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In Africa, U.S.-Trained Militaries Are Ousting Civilian Governments in Coups

194 points by gscott 5y ago

drenvuk 5y ago
At this point it's safe to assume that this is always the unstated part of the plan. Keeping individual areas destabilized 1. decreases nations' ability to organize, 2. prevents them from properly utilizing their natural resources, 3. reduces possible competition at the global economic level, 4. increases the the possibility of extracting resources and labor from them due to an increase of various factors like economic desperation and political variability. It serves fully developed countries' interests better to keep everyone else down so they can be exploited. Negotiating with blocs rather than newly instated and flexible rulers annoying and difficult.
- pepperonipizza 5y ago
  Do you have legitimate source for this claim? France spended billions of euros to fight islamist groups in Mali at the demand of the government. No resources worth the billions France spended in Mali
  - peter-m80 5y ago
    The source for this claim is called history
  - mxmilkiib 5y ago
    FWIW The Gravel Institute on France's neocolonial financial control in Africa https://youtu.be/36vYRkVYeVw https://youtu.be/36vYRkVYeVw
    - sampo 5y ago
      Here is some criticism of the Gravel Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFGQI8P9BMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFGQI8P9BMg
      - deleted 5y ago
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    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      Gravel Institute marketing itself as a counterweight to PragerU is about the most honest thing they've done, because they lie just as much and in similar ways as PragerU likes to.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    But that has an agenda involved. If France wants betterment of Mali, it would be better to spend it by giving humanitarian aid or food or medicine.
    - Grimburger 5y ago
      > humanitarian aid The west gives enough humanitarian aid to feed the continent a few times over. It's hard for some to understand but adequate amounts of money or assistance isn't the problem here.
      - robinsoh 5y ago
        > The west gives enough humanitarian aid to feed the continent a few times over. It's hard for some to understand but adequate amounts of money or assistance isn't the problem here. The west? The continent? "isn't the problem here"? Citations needed. Definitions needed. Tell us what you perceive is the problem here?
        robinsoh 5y ago
        So many downvotes without a response, looks like everyone seems to know some facts or has a consensus belief/faith that I don't know about or don't accept as a given fact/truth.
        elcamino44 5y ago
        Agreed. I’ve seen the UN-led humanitarian system up close (albeit not in Africa). In my experience, it has many, many flaws. One of these is that it is resource constrained.
      - dathinab 5y ago
        The problem is that a lot of the humanitarian aid is not reaching the actual people. Like building school buildings, but not including anything needed to _run_ the school for more then a very short time, or at all.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    Can’t that be done in parallel to parent’s claims ? By helping the gov. France secures its influence on the area and makes sure French company’s business is safe. For instance from a quick search Mali seems bound to Veolia for its water distribution network building. And I’d assume it is or will go the same for electricity, transportation etc. where anytime a big contract needs to be passed with an external technology provider, excluding French companies from the call won’t be an option. PS: to add, French companies entering these kind of deals will usually be predatory and make sure the gov. is under enough pressure that they can’t just move to another provider. Development will only happen within a tight control of the situation by external debtors.
    - dgellow 5y ago
      > By helping the gov. France secures its influence on the area and makes sure French company’s business is safe. That's not how things played out in real life, in fact the exact opposite is true. There is now a very strong anti-French sentiment in Mali (in part exacerbated by Russia), and France lost a huge part of the influence they had in the whole region.
      - makeitdouble 5y ago
        I'm looking at this as a reference timeline: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-france-to-withdraw-its-troops-from-mali https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-f... It looks to me like France/Mali gov relations took a turn after the 2020 coup ? All in all I can totally imagine Malian population having an anti-French sentiment, while their government is in bed with French entities.
        dgellow 5y ago
        Do you mean the second coup from 2021? That’s when France started to have clear difficulties to deal with the Malian government, the coup was in May, Macron announced the planned end of the operation in June IIRC due to issues related to the new government. In any case it’s a quite complicated topic, but it’s not one government being in bed with French entities. You have multiple groups fighting for territory and resources in the region for their own interest, France went there to support the government fight against Islamist groups by demand of Mali. And you now have a lot of Wagner mercenaries too (see https://www.csis.org/analysis/tracking-arrival-russias-wagner-group-mali https://www.csis.org/analysis/tracking-arrival-russias-wagne... for example. Trigger warning: be ready to read some horrifying details if you look at recent events…). You can read about the Operation Barkhane article on Wikipedia it has lot of context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane (I would recommend the French article if you read French). And about Operation Serval if you want to understand what happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval. There was a general opposition to French forces, from part of the population since the beginning which is to be expected. If you go a bit more into the details you will see that Russia took the opportunity to start an information war in the region to push against French forces, as a soft evidence you can see that protesters started asking for a Russian intervention in 2019 (in French, sorry https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/01/10/au-mali-le-sentiment-anti-francais-gagne-du-terrain_6025466_3212.html https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/01/10/au-mali-le...). That has also been communicated by Macron as a reason to stop their operation and leave the region (he made public speeches clearly pointing to Russia without explicitly saying it’s name, you can easily find them online and official translations).
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    Islamists in Africa will eventually come to France and wreak havoc there, so France has a good interest to nip the threat in the bud.
    - kkfx 5y ago
      Islamists are like talibans western creatures built to overthrown local dictatorships and governments in general when they do not behave in ways the west like, as the talibans they grow enough to a point they can revolt against those who have created them. Keeping this in mind you'll understand why African's do not like us except when they live in EU, so when they see the difference and hypocrisy of our oppressive élite governance.
      - troon-lover 5y ago
      - ryan93 5y ago
        I wish we could go back to the secular stable Middle East before the west showed up.
  - drenvuk 5y ago
    I only spent about 20 minutes looking this up. Western nations overthrew Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Less than two years after they're mostly done in Libya, they roll those forces over to Mali and get Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in as acting president. NATO/UN forces had a hand in both situations. Western nations were just rolling our already funded and armed forces through the region to set things back up for proper resource and money extraction. This is all on wikipedia. When I say "our" forces I mean any people who are holding weapons provided by us, eating food provided by us and working towards goals that are set by us. How all of that is funneled to them I have no idea. Now that the west instated former leader of Mali was ousted France wanted to re-de-stabilize again it seems. It might or might not be worth it. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/mali-accuses-france-of-training-terrorists-in-country https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/mali-accuses-france... I should have stated it more as an opinion rather than fact but I stand by it. It's hard to believe that the US has so much intelligence yet we're unable to predict the guys we're training are going to attempt to take over the country. It's also not hard to understand that if we're committing billions of dollars to a war effort there isn't someone or a group of someone who have a hugely vested interest in either keeping the status quo for existing streams of income or removing some impediment in a potential stream of income. Those streams mostly don't go to the governments themselves, rather they go to companies headed by well connected individuals who somehow are able to drive policy and decisions either directly or indirectly. On the flip side of this, you might have competing interests from other nations as well so it may not be as clear cut. It's no longer border expansion, annexation and "this country" vs "that country". Instead now we have nameless rebels or terrorists (depending on who's side their on) who then sign deals and feed money and resources to their "sponsor countries", or get loans for construction, or some other financial games that are far more opaque. I have no more specific information, this is all broad strokes based on what I've seen and read. Maybe I'm wrong.
  - kkfx 5y ago
    No country act on others for charity or humanitarian purposes. France was in Mali because France have a long colonial history in Africa and need African's resources. Russian Fed. try to bring back relations from the URSS era in Africa and get a better welcome because in the past they do not colonize Africa so their actions are less badly seen by local populations. France was one of the less oppressive colonizers in Africa, but still left a significant trail of blood and suffering behind so while with Mali there was an agreement because western-created (yes, you read correctly) "islamic" militias are worse for Malian than French colonial legacy, though when Russia step-in it was and perhaps still is considered better: they do not really have means to colonize, they can just make agreements less unfair perhaps than western countries. And that's happen almost everywhere, China is far less welcomed because various populations already experience China BRI policies and so the news they are not much friendly than the west is already spread. You do not need more resources than just history. The worst western colonizer were, from the more bloody and oppressive: - Dutch & Belgian & British - Germans & Italians & Spaniards - Frenches & Portuguese Chinese are "new" outside China, so are Russians and Russians are still seen a bit as Soviet witch to gain influences was far lighter than anyone else outside their borders.
    - blacklion 5y ago
      I don't agree with you ranking. Read about French behavior in colonial south-east Asia, like Vietnam. I don't think, it is better than Britain behavior in India. Belgians in Africa are unsurpassed, though :-(
      - kkfx 5y ago
        They still not have done a genocide (like British with USA native Americans, or Spain in south America many years before) also for France colonies was and some still are part of the State, so their Citizens get French nationality witch does not compensate their oppression, but let them potentially emigrate far more easily and becoming French Citizens like immigrants in USA can apply, UK have never done something similar. Also France have always colonized by the State, with troops etc, not with opium smuggling or commercial criminals (Indian's companies). That's why I put UK at the top of the most criminal in the list. They are ranked third there because Dutch and Belgian crimes was far bigger even if for a limited period of time and geographical areas, but still at the top IMO. I rank Spain crimes a bit lower because South America colonization is far in the past, in an era where certain crimes was not considered much crimes from the point of view of most populations, otherwise they would be at the top position, perhaps counting also they religious crimes against also their own citizens. Anyway any power have a blood trail, that's just a rank for the most "recent" ones...
- JonathanFly 5y ago
  The article is about how these coups are reducing US influence and strategy. The sub headline: "Insurrections are disrupting American security strategy in the region and giving Russia an opening to gain sway."
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    "Well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions" -- the CIA, probably.
- recuter 5y ago
  Can you describe which specific resources and what labour is presently being extracted en masse as per #4?
- geysersam 5y ago
  This is just a typical conspiracy theory to explain the mess that is reality. It borrows aspects of the real world: 1. Predatory resource extraction from poorer countries, 2. Cases where western militaries / intelligence agencies have helped overthrow democratically elected governments, Etc But! Then it fuses these pieces and makes it seem like they are part of a larger plan. A plan where "someone" has incentive, lack of ethics and almost all powerful capability to manipulate events. Thing is, masterminds don't exist. Opportunists do. *It doesn't serve developed nations interests to keep everyone else down.* Look at globalization. How much money has western companies made from utilizing manufacturing in Asia? More than they would extracting some minerals mined by child laborers...
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - themgt 5y ago
    It's also possible to go too far in the direction of seeing only tactics but never strategy, and taking countries publicly stated goals and motives at face value. Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of our most influential contemporary foreign policy thinkers - here's the NYT reviewing his book 'The Grand Chessboard': Brzezinski ... describes a very forbidding situation in the years ahead if the United States does not make more permanent the dominance it now has over a vast area of the world. "This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok -- provides the setting for 'the game,'" Brzezinski says. "If the middle space can be drawn increasingly into the expanding orbit of the West (where America preponderates), if the southern region is not subjected to domination by a single player, and if the East is not unified in a manner that prompts the expulsion of America from its offshore bases, America can then be said to prevail. But if the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America's primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically."[1] In other words, for the US to continue its unipolar domination requires the lack of cohesive blocs dominated by other great powers. Obviously in this context Brzezinski is alluding to Russia and China in the Eurasian 'chessboard', but the logic is broadly applicable around the globe. There's also a difference between controlling events like a puppeteer pulling strings and the more common scenario where our actions help catalyze events we may not have intended but were nonetheless predictable and seen as not worth the effort or trade-offs to avoid. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/reviews/971026.26gwertzt.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/r...
- giantg2 5y ago
  If this were true, especially #4, why aren't more companies doing business there? The instability seems to be reducing resource extraction. It seems China wants to increase stability and build infrastructure so that they can can exploit it. The only industry that would likely benefit from the inability to extract resources are the diamond companies since price is artificially inflated.
  - JBiserkov 5y ago
    If China wants stability in Africa, and China is an enemy of the US, then it follows the US wants instability in Africa.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Ever hear the enemy of my enemy is my friend? If the enemy is instability, the US and China may have a shared goal and cooperate (or at least not sabotage each other on that issue).
    - geysersam 5y ago
      This reasoning is absurd in every way! Besides assuming China is an enemy of the US - what does that even mean? Let me illustrate how ridiculous this reasoning is: "North Korea wants to prevent rampant global warming, North Korea is an enemy of the US, the US wants to...?"
- bigDinosaur 5y ago
  I don't buy it. Developed countries want stability in their allies/trading partners, unless they are actively at war or see another state as a threat. I doubt the US sees many threats in Africa. The crucial thing is though that historically nobody has really cared from where such (pro-western) stability came: if it was from a democratic government, fine - but if not, also fine.
  - robinsoh 5y ago
    > Developed countries want stability in their allies/trading partners If you take a look at our history and our actions with our "allies" and "trading partners", do you see that to be true? Say for example with our immediate neighbours like Mexico? How about our history with Haiti the moment they became independent? Does it seem like we wanted stability for them? How about our history with Panama, Granada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Columbia, etc? I'm assuming everyone is familiar with the history of why and how the term banana republic got coined. Oh, how about our history with Cuba? It seems to me that your statement is not an accurate representation of history for those specific cases. Do you feel that's a fair perception of reality?
    - bigDinosaur 5y ago
      Yes, I think the US did/does want stability in Mexico. I think historically the US has actually been quite good at ensuring stability in other countries. Things like the Marshall plan were not altruistic and are a clear example of this. It's also possible that you want to occasionally destabilise a country as a threat to others (Vietnam?) to make them stay stable (=status quo). If you just look at the unstable results you're probably ignoring the many successful examples of stability that the US created. Again, often using and supporting terrifying regimes. Often not. Typical empire. I make no claim that the US a) always stabilises countries b) doesn't use brutal methods to stabilise countries c) always acts in a purely rational manner.
      - robinsoh 5y ago
        > I think historically the US has actually been quite good at ensuring stability in other countries. I'm now unsure whether your meaning of "stability" is equivalent to my meaning of "stability". I'm curious what is your basis for this thinking and whether you have a factual basis for "has actually been quite good". What measurement statistic would be reasonable to use for measuring that? Lets re-visit some counter facts that will be likely to be raised. How would you quantify these in opposition to your claim? In Argentina, military forces overthrew the democratically elected President Isabel Perón in the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, starting the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla, known as the National Reorganization Process. Both the coup and the following authoritarian regime was eagerly endorsed and supported by the United States government[5] with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger paying several official visits to Argentina during the dictatorship The US government supported the 1971 coup led by General Hugo Banzer that toppled President Juan José Torres of Bolivia.[9][10] Torres had displeased Washington by convening an "Asamblea del Pueblo" (Assembly of the People), in which representatives of specific proletarian sectors of society were represented (miners, unionized teachers, students, peasants), and more generally by leading the country in what was perceived as a left wing direction. Banzer hatched a bloody military uprising starting on August 18, 1971, that succeeded in taking the reins of power by August 22, 1971. After Banzer took power, the US provided extensive military and other aid to the Banzer dictatorship.[11][12] Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the US-supported campaign of political repression and state terrorism by South American right-wing dictators.[13][14][15] US-backed[16] 1964 Brazilian coup d'état against social democrat João Goulart. Under then-President John F. Kennedy, the US sought to "prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba", a policy which was carried forward under Lyndon B. Johnson and which led to US military support for the coup in April 1964 After the democratic election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, an economic war ordered by President Richard Nixon,[19] among other things, caused the 1973 Chilean coup d'état with the involvement of the CIA[20] due to Allende's democratic socialist leanings. What followed was the decades-long US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Peasants and workers (mostly of indigenous descent) revolt during the first half of the 20th century due to harsh living conditions and the abuse from landlords and the government-supported American United Fruit Company. This revolt was repressed, but led to the democratic election of Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was overthrown during the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, endorsed by the United States In 1912, during the Banana Wars period, the U.S. occupied Nicaragua as a means of protecting American business interests and protecting the rights that Nicaragua granted to the United States to construct a canal there.[38] The intervention, utilizing the U.S. Marine Corps, was sparked by a rebellion that opposed the United States. After quelling the rebellion, the U.S. continued occupying Nicaragua until 1933, when President Herbert Hoover officially ended the occupation.[39] After the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew pro-American dictator[40] Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua fought the Contra guerrillas supported by the United States.
- antupis 5y ago
  Thing is that where USA elite is best is nontangable goods like financial systems, computer software and cultural stuff(movies, brands etc) and this stuff needs strong consumer markets. So if they would be that kind entity doing this stuff then it would not work for USA elite.
- drnonsense42 5y ago
  It’s rarely a good look for anybody to claim that the US government is this competent
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  On the other hand these are fragile governments at best, and handing the military more effective troops is always going to cause a rise in the number of Coups.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  This is bad logic if you look at the bigger picture. So you’re saying that the US spends money for coups only to have China swoop in for the diplomatic win? Instability is also bad for US conglomerates to take advantage of the situation.
  - ericmay 5y ago
    Not to mention everyone always assigns extreme competence to these conspiracy theories… yet the US couldn’t see that China would swoop in for a diplomatic win? C’mon.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Don't believe the marketing for our many stupid wars. It's never about democracy or women's rights or education or business or terrorism or even oil. (You know this, because none of our wars have ever improved any situation with respect to any of these supposed values.) The only point, ever, is to sell more weapons manufactured in USA. All of our stupid media and stupid politics are subordinate to this tawdry motivation. For this purpose, it's actually better if Africans can momentarily imagine better lives, before their hopes are dashed again by more violent coups.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Yea I agree. I wish Republicans would stop creating new ones ya know? I’m also surprised at how small the defense industry is. What do you think we do to support tech companies? Do you think wars in Africa can be traced back to government support for Netflix and Stripe? Maybe we’re not supporting the defense industry, but actually supporting someone else behind the scenes yea?
      - chaostheory 5y ago
        It is actually not about selling weapons. It is about getting access to natural resources such as oil and rare earth metals for things like chips. For that, you need stability in order to do business. Constant coups and armed insurrections is counter productive, which is why these types of conspiracy theories fall apart.
- bnralt 5y ago
  > At this point it's safe to assume that this is always the unstated part of the plan. Keeping individual areas destabilized If you read the article, it's all about how the instability is harming U.S. strategy in the region because the coups trigger laws that require the U.S. to break off partnerships: > But U.S. commanders have watched with dismay over the past year as military leaders in several African allies—including officers with extensive American schooling—have overthrown civilian governments and seized power for themselves, triggering laws that forbid the U.S. government from providing them with weapons or training. And lists several examples of that happening, such as: > Last year, a logistics advisory team from Col. Sullivan’s brigade had just arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, and was waiting out its Covid-19 quarantine at a hotel when the Biden administration decided to cancel the deployment “due to our deep concerns about the conflict in northern Ethiopia and human-rights violations and abuses being committed against civilians,” according to a State Department spokesperson. This disruption has opened the doors to other countries to take United State's place: > Malian commandos attended U.S.-led special-operations exercises in Mauritania in 2020, but were cut off from American training after its military overthrew the president last May. The Malian junta hired Russian mercenaries from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group to provide security.
- jollybean 5y ago
  This is not true, and it's relatively easy to prove. It's nary impossible to 'extract resources' when nations are 'unstable'. 'Instability' means nothing can happen in the long term, and most of the necessary underlying necessary factors can't exist either. 'Instability' means contracts are ripped up, money disappears, rights are re-allocated, 3rd parties drop out etc. etc.. IMF contracts for the development of 'an electricity' grid - essential in doing anything - fall through. And nobody is afraid of 'competition' from a completely underdeveloped nation. In some very niche cases (perhaps some unique resource), but that's negligible. It's actually completely the opposite: Everyone wants stability. Stability means the system can start to develop, resource extraction starts to happen, but more importantly - 'the rest of the economy' starts to need and consume things. Factories buy German equipment, they buy gear from Caterpillar, they need IT from Cisco, they build dams using requiring myriad tooling, consulting from IBM and Accenture. Consumers start to buy cars from Toyota and Ford, business need financial services from NY and London, they need loans and investment from abroad, they start to buy iPhones, Androids, they use Facebook, Twitter. If you want to be cynical, then you can say what the West wants is 'stability' over democracy, which frankly is not entirely irrational. Consider the situation in Saudi Arabia. House of Saud is held in power by the US, with the guarantee that the 'Oil Flows' and is sold at market prices to 'whoever'. Implicit in that is the nation remains stable. That they do not become a vassal of Russia or China etc., and that they act as a 'good neighbour country' and mostly they do. (Not always). Internally - it's not so nice. Lack of democracy and human rights, however, there's enough pressure for progress to be made, and there is. Gadaffi was literally a terrorist, he shot down an airliner (Lockerbee). But via is 'nice guy son' was being 'rehabilitated' (i.e. image was cleaned up), because we don't mind and evil turd, as long as there is stability. Unfortunately, the 'Arab Spring' happened, his people rose up, and there was a civil war. Western involvement probably shifted the outcome, but the resulting instability was inevitable - and Oil contracts went to shit. Nobody wants that. In reality - intervention in utterly chaotic and despotic states is just hard. You can train 'Your Man' and when he gets into power, he's not much better than the last guy. Arguably, the West could steer more clear of it, but 'lack of involvement' is also a choice. Botswana in the last couple decades has prospered amazingly - they are stable. They are a shining example for Africa. 'The West', China, India - absolutely want it to be like that, it's good for everyone.
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shmde 5y ago
USA and organising coups to destabilize nation. Name a better duo.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Peanut butter & jelly. Safer and tastier.
- _trampeltier 5y ago
  Overextending and Unbalancing Russia Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas_Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas_Watch
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Note that most of the coups which have happened in quick succession or a nontrivial amount, the coup plotters are related to the flintlock exercises https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/34268/flintlock-2022-begins-next-week-in-cote-divoire https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/34268/flintlock-2022-be... https://theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-military/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-mil...
jdougan 5y ago
https://archive.ph/QIH6D https://archive.ph/QIH6D Missing from this article: "China" and "belt and road"
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Why should they be mentioned? Is the threat of Chinese economic ties worth tacit support of military intervention?
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  - pindab0ter 5y ago
    It's not about whether it's worth it or not, but whether it's a part of the conversation. Arguably it is.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      Why? I don't see the connection between the US training troops in African countries and China's infrastructure plan unless you're saying the infrastructure plan should be opposed militarily if necessary.
      - dalbasal 5y ago
        The connection is undeniable, in a journalistic sense. Ie, you can't describe why the US and others are making certain choices without referencing it. Of course, "related to" and "justifies" are not synonyms.
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        nkozyra 5y ago
        The connection is "influence in China" and "contemporary colonialism" which is a broad enough topic for a large series of articles. But I agree that this stands on its own as a topic and Belt and Road would feel shoehorned in within an article this short.
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
- Isinlor 5y ago
  Nobody in the west organized Euromaidan and it was not a coup. Viktor Yanukovych decided to abandon the country on his own without any military intervention. The reason for Euromaidan is simple. Ukraine is poor and EU represents the road to prosperity. In 1991, after collapse of Soviet Union, Polish and Ukrainian economies were exactly the same size. The same GDP. Poland made very quick pivot to the west. We decided to join NATO in 1999 and EU in 2004. Last year Polish economy was 3 times bigger than Ukrainian. Nothing good ever comes from the east.
  - maratc 5y ago
    > Nobody in the west organized Euromaidan and it was not a coup. You can listen to the "nobody" organizing the "not a coup" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Yanukovich decided to flee when an agreement with opposition, co-signed by three ministers of foreign affairs of EU, were just ditched by the crowd and the opposition.
    - watwut 5y ago
      After he rejected EU under pressure from Russia, by his own words. Against what quite a lot of Ukraniens wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. You can't ignore preceeding pressure and meddling from Russia in this story. And despite all the effort to engineer pro Russia sentiment in Ukraine, it never worked, because it is not actually that easy to create large scale support for anything from outside.
      - maratc 5y ago
        > Against what quite a lot of Ukraniens wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. But in accordance with what quite a lot of other Ukranians wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. Ukraine is a badly-divided country that has been long in a business of imposing the will of some of their people on all of their people. What will of some was imposed on all changed with time; the fact did not. In similar situation, some of Swiss people wanted more association with Germany while some wanted more association with France or Italy; they wisely decided on neutrality and have been living with that peacefully for hundreds of years, staying out of many wars involving some or all of their neighbors.
throwaway61101 5y ago
The Pakistani government was also toppled last night after falling foul of the military.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  AP story: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-pakistan-religion-elections-c01ccef08677bf8579bd7cdfe01a3d24 https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-pakistan-re...
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > falling foul of the military. I was going to say citation needed but then I googled. Astounding. So.... again we're paying for all this insanity. Imagine if we had spent this 18 billion on ourselves. I dare say that would have been better for ourselves as well as for the people of Pakistan and the whole world since these areas we mess with tend to be major exporters of smaller scale terror as well. " Financial aid to Pakistan since the 11 September 2001 attacks. Between 2002–2011, US Congress approved $18 billion in military and economic aid from the United States. However the Pakistan Treasury only received $8.647 billion in direct financial payments. "
  - nosianu 5y ago
    Maybe you did? What are they buying with that money, or if it's siphoned off where is it sent? Especially military aid, if they don't use it to buy from Russia the money probably goes back to the US, as the nr. one arms exporter by a significant margin (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-the-leadings-exporters-of-conventional-weapons/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-t...). With large weapons systems come decades of additional purchases, for training, upgrades, maintenance, spare parts, and an increased chance for buying other systems. That "aid" today can buy a lot of income over time, so rather than aid it actually is a kind of purchase itself. Googling I see a lot of links telling us how much the US is "giving" in aid. But few of those pages bother mentioning what happens with that money next. "Hoes does the US spend foreign aid" is common (to whom and where does it go), "What does the US buy with foreign aid" is not. How much aid really is free no strings attached? I guess that's most likely for emergency funds after some catastrophe. As I see it, aid more often than not is a purchase too, but few bother finding out what the US purchased. It may be they don't buy anything concrete, but so do businesses investing in PR. Example: "What we buy with foreign aid" -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12289893/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12289893/
Digit-Al 5y ago
Archive to get round paywall https://archive.ph/QIH6D https://archive.ph/QIH6D
mlindner 5y ago
Why do people continue to believe nonsense like this? The US wants stable governments, not unstable ones.
- mushbino 5y ago
  The US has historically and currently benefited much more from unstable governments. Why do you think they've invested so much in making governments unstable? Especially if they're "unfriendly" to US business interests
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Historically is different than currently. Historically the fight was against the spread of communism and so we propped up dictatorships all over the world that would prevent the spread of communism in their countries (which often backfired). Currently that is no longer the case because communism is basically dead for all intents and purposes.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    That's Russian propaganda. The West/ US interventions were always supported by the population, that's why the amount of casualties from US/West military is so low. In many cases there are barely boots on the ground and the actual work is done by civilians protesting en masse. ( They were already protesting before interventions). It doesn't mean there are no casualties, but that's mostly lowered by the interventions ( by lowering authoritarian military strength)
    - mushbino 5y ago
      This is one of the longer wikipedia articles I've come across. It's hard to imagine the US population had much say in the matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
- bell-cot 5y ago
  You could argue probabilities, causation vs. correlation, etc. - but the data on which countries have had their military trained by the U.S., vs. which countries have had military coups is fairly black-and-white. And the WSJ is not exactly a left-wing peacenic paper, to have knee-jerk or click-bait reasons to oppose U.S. training of foreign militaries. > The US wants stable governments... That line of argument tends to assume that the U.S. is both monolithic, and highly competent in the planning & conduct of its foreign policy. Vs. looking at history...
AnAfrican 5y ago
Correlation US had been training more elite troops recently Elite troops have always been the ones succefully pulling out coups
aaomidi 5y ago
America has so much innocent blood on its hands it's not even funny. I really fucking hate how complacent Americans are to what we're doing outside of the country.
- mlindner 5y ago
  The fact that we're causing so much problems is itself foreign propaganda, which is why it's only believed by a minority of deluded people.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    I'm confused what you mean by this? Could you elaborate a bit more.
slim 5y ago
This is like Che Guevara saying "I dunno, I'm just training people, I'm surprised by all these revolutions happening"
- nindalf 5y ago
  Right so what would you do in Nigeria and Mali, two countries with weak militaries struggling to maintain control of their territory? Options 1. Ignore their requests for training, because who cares about them. If they’re overrun by jihadists, it’s fine. 2. Train their military, helping them maintain peace and security internally. Consequences - you’ll be on the hook for any actions that military takes in the future. Intellectuals on HN will criticise this action with the benefit of hindsight. Please, choose one. The thing with “clever” comments like yours is that the lack the basic level of thought.
  - slim 5y ago
    Maybe USA should never have trained jihadists in first place ? can you see the pattern ?
    - nindalf 5y ago
      Please tell me more about how Boko Haram was trained by America? Can you see a pattern of ignorance?
rayiner 5y ago
Amazing that after all these years, most importantly the experiment in the 1970s of funding the groups that became the Taliban, Americans haven’t learned their lessons about funding foreign militaries.
- blfr 5y ago
  Having people you trained and armed turn around to fight against you is obviously not ideal but also the Taliban is much less of a threat than the Soviet Union so it might have been a good trade.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  This is one of my favourite articles of all time https://imgur.com/pd91LcI https://imgur.com/pd91LcI It came to mind a few days ago when I was noticing how Azov in many reputable newspapers is now seemingly being downgraded from 'neo-nazi' to 'right-wing militia'.
  - unmole 5y ago
    I don't remember where I read this: "We are this close to talking about supporting moderate Nazis."
  - nukemaster 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - recuter 5y ago
    - dralley 5y ago
      To add a little more context, from what I've read they definitely had a large (actual) Nazi element in 2014, but that has been less and less true over the intervening years. The more extreme political leaders were kicked out and they grew in size significantly based on their military success rather than their ideological leanings.
bannedbybros 5y ago
slibhb 5y ago
If "US training" is such a big deal, what the hell happened in Afghanistan? When it comes to problems in the developing world, I think we neglect to highlight Islam's role. Islam is an Arab religion that has spread across Africa and Asia. It supplants local cultures and religions and Muslim-dominated countries tend to be caught in a stalemate between popular Islamist regimes and military dictatorship. Egypt is a prime example. Pakistan is looking more and more like a failed state. I don't think the problem is the Quran but I've come to have a more negative view of the influence of Islam over the years. I think the problem is cultural imperialism: marginalization of local cultures and the Arabization that follows.
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  I wonder if reducing oil consumption might reduce the spread of Islam more than trying these militaries?
  - nickles 5y ago
    > reducing oil consumption Without singling you out, why is the suggestion always to reduce consumption as opposed to producing energy in less hostile locales? Current geopolitical events (and associated suffering) are occurring precisely because efforts to produce fossil fuels in the West have been undermined by activists pushing anti-consumption ideology.
    - dralley 5y ago
      > why is the suggestion always to reduce consumption as opposed to producing energy in less hostile locales? Maybe because reducing carbon emissions is something we already understand we desperately need to do?
      - nickles 5y ago
        > reducing carbon emissions is something we already understand we desperately need to do The USA emits roughly the same amount of C02 as it did in the mid-1970s. On a per capita basis, the emissions are the lowest since at least the 1960s. This has been achieved largely due to the cost effective production of natural gas using fracking. At the same time, US environmental regulations lead to lower emissions during production than in other nations. In other words, fossil fuels produced in the US produce less carbon than those produced in other nations. Advocating against utilizing these energy resources has created massive geopolitical instability, harmed efforts to reduce carbon emissions globally, and inflated costs of all economic activity. Such policy is inconsistent with environmental concerns but is entirely consistent with anti-consumption ideologies. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
throwaway5752 5y ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/mali-russia-wagner/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/mali-russia-..., Mali. China and Russia are active in this, too.
credit_guy 5y ago
I see some moral outrage in these comments. To those who find themselves critical of the US here, what would you do differently? Would you simply stop providing training to African soldiers? Who is then going to fight ISIS and Boko Haram? Or you simply let these groups to their own devices? Or you bring American boots on the ground to fight them? To those inclined to believe some grand conspiracy theories: it's much simpler than that. The US has limited capabilities. And reading the future is not one of them. You train some soldiers, some might turn bad. You don't train them, thousands of girls get kidnapped and then killed or sold into slavery. There's not perfect solution here.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  True. And the moral outrage around russia is so stupid too! What would you do to stop ukraine's nazis right? They just have to interfere in their neighbor's business. Your argument might have made more sense if the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and Africa wasn't directly related and reactionary to western imperialism. If it was true that the US cared about extremism, it wouldn't have invaded Iraq in 2003. The invasion is what led to the creation of ISIS and gave a huge credibility boost to Al Qaida in the middle east. But hey they had good intentions so it's different from the russians, right? More foreign interference will solve the problem caused by foreign interference.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    the invasion was 2003, a couple of years after 9/11. When did Ukrainian Nazis attack the US?
    - Tepix 5y ago
      The US did not invade Saudi Arabia, did it?
      - Chris2048 5y ago
        No, neither did it confirm SA was responsible. In any case, SA itself isn't comparable to Russia or Nazi German as a potential threat to the US, relative to networks "of terror" across multiple countries; eg many taliban training camps are/where in Afganistan, not SA.
FerretFred 5y ago
This may be as an effort to push back against Russian-backed paramilitary groups like Wagner, who have also recently gained notoriety in Ukraine. In Mali, they are helping to liberate the region as the French Colonialists withdraw. The problem with Africa seems to be that they'll sell themselves many times over without really considering the consequences: after all, as China buys up more and more of Africa under the guise of a Belt and Road initiative, how will that jive with Russia, who presumably want to "liberate" the same natural resources that China want? https://cybershafarat.com/2021/09/26/the-wagner-group-in-africa/ https://cybershafarat.com/2021/09/26/the-wagner-group-in-afr... For background.
alcal74 5y ago
So you’re saying that US intervention is a destabilizing influence? Can I show you my shocked face?

194 points by gscott 5y ago

At this point it's safe to assume that this is always the unstated part of the plan. Keeping individual areas destabilized 1. decreases nations' ability to organize, 2. prevents them from properly utilizing their natural resources, 3. reduces possible competition at the global economic level, 4. increases the the possibility of extracting resources and labor from them due to an increase of various factors like economic desperation and political variability. It serves fully developed countries' interests better to keep everyone else down so they can be exploited. Negotiating with blocs rather than newly instated and flexible rulers annoying and difficult.

pepperonipizza 5y ago
Do you have legitimate source for this claim? France spended billions of euros to fight islamist groups in Mali at the demand of the government. No resources worth the billions France spended in Mali
- peter-m80 5y ago
  The source for this claim is called history
- mxmilkiib 5y ago
  FWIW The Gravel Institute on France's neocolonial financial control in Africa https://youtu.be/36vYRkVYeVw https://youtu.be/36vYRkVYeVw
  - sampo 5y ago
    Here is some criticism of the Gravel Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFGQI8P9BMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFGQI8P9BMg
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    Gravel Institute marketing itself as a counterweight to PragerU is about the most honest thing they've done, because they lie just as much and in similar ways as PragerU likes to.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  But that has an agenda involved. If France wants betterment of Mali, it would be better to spend it by giving humanitarian aid or food or medicine.
  - Grimburger 5y ago
    > humanitarian aid The west gives enough humanitarian aid to feed the continent a few times over. It's hard for some to understand but adequate amounts of money or assistance isn't the problem here.
    - robinsoh 5y ago
      > The west gives enough humanitarian aid to feed the continent a few times over. It's hard for some to understand but adequate amounts of money or assistance isn't the problem here. The west? The continent? "isn't the problem here"? Citations needed. Definitions needed. Tell us what you perceive is the problem here?
      - robinsoh 5y ago
        So many downvotes without a response, looks like everyone seems to know some facts or has a consensus belief/faith that I don't know about or don't accept as a given fact/truth.
      - elcamino44 5y ago
        Agreed. I’ve seen the UN-led humanitarian system up close (albeit not in Africa). In my experience, it has many, many flaws. One of these is that it is resource constrained.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      The problem is that a lot of the humanitarian aid is not reaching the actual people. Like building school buildings, but not including anything needed to _run_ the school for more then a very short time, or at all.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Can’t that be done in parallel to parent’s claims ? By helping the gov. France secures its influence on the area and makes sure French company’s business is safe. For instance from a quick search Mali seems bound to Veolia for its water distribution network building. And I’d assume it is or will go the same for electricity, transportation etc. where anytime a big contract needs to be passed with an external technology provider, excluding French companies from the call won’t be an option. PS: to add, French companies entering these kind of deals will usually be predatory and make sure the gov. is under enough pressure that they can’t just move to another provider. Development will only happen within a tight control of the situation by external debtors.
  - dgellow 5y ago
    > By helping the gov. France secures its influence on the area and makes sure French company’s business is safe. That's not how things played out in real life, in fact the exact opposite is true. There is now a very strong anti-French sentiment in Mali (in part exacerbated by Russia), and France lost a huge part of the influence they had in the whole region.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I'm looking at this as a reference timeline: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-france-to-withdraw-its-troops-from-mali https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/17/timeline-what-led-f... It looks to me like France/Mali gov relations took a turn after the 2020 coup ? All in all I can totally imagine Malian population having an anti-French sentiment, while their government is in bed with French entities.
      - dgellow 5y ago
        Do you mean the second coup from 2021? That’s when France started to have clear difficulties to deal with the Malian government, the coup was in May, Macron announced the planned end of the operation in June IIRC due to issues related to the new government. In any case it’s a quite complicated topic, but it’s not one government being in bed with French entities. You have multiple groups fighting for territory and resources in the region for their own interest, France went there to support the government fight against Islamist groups by demand of Mali. And you now have a lot of Wagner mercenaries too (see https://www.csis.org/analysis/tracking-arrival-russias-wagner-group-mali https://www.csis.org/analysis/tracking-arrival-russias-wagne... for example. Trigger warning: be ready to read some horrifying details if you look at recent events…). You can read about the Operation Barkhane article on Wikipedia it has lot of context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane (I would recommend the French article if you read French). And about Operation Serval if you want to understand what happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Serval. There was a general opposition to French forces, from part of the population since the beginning which is to be expected. If you go a bit more into the details you will see that Russia took the opportunity to start an information war in the region to push against French forces, as a soft evidence you can see that protesters started asking for a Russian intervention in 2019 (in French, sorry https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/01/10/au-mali-le-sentiment-anti-francais-gagne-du-terrain_6025466_3212.html https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/01/10/au-mali-le...). That has also been communicated by Macron as a reason to stop their operation and leave the region (he made public speeches clearly pointing to Russia without explicitly saying it’s name, you can easily find them online and official translations).
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  Islamists in Africa will eventually come to France and wreak havoc there, so France has a good interest to nip the threat in the bud.
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Islamists are like talibans western creatures built to overthrown local dictatorships and governments in general when they do not behave in ways the west like, as the talibans they grow enough to a point they can revolt against those who have created them. Keeping this in mind you'll understand why African's do not like us except when they live in EU, so when they see the difference and hypocrisy of our oppressive élite governance.
    - troon-lover 5y ago
    - ryan93 5y ago
      I wish we could go back to the secular stable Middle East before the west showed up.
- drenvuk 5y ago
  I only spent about 20 minutes looking this up. Western nations overthrew Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Less than two years after they're mostly done in Libya, they roll those forces over to Mali and get Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in as acting president. NATO/UN forces had a hand in both situations. Western nations were just rolling our already funded and armed forces through the region to set things back up for proper resource and money extraction. This is all on wikipedia. When I say "our" forces I mean any people who are holding weapons provided by us, eating food provided by us and working towards goals that are set by us. How all of that is funneled to them I have no idea. Now that the west instated former leader of Mali was ousted France wanted to re-de-stabilize again it seems. It might or might not be worth it. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/mali-accuses-france-of-training-terrorists-in-country https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/8/mali-accuses-france... I should have stated it more as an opinion rather than fact but I stand by it. It's hard to believe that the US has so much intelligence yet we're unable to predict the guys we're training are going to attempt to take over the country. It's also not hard to understand that if we're committing billions of dollars to a war effort there isn't someone or a group of someone who have a hugely vested interest in either keeping the status quo for existing streams of income or removing some impediment in a potential stream of income. Those streams mostly don't go to the governments themselves, rather they go to companies headed by well connected individuals who somehow are able to drive policy and decisions either directly or indirectly. On the flip side of this, you might have competing interests from other nations as well so it may not be as clear cut. It's no longer border expansion, annexation and "this country" vs "that country". Instead now we have nameless rebels or terrorists (depending on who's side their on) who then sign deals and feed money and resources to their "sponsor countries", or get loans for construction, or some other financial games that are far more opaque. I have no more specific information, this is all broad strokes based on what I've seen and read. Maybe I'm wrong.
- kkfx 5y ago
  No country act on others for charity or humanitarian purposes. France was in Mali because France have a long colonial history in Africa and need African's resources. Russian Fed. try to bring back relations from the URSS era in Africa and get a better welcome because in the past they do not colonize Africa so their actions are less badly seen by local populations. France was one of the less oppressive colonizers in Africa, but still left a significant trail of blood and suffering behind so while with Mali there was an agreement because western-created (yes, you read correctly) "islamic" militias are worse for Malian than French colonial legacy, though when Russia step-in it was and perhaps still is considered better: they do not really have means to colonize, they can just make agreements less unfair perhaps than western countries. And that's happen almost everywhere, China is far less welcomed because various populations already experience China BRI policies and so the news they are not much friendly than the west is already spread. You do not need more resources than just history. The worst western colonizer were, from the more bloody and oppressive: - Dutch & Belgian & British - Germans & Italians & Spaniards - Frenches & Portuguese Chinese are "new" outside China, so are Russians and Russians are still seen a bit as Soviet witch to gain influences was far lighter than anyone else outside their borders.
  - blacklion 5y ago
    I don't agree with you ranking. Read about French behavior in colonial south-east Asia, like Vietnam. I don't think, it is better than Britain behavior in India. Belgians in Africa are unsurpassed, though :-(
    - kkfx 5y ago
      They still not have done a genocide (like British with USA native Americans, or Spain in south America many years before) also for France colonies was and some still are part of the State, so their Citizens get French nationality witch does not compensate their oppression, but let them potentially emigrate far more easily and becoming French Citizens like immigrants in USA can apply, UK have never done something similar. Also France have always colonized by the State, with troops etc, not with opium smuggling or commercial criminals (Indian's companies). That's why I put UK at the top of the most criminal in the list. They are ranked third there because Dutch and Belgian crimes was far bigger even if for a limited period of time and geographical areas, but still at the top IMO. I rank Spain crimes a bit lower because South America colonization is far in the past, in an era where certain crimes was not considered much crimes from the point of view of most populations, otherwise they would be at the top position, perhaps counting also they religious crimes against also their own citizens. Anyway any power have a blood trail, that's just a rank for the most "recent" ones...
JonathanFly 5y ago
The article is about how these coups are reducing US influence and strategy. The sub headline: "Insurrections are disrupting American security strategy in the region and giving Russia an opening to gain sway."
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  "Well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions" -- the CIA, probably.
recuter 5y ago
Can you describe which specific resources and what labour is presently being extracted en masse as per #4?
geysersam 5y ago
This is just a typical conspiracy theory to explain the mess that is reality. It borrows aspects of the real world: 1. Predatory resource extraction from poorer countries, 2. Cases where western militaries / intelligence agencies have helped overthrow democratically elected governments, Etc But! Then it fuses these pieces and makes it seem like they are part of a larger plan. A plan where "someone" has incentive, lack of ethics and almost all powerful capability to manipulate events. Thing is, masterminds don't exist. Opportunists do. *It doesn't serve developed nations interests to keep everyone else down.* Look at globalization. How much money has western companies made from utilizing manufacturing in Asia? More than they would extracting some minerals mined by child laborers...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- themgt 5y ago
  It's also possible to go too far in the direction of seeing only tactics but never strategy, and taking countries publicly stated goals and motives at face value. Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of our most influential contemporary foreign policy thinkers - here's the NYT reviewing his book 'The Grand Chessboard': Brzezinski ... describes a very forbidding situation in the years ahead if the United States does not make more permanent the dominance it now has over a vast area of the world. "This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok -- provides the setting for 'the game,'" Brzezinski says. "If the middle space can be drawn increasingly into the expanding orbit of the West (where America preponderates), if the southern region is not subjected to domination by a single player, and if the East is not unified in a manner that prompts the expulsion of America from its offshore bases, America can then be said to prevail. But if the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America's primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically."[1] In other words, for the US to continue its unipolar domination requires the lack of cohesive blocs dominated by other great powers. Obviously in this context Brzezinski is alluding to Russia and China in the Eurasian 'chessboard', but the logic is broadly applicable around the globe. There's also a difference between controlling events like a puppeteer pulling strings and the more common scenario where our actions help catalyze events we may not have intended but were nonetheless predictable and seen as not worth the effort or trade-offs to avoid. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/reviews/971026.26gwertzt.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/26/r...
giantg2 5y ago
If this were true, especially #4, why aren't more companies doing business there? The instability seems to be reducing resource extraction. It seems China wants to increase stability and build infrastructure so that they can can exploit it. The only industry that would likely benefit from the inability to extract resources are the diamond companies since price is artificially inflated.
- JBiserkov 5y ago
  If China wants stability in Africa, and China is an enemy of the US, then it follows the US wants instability in Africa.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Ever hear the enemy of my enemy is my friend? If the enemy is instability, the US and China may have a shared goal and cooperate (or at least not sabotage each other on that issue).
  - geysersam 5y ago
    This reasoning is absurd in every way! Besides assuming China is an enemy of the US - what does that even mean? Let me illustrate how ridiculous this reasoning is: "North Korea wants to prevent rampant global warming, North Korea is an enemy of the US, the US wants to...?"
bigDinosaur 5y ago
I don't buy it. Developed countries want stability in their allies/trading partners, unless they are actively at war or see another state as a threat. I doubt the US sees many threats in Africa. The crucial thing is though that historically nobody has really cared from where such (pro-western) stability came: if it was from a democratic government, fine - but if not, also fine.
- robinsoh 5y ago
  > Developed countries want stability in their allies/trading partners If you take a look at our history and our actions with our "allies" and "trading partners", do you see that to be true? Say for example with our immediate neighbours like Mexico? How about our history with Haiti the moment they became independent? Does it seem like we wanted stability for them? How about our history with Panama, Granada, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Columbia, etc? I'm assuming everyone is familiar with the history of why and how the term banana republic got coined. Oh, how about our history with Cuba? It seems to me that your statement is not an accurate representation of history for those specific cases. Do you feel that's a fair perception of reality?
  - bigDinosaur 5y ago
    Yes, I think the US did/does want stability in Mexico. I think historically the US has actually been quite good at ensuring stability in other countries. Things like the Marshall plan were not altruistic and are a clear example of this. It's also possible that you want to occasionally destabilise a country as a threat to others (Vietnam?) to make them stay stable (=status quo). If you just look at the unstable results you're probably ignoring the many successful examples of stability that the US created. Again, often using and supporting terrifying regimes. Often not. Typical empire. I make no claim that the US a) always stabilises countries b) doesn't use brutal methods to stabilise countries c) always acts in a purely rational manner.
    - robinsoh 5y ago
      > I think historically the US has actually been quite good at ensuring stability in other countries. I'm now unsure whether your meaning of "stability" is equivalent to my meaning of "stability". I'm curious what is your basis for this thinking and whether you have a factual basis for "has actually been quite good". What measurement statistic would be reasonable to use for measuring that? Lets re-visit some counter facts that will be likely to be raised. How would you quantify these in opposition to your claim? In Argentina, military forces overthrew the democratically elected President Isabel Perón in the 1976 Argentine coup d'état, starting the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla, known as the National Reorganization Process. Both the coup and the following authoritarian regime was eagerly endorsed and supported by the United States government[5] with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger paying several official visits to Argentina during the dictatorship The US government supported the 1971 coup led by General Hugo Banzer that toppled President Juan José Torres of Bolivia.[9][10] Torres had displeased Washington by convening an "Asamblea del Pueblo" (Assembly of the People), in which representatives of specific proletarian sectors of society were represented (miners, unionized teachers, students, peasants), and more generally by leading the country in what was perceived as a left wing direction. Banzer hatched a bloody military uprising starting on August 18, 1971, that succeeded in taking the reins of power by August 22, 1971. After Banzer took power, the US provided extensive military and other aid to the Banzer dictatorship.[11][12] Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the US-supported campaign of political repression and state terrorism by South American right-wing dictators.[13][14][15] US-backed[16] 1964 Brazilian coup d'état against social democrat João Goulart. Under then-President John F. Kennedy, the US sought to "prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba", a policy which was carried forward under Lyndon B. Johnson and which led to US military support for the coup in April 1964 After the democratic election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, an economic war ordered by President Richard Nixon,[19] among other things, caused the 1973 Chilean coup d'état with the involvement of the CIA[20] due to Allende's democratic socialist leanings. What followed was the decades-long US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Peasants and workers (mostly of indigenous descent) revolt during the first half of the 20th century due to harsh living conditions and the abuse from landlords and the government-supported American United Fruit Company. This revolt was repressed, but led to the democratic election of Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was overthrown during the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, endorsed by the United States In 1912, during the Banana Wars period, the U.S. occupied Nicaragua as a means of protecting American business interests and protecting the rights that Nicaragua granted to the United States to construct a canal there.[38] The intervention, utilizing the U.S. Marine Corps, was sparked by a rebellion that opposed the United States. After quelling the rebellion, the U.S. continued occupying Nicaragua until 1933, when President Herbert Hoover officially ended the occupation.[39] After the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew pro-American dictator[40] Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua fought the Contra guerrillas supported by the United States.
antupis 5y ago
Thing is that where USA elite is best is nontangable goods like financial systems, computer software and cultural stuff(movies, brands etc) and this stuff needs strong consumer markets. So if they would be that kind entity doing this stuff then it would not work for USA elite.
drnonsense42 5y ago
It’s rarely a good look for anybody to claim that the US government is this competent
anothernewdude 5y ago
On the other hand these are fragile governments at best, and handing the military more effective troops is always going to cause a rise in the number of Coups.
chaostheory 5y ago
This is bad logic if you look at the bigger picture. So you’re saying that the US spends money for coups only to have China swoop in for the diplomatic win? Instability is also bad for US conglomerates to take advantage of the situation.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Not to mention everyone always assigns extreme competence to these conspiracy theories… yet the US couldn’t see that China would swoop in for a diplomatic win? C’mon.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Don't believe the marketing for our many stupid wars. It's never about democracy or women's rights or education or business or terrorism or even oil. (You know this, because none of our wars have ever improved any situation with respect to any of these supposed values.) The only point, ever, is to sell more weapons manufactured in USA. All of our stupid media and stupid politics are subordinate to this tawdry motivation. For this purpose, it's actually better if Africans can momentarily imagine better lives, before their hopes are dashed again by more violent coups.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Yea I agree. I wish Republicans would stop creating new ones ya know? I’m also surprised at how small the defense industry is. What do you think we do to support tech companies? Do you think wars in Africa can be traced back to government support for Netflix and Stripe? Maybe we’re not supporting the defense industry, but actually supporting someone else behind the scenes yea?
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      It is actually not about selling weapons. It is about getting access to natural resources such as oil and rare earth metals for things like chips. For that, you need stability in order to do business. Constant coups and armed insurrections is counter productive, which is why these types of conspiracy theories fall apart.
bnralt 5y ago
> At this point it's safe to assume that this is always the unstated part of the plan. Keeping individual areas destabilized If you read the article, it's all about how the instability is harming U.S. strategy in the region because the coups trigger laws that require the U.S. to break off partnerships: > But U.S. commanders have watched with dismay over the past year as military leaders in several African allies—including officers with extensive American schooling—have overthrown civilian governments and seized power for themselves, triggering laws that forbid the U.S. government from providing them with weapons or training. And lists several examples of that happening, such as: > Last year, a logistics advisory team from Col. Sullivan’s brigade had just arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, and was waiting out its Covid-19 quarantine at a hotel when the Biden administration decided to cancel the deployment “due to our deep concerns about the conflict in northern Ethiopia and human-rights violations and abuses being committed against civilians,” according to a State Department spokesperson. This disruption has opened the doors to other countries to take United State's place: > Malian commandos attended U.S.-led special-operations exercises in Mauritania in 2020, but were cut off from American training after its military overthrew the president last May. The Malian junta hired Russian mercenaries from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group to provide security.
jollybean 5y ago
This is not true, and it's relatively easy to prove. It's nary impossible to 'extract resources' when nations are 'unstable'. 'Instability' means nothing can happen in the long term, and most of the necessary underlying necessary factors can't exist either. 'Instability' means contracts are ripped up, money disappears, rights are re-allocated, 3rd parties drop out etc. etc.. IMF contracts for the development of 'an electricity' grid - essential in doing anything - fall through. And nobody is afraid of 'competition' from a completely underdeveloped nation. In some very niche cases (perhaps some unique resource), but that's negligible. It's actually completely the opposite: Everyone wants stability. Stability means the system can start to develop, resource extraction starts to happen, but more importantly - 'the rest of the economy' starts to need and consume things. Factories buy German equipment, they buy gear from Caterpillar, they need IT from Cisco, they build dams using requiring myriad tooling, consulting from IBM and Accenture. Consumers start to buy cars from Toyota and Ford, business need financial services from NY and London, they need loans and investment from abroad, they start to buy iPhones, Androids, they use Facebook, Twitter. If you want to be cynical, then you can say what the West wants is 'stability' over democracy, which frankly is not entirely irrational. Consider the situation in Saudi Arabia. House of Saud is held in power by the US, with the guarantee that the 'Oil Flows' and is sold at market prices to 'whoever'. Implicit in that is the nation remains stable. That they do not become a vassal of Russia or China etc., and that they act as a 'good neighbour country' and mostly they do. (Not always). Internally - it's not so nice. Lack of democracy and human rights, however, there's enough pressure for progress to be made, and there is. Gadaffi was literally a terrorist, he shot down an airliner (Lockerbee). But via is 'nice guy son' was being 'rehabilitated' (i.e. image was cleaned up), because we don't mind and evil turd, as long as there is stability. Unfortunately, the 'Arab Spring' happened, his people rose up, and there was a civil war. Western involvement probably shifted the outcome, but the resulting instability was inevitable - and Oil contracts went to shit. Nobody wants that. In reality - intervention in utterly chaotic and despotic states is just hard. You can train 'Your Man' and when he gets into power, he's not much better than the last guy. Arguably, the West could steer more clear of it, but 'lack of involvement' is also a choice. Botswana in the last couple decades has prospered amazingly - they are stable. They are a shining example for Africa. 'The West', China, India - absolutely want it to be like that, it's good for everyone.
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shmde 5y ago

USA and organising coups to destabilize nation. Name a better duo.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
Peanut butter & jelly. Safer and tastier.
_trampeltier 5y ago
Overextending and Unbalancing Russia Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas_Watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Americas_Watch

CyanBird 5y ago
Note that most of the coups which have happened in quick succession or a nontrivial amount, the coup plotters are related to the flintlock exercises https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/34268/flintlock-2022-begins-next-week-in-cote-divoire https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/34268/flintlock-2022-be... https://theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-military/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/26/burkina-faso-coup-us-mil...

jdougan 5y ago

https://archive.ph/QIH6D https://archive.ph/QIH6D Missing from this article: "China" and "belt and road"

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Why should they be mentioned? Is the threat of Chinese economic ties worth tacit support of military intervention?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pindab0ter 5y ago
  It's not about whether it's worth it or not, but whether it's a part of the conversation. Arguably it is.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Why? I don't see the connection between the US training troops in African countries and China's infrastructure plan unless you're saying the infrastructure plan should be opposed militarily if necessary.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      The connection is undeniable, in a journalistic sense. Ie, you can't describe why the US and others are making certain choices without referencing it. Of course, "related to" and "justifies" are not synonyms.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - nkozyra 5y ago
        The connection is "influence in China" and "contemporary colonialism" which is a broad enough topic for a large series of articles. But I agree that this stands on its own as a topic and Belt and Road would feel shoehorned in within an article this short.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

Isinlor 5y ago
Nobody in the west organized Euromaidan and it was not a coup. Viktor Yanukovych decided to abandon the country on his own without any military intervention. The reason for Euromaidan is simple. Ukraine is poor and EU represents the road to prosperity. In 1991, after collapse of Soviet Union, Polish and Ukrainian economies were exactly the same size. The same GDP. Poland made very quick pivot to the west. We decided to join NATO in 1999 and EU in 2004. Last year Polish economy was 3 times bigger than Ukrainian. Nothing good ever comes from the east.
- maratc 5y ago
  > Nobody in the west organized Euromaidan and it was not a coup. You can listen to the "nobody" organizing the "not a coup" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k
- thriftwy 5y ago
  Yanukovich decided to flee when an agreement with opposition, co-signed by three ministers of foreign affairs of EU, were just ditched by the crowd and the opposition.
  - watwut 5y ago
    After he rejected EU under pressure from Russia, by his own words. Against what quite a lot of Ukraniens wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. You can't ignore preceeding pressure and meddling from Russia in this story. And despite all the effort to engineer pro Russia sentiment in Ukraine, it never worked, because it is not actually that easy to create large scale support for anything from outside.
    - maratc 5y ago
      > Against what quite a lot of Ukraniens wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. But in accordance with what quite a lot of other Ukranians wanted, voted for and worked for for a long time. Ukraine is a badly-divided country that has been long in a business of imposing the will of some of their people on all of their people. What will of some was imposed on all changed with time; the fact did not. In similar situation, some of Swiss people wanted more association with Germany while some wanted more association with France or Italy; they wisely decided on neutrality and have been living with that peacefully for hundreds of years, staying out of many wars involving some or all of their neighbors.

throwaway61101 5y ago

The Pakistani government was also toppled last night after falling foul of the military.

kzrdude 5y ago
AP story: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-pakistan-religion-elections-c01ccef08677bf8579bd7cdfe01a3d24 https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-pakistan-re...
robinsoh 5y ago
> falling foul of the military. I was going to say citation needed but then I googled. Astounding. So.... again we're paying for all this insanity. Imagine if we had spent this 18 billion on ourselves. I dare say that would have been better for ourselves as well as for the people of Pakistan and the whole world since these areas we mess with tend to be major exporters of smaller scale terror as well. " Financial aid to Pakistan since the 11 September 2001 attacks. Between 2002–2011, US Congress approved $18 billion in military and economic aid from the United States. However the Pakistan Treasury only received $8.647 billion in direct financial payments. "
- nosianu 5y ago
  Maybe you did? What are they buying with that money, or if it's siphoned off where is it sent? Especially military aid, if they don't use it to buy from Russia the money probably goes back to the US, as the nr. one arms exporter by a significant margin (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-the-leadings-exporters-of-conventional-weapons/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267131/market-share-of-t...). With large weapons systems come decades of additional purchases, for training, upgrades, maintenance, spare parts, and an increased chance for buying other systems. That "aid" today can buy a lot of income over time, so rather than aid it actually is a kind of purchase itself. Googling I see a lot of links telling us how much the US is "giving" in aid. But few of those pages bother mentioning what happens with that money next. "Hoes does the US spend foreign aid" is common (to whom and where does it go), "What does the US buy with foreign aid" is not. How much aid really is free no strings attached? I guess that's most likely for emergency funds after some catastrophe. As I see it, aid more often than not is a purchase too, but few bother finding out what the US purchased. It may be they don't buy anything concrete, but so do businesses investing in PR. Example: "What we buy with foreign aid" -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12289893/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12289893/

Digit-Al 5y ago

Archive to get round paywall https://archive.ph/QIH6D https://archive.ph/QIH6D

mlindner 5y ago

Why do people continue to believe nonsense like this? The US wants stable governments, not unstable ones.

mushbino 5y ago
The US has historically and currently benefited much more from unstable governments. Why do you think they've invested so much in making governments unstable? Especially if they're "unfriendly" to US business interests
- mlindner 5y ago
  Historically is different than currently. Historically the fight was against the spread of communism and so we propped up dictatorships all over the world that would prevent the spread of communism in their countries (which often backfired). Currently that is no longer the case because communism is basically dead for all intents and purposes.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  That's Russian propaganda. The West/ US interventions were always supported by the population, that's why the amount of casualties from US/West military is so low. In many cases there are barely boots on the ground and the actual work is done by civilians protesting en masse. ( They were already protesting before interventions). It doesn't mean there are no casualties, but that's mostly lowered by the interventions ( by lowering authoritarian military strength)
  - mushbino 5y ago
    This is one of the longer wikipedia articles I've come across. It's hard to imagine the US population had much say in the matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
bell-cot 5y ago
You could argue probabilities, causation vs. correlation, etc. - but the data on which countries have had their military trained by the U.S., vs. which countries have had military coups is fairly black-and-white. And the WSJ is not exactly a left-wing peacenic paper, to have knee-jerk or click-bait reasons to oppose U.S. training of foreign militaries. > The US wants stable governments... That line of argument tends to assume that the U.S. is both monolithic, and highly competent in the planning & conduct of its foreign policy. Vs. looking at history...

AnAfrican 5y ago

Correlation US had been training more elite troops recently Elite troops have always been the ones succefully pulling out coups

aaomidi 5y ago

America has so much innocent blood on its hands it's not even funny. I really fucking hate how complacent Americans are to what we're doing outside of the country.

mlindner 5y ago
The fact that we're causing so much problems is itself foreign propaganda, which is why it's only believed by a minority of deluded people.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  I'm confused what you mean by this? Could you elaborate a bit more.

slim 5y ago

This is like Che Guevara saying "I dunno, I'm just training people, I'm surprised by all these revolutions happening"

nindalf 5y ago
Right so what would you do in Nigeria and Mali, two countries with weak militaries struggling to maintain control of their territory? Options 1. Ignore their requests for training, because who cares about them. If they’re overrun by jihadists, it’s fine. 2. Train their military, helping them maintain peace and security internally. Consequences - you’ll be on the hook for any actions that military takes in the future. Intellectuals on HN will criticise this action with the benefit of hindsight. Please, choose one. The thing with “clever” comments like yours is that the lack the basic level of thought.
- slim 5y ago
  Maybe USA should never have trained jihadists in first place ? can you see the pattern ?
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Please tell me more about how Boko Haram was trained by America? Can you see a pattern of ignorance?

rayiner 5y ago

Amazing that after all these years, most importantly the experiment in the 1970s of funding the groups that became the Taliban, Americans haven’t learned their lessons about funding foreign militaries.

blfr 5y ago
Having people you trained and armed turn around to fight against you is obviously not ideal but also the Taliban is much less of a threat than the Soviet Union so it might have been a good trade.
Barrin92 5y ago
This is one of my favourite articles of all time https://imgur.com/pd91LcI https://imgur.com/pd91LcI It came to mind a few days ago when I was noticing how Azov in many reputable newspapers is now seemingly being downgraded from 'neo-nazi' to 'right-wing militia'.
- unmole 5y ago
  I don't remember where I read this: "We are this close to talking about supporting moderate Nazis."
- nukemaster 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - recuter 5y ago
  - dralley 5y ago
    To add a little more context, from what I've read they definitely had a large (actual) Nazi element in 2014, but that has been less and less true over the intervening years. The more extreme political leaders were kicked out and they grew in size significantly based on their military success rather than their ideological leanings.

bannedbybros 5y ago

slibhb 5y ago

If "US training" is such a big deal, what the hell happened in Afghanistan? When it comes to problems in the developing world, I think we neglect to highlight Islam's role. Islam is an Arab religion that has spread across Africa and Asia. It supplants local cultures and religions and Muslim-dominated countries tend to be caught in a stalemate between popular Islamist regimes and military dictatorship. Egypt is a prime example. Pakistan is looking more and more like a failed state. I don't think the problem is the Quran but I've come to have a more negative view of the influence of Islam over the years. I think the problem is cultural imperialism: marginalization of local cultures and the Arabization that follows.

killjoywashere 5y ago
I wonder if reducing oil consumption might reduce the spread of Islam more than trying these militaries?
- nickles 5y ago
  > reducing oil consumption Without singling you out, why is the suggestion always to reduce consumption as opposed to producing energy in less hostile locales? Current geopolitical events (and associated suffering) are occurring precisely because efforts to produce fossil fuels in the West have been undermined by activists pushing anti-consumption ideology.
  - dralley 5y ago
    > why is the suggestion always to reduce consumption as opposed to producing energy in less hostile locales? Maybe because reducing carbon emissions is something we already understand we desperately need to do?
    - nickles 5y ago
      > reducing carbon emissions is something we already understand we desperately need to do The USA emits roughly the same amount of C02 as it did in the mid-1970s. On a per capita basis, the emissions are the lowest since at least the 1960s. This has been achieved largely due to the cost effective production of natural gas using fracking. At the same time, US environmental regulations lead to lower emissions during production than in other nations. In other words, fossil fuels produced in the US produce less carbon than those produced in other nations. Advocating against utilizing these energy resources has created massive geopolitical instability, harmed efforts to reduce carbon emissions globally, and inflated costs of all economic activity. Such policy is inconsistent with environmental concerns but is entirely consistent with anti-consumption ideologies. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carbon-co2-emissions https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...

throwaway5752 5y ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/mali-russia-wagner/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/mali-russia-..., Mali. China and Russia are active in this, too.

credit_guy 5y ago

I see some moral outrage in these comments. To those who find themselves critical of the US here, what would you do differently? Would you simply stop providing training to African soldiers? Who is then going to fight ISIS and Boko Haram? Or you simply let these groups to their own devices? Or you bring American boots on the ground to fight them? To those inclined to believe some grand conspiracy theories: it's much simpler than that. The US has limited capabilities. And reading the future is not one of them. You train some soldiers, some might turn bad. You don't train them, thousands of girls get kidnapped and then killed or sold into slavery. There's not perfect solution here.

mardifoufs 5y ago
True. And the moral outrage around russia is so stupid too! What would you do to stop ukraine's nazis right? They just have to interfere in their neighbor's business. Your argument might have made more sense if the rise of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and Africa wasn't directly related and reactionary to western imperialism. If it was true that the US cared about extremism, it wouldn't have invaded Iraq in 2003. The invasion is what led to the creation of ISIS and gave a huge credibility boost to Al Qaida in the middle east. But hey they had good intentions so it's different from the russians, right? More foreign interference will solve the problem caused by foreign interference.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  the invasion was 2003, a couple of years after 9/11. When did Ukrainian Nazis attack the US?
  - Tepix 5y ago
    The US did not invade Saudi Arabia, did it?
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      No, neither did it confirm SA was responsible. In any case, SA itself isn't comparable to Russia or Nazi German as a potential threat to the US, relative to networks "of terror" across multiple countries; eg many taliban training camps are/where in Afganistan, not SA.

FerretFred 5y ago

This may be as an effort to push back against Russian-backed paramilitary groups like Wagner, who have also recently gained notoriety in Ukraine. In Mali, they are helping to liberate the region as the French Colonialists withdraw. The problem with Africa seems to be that they'll sell themselves many times over without really considering the consequences: after all, as China buys up more and more of Africa under the guise of a Belt and Road initiative, how will that jive with Russia, who presumably want to "liberate" the same natural resources that China want? https://cybershafarat.com/2021/09/26/the-wagner-group-in-africa/ https://cybershafarat.com/2021/09/26/the-wagner-group-in-afr... For background.

alcal74 5y ago

So you’re saying that US intervention is a destabilizing influence? Can I show you my shocked face?