00:00Donald Trump promised to pull American troops out of Africa, part of ending what he called
00:05forever wars. But now the U.S. is carrying out strikes at a higher rate than ever before,
00:12most recently in Nigeria. This month saw the largest operation of its kind in years in which
00:18the U.S. and Nigeria say their forces killed more than 170 jihadist fighters, including a senior
00:25commander of the so-called Islamic State. So what changed in Washington's thinking? Why promise
00:32one thing and do quite the opposite? Cameron Hudson has been deeply involved in U.S. Africa policy for
00:38many years, including previously working for the State Department and the White House on Africa.
00:43He has a name for what he's seeing now. I think I would describe this as a kind of made
00:48-for-TV
00:49foreign policy. We are avoiding the hard work of nation building, of institution building,
00:57of development, providing medical assistance, providing health care, providing education
01:05infrastructure. Because if this is a show, the question is who it's for. Last October,
01:12Trump labeled Nigeria a country of particular concern. That's the formal classification the
01:17U.S. government gives to countries that fail on religious freedom. He said Nigerian Christians
01:22were being slaughtered and that he'd send in the military, in his words, guns a-blazing. And he did.
01:29In the last few weeks, we have seen multiple attacks on terror targets in Nigeria that have involved
01:37U.S. forces on the front lines of those assaults, whether they've been on the ground or in helicopters.
01:43It has not just been provision of intelligence support or operational planning. U.S. soldiers
01:52have been involved in these raids on terror targets in Nigeria. And that is going a step beyond anything
02:00that we have seen since 2017, the last time we had casualties of American troops and which prompted
02:09the Trump administration at that time to call for this wholesale review of the American force posture
02:14in Africa. So we're seeing a complete 180 between then and now. This is a president who in his first
02:23term questioned why American troops were in Africa at all, whose administration in his second term wanted
02:29to shut down the command focused on Africa. That same president is now overseeing the biggest U.S.
02:35strike campaign Africa has seen in years. It's difficult to say exactly what prompted Trump's
02:42U-turn, but there's a strong Christian lobby in Washington with a direct line to the president.
02:49The Trump administration came in, I think, with a very narrow focus on defending Christians,
02:55not just in the world, but in Nigeria in particular. And that was really appealing to the domestic base
03:02of President Trump supporters. Now, we haven't talked about Nigeria itself. This country isn't
03:09a passenger here. It initially rejected the notion from the U.S. that there was a genocide being
03:15carried out against Nigerian Christians. But the government in Abuja watched how this Trump
03:20administration treats countries that turn up and argue with it. And they made a choice.
03:26I think that they probably saw from whether it's Ukraine or South Africa or a number of,
03:32you know, pretty high profile examples that it's just not get it's not worth getting into a public
03:38dispute with Trump or trying to school him publicly about the error of his ways, that that's not going
03:46to get you very far. And so and so I think what they've they've adopted is a kind of yes
03:53and approach,
03:55which is, yes, we have a problem with the protection of Christians and we also have these
03:59other problems. And you really can't, you know, disaggregate those problems. They're all part and
04:05parcel of the same security challenge that we face. This move also helped Nigeria scale another long term
04:12hurdle. If you go back prior to the Trump administration, whether that's the Biden
04:17administration or the previous Trump administration or the Obama administration, there have been a lot
04:22of congressional restrictions on our support to the Nigerian military over time. And that those have
04:29been based upon human rights concerns that the Nigerian military operates with a very heavy hand,
04:35that there are very high civilian casualties that come along with providing whether it's attack
04:41helicopters or night vision or UAV drones. And so there have been heavy restrictions on the use of
04:51U.S. provided military equipment to the Nigerian military. Trump has essentially waived those
04:57restrictions on the Nigerian military. So in some respects, the gloves are off, right? Trump has taken
05:03the gloves off the Nigerian military in a way that his predecessors did not.
05:09So Trump gets to defend Christians and Nigerians get the weapons. Meanwhile, the U.S. lost a foothold
05:15in West Africa's Sahel region. In nearby Niger, the new military rulers ordered the Americans out.
05:22Washington left behind a $100 million drone base and a hole where its eyes and ears used to be.
05:29Losing that created a big intelligence vacuum for the United States that certainly our defense
05:35department has been quite keen to try to re-establish. And so I think the approach that
05:41we have seen the U.S. take in the years since losing that base is having a much smaller footprint
05:48spread across a number of countries. So whether it's Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria now, entry into
05:56possibly Mali with restarting talks with the military junta there.
06:01And geopolitics is also at play here.
06:04But certainly I think the other aspect of wanting to get back in beyond just improving our own
06:11intelligence picture is this notion that by not being on the ground, we have ceded territory to
06:17the Russians or to the Chinese or to other entrants, which might threaten U.S. interests in the long
06:25term. And that's certainly, I think, a concern.
06:28But now the U.S. is in Nigeria carrying out some of its biggest strikes ever seen in the country.
06:34Instead of just targeting key individuals, they claim to be wiping out hundreds of fighters.
06:39And that makes big headlines. But Hudson's worry is that this approach doesn't work.
06:45Well, I think the concern that I have with respect to the way the Trump administration is approaching
06:51counterterrorism in Africa is very similar to the to the way that the French approached it in 2013 when
06:57they came into Mali, which is, you know, this kind of whack-a-mole effort. Right. I think we know
07:04from
07:05more than a decade of counterterrorism involvement in a place like Mali that you can't kill your way out of
07:12a counterterrorism problem. Right. And a counterinsurgency problem because because these forces will be
07:19replaced. There's an infinite number of unemployed 18 year old men in in the Sahel and in northern
07:27Nigeria. And they are all waiting to be recruited and promoted into these terror groups. And so if we
07:35can kill the number two in ISIS, well, tomorrow there's going to be another number two. That's my
07:40concern is that you're going to you're going to sow resentment, as the French did in Mali over time,
07:46if all we do is, you know, drone strikes on terror targets. There has to be some alternative to that.
07:54So whack-a-mole attacks on insurgents create more insurgents. Hudson says there are non-military
08:00strategies that could address the root causes of terrorism. But Trump's administration has undermined
08:07them. I mean, I think I would describe this as a kind of made for TV foreign policy. Right. So
08:13we are
08:15we are avoiding the hard work of nation building of institution building of development. And my
08:24concern is that the Trump administration is not only not interested in thinking about these questions,
08:29but they've eliminated the parts of our government. Right. Like USAID and other development agencies of
08:35the US government that had the responsibility of engaging in this kind of work. And so we have
08:40not just, you know, not just a, an unwillingness to engage in that work, but we now have an inability
08:47to engage in that kind of soft power projection around development and state building that might not
08:56be particularly sexy or appealing that doesn't create headlines, but providing medical assistance,
09:04providing health care, providing education infrastructure. Those are the pathways out of
09:12poverty. Those are the pathways to avoid terror recruitment. Instead, what we are getting, I think,
09:19from the Trump administration is a foreign policy that is tailor made to get headlines.
09:25But if the groundwork isn't being done, nobody can tell you where this ends. We can now add Nigeria to
09:31a growing list of military conflicts Trump has engaged in and another for which there's no easy way out.
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