous borders, economic distress, and local conflicts that armed groups have proven adept at exploiting. Washington's preferred instrument is partner capacity-building: training, intelligence sharing, and institutional support rather than large deployments of American troops.

The third driver is economic, and it is the one with the longest time horizon. West Africa and the Sahel hold significant reserves of gold, uranium, lithium, and other minerals tied to the energy transition and advanced manufacturing. For Washington, securing diversified access to these supply chains — and reducing dependence on sources concentrated in China — has become a geopolitical objective rather than merely a commercial one, pursued increasingly through investment institutions rather than aid programmes.

The Opening — and the Ceiling

There is a genuine opportunity here. The retreat of French influence has created space for new partners, and Washington enters that space without the colonial legacy that has weighed on Paris. Sahelian governments have shown a clear preference for partnership diversification over exclusive alignment. The security needs are real and growing, and Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire — both of which have kept relations with Washington relatively intact — offer plausible entry points for a wider regional presence.

But the constraints are structural rather than tactical. A trust deficit runs deeper than any single administration: across large segments of Sahelian society, Western military presence has become associated with a decade of deteriorating security rather than improving it, and several of the region's governments have built part of their domestic legitimacy on precisely that argument.

Washington is also not competing against a vacuum. It faces two distinct models at once — Russian security assistance that arrives quickly and without conditions, and Chinese investment at a scale the United States has not matched. The realistic goal, the report argues, is not displacement but relevance.

The hardest constraint is the nature of the crisis itself. The Sahel's instability is not fundamentally a shortfall of security capacity. It is rooted in poverty, weak institutions, marginalised peripheries, and local grievances that armed groups convert into recruitment. A decade of military-led approaches has not contained the expansion of jihadist organisations, and there is little reason to expect a differently badged security partnership to produce faster results.

The Test Ahead

Washington's return to the Sahel is real, and the strategic logic behind it — countering rivals, securing minerals, preventing security vacuums — is coherent on its own terms. But every one of those objectives is an American interest first. The open question is whether a partnership model built primarily around them can hold the attention of governments and publics whose own priorities lie in development, jobs, and functioning institutions.

Influence in the Sahel will not be won by outcompeting Russia or China directly. It will be won, if at all, by offering something the region actually needs and sustaining it long enough to be believed. On the evidence of the past decade, that is the harder task — and the one Washington has least often completed.

The full report examines the drivers, opportunities, and constraints in detail, including the country-level cases of Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali.

Download the full report here.

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