![Geopolitical Futures]()
July 7, 2026
Washington’s Quiet Return to the Sahel
The U.S. is re-engaging the region’s military juntas with a new focus on trading intelligence for minerals.
By: Ronan Wordsworth
The United States is edging back into the junta-led Sahelian states from which it was evicted just a couple of years ago, but this time it has abandoned the comprehensive, reform-minded approach that prevailed prior to the coups that reshaped the African region between 2020 and 2023. Its new approach is narrower, quieter and more transactional. Democracy promotion, governance reform, counterterrorism training and institution building have been set aside in favor of a simpler bargain: access to logistics and mineral opportunities in exchange for aerial surveillance and intelligence support beyond what Russia – which replaced the ousted Western forces – can provide.
U.S. officials have made numerous visits to the region to launch discussions on potential cooperation. Nick Checker, a senior official at the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, recently visited the capitals of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where he met with foreign ministers and senior officials. Washington’s new angle is most visible in Mali. A few months ago, the U.S. lifted sanctions on three senior Malian officials who had been targeted over their ties to Russia’s Wagner Group, including then-Defense Minister Sadio Camara (who was killed by insurgents in April). Now discussions are underway on an agreement that would permit U.S. aircraft and drones to resume intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights aimed at tracking al-Qaida-linked jihadist groups. In Burkina Faso and Niger, too, U.S. officials have engaged their counterparts on security cooperation, trade and investment, demonstrating a new willingness to deal with military regimes as long as the exchange serves U.S. interests, particularly access to critical minerals.
From West to East and Back
For more than a decade, international engagement in central Sahel was built around overlapping layers of French, European, U.N., African and U.S. security support. The G5 Sahel, established in 2014 by Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, was designed to combine security coordination with regional development. Its joint force, launched in 2017, was supposed to become the center of transnational counterterrorism efforts against jihadist groups operating across the sparsely governed borderlands.
The joint force celebrated some successes, but the whole architecture eventually buckled under the weight of slow battlefield progress, local resentment, elite competition and local power struggles. The soldiers who perpetrated Mali’s coups in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso’s two coups in 2022 and Niger’s coup in 2023 all claimed that civilian governments and Western-backed security models had failed to restore their nations’ sovereignty or security. Anti-French rhetoric swelled to encompass all Western security providers, and by late 2023, the three juntas were in the process of severing military cooperation with Western partners, forming their own Alliance of Sahel States and withdrawing from the 51-year-old Economic Community of West African States.
For Washington, the most damaging loss was Niger. The U.S. had invested heavily in Air Base 201 at Agadez, a drone base built for about $100 million that gathered intelligence on jihadist groups across the region. However, under orders from Niger’s new junta, the U.S. in late 2024 withdrew from the base, as well as from Air Base 101 in Niamey, the capital. The Agadez facility had been the most crucial intelligence platform for surveillance of the region prior to Niger’s coup. Its loss has even affected the U.S. military’s ability to provide surveillance coverage supporting counterterrorism operations in northern Nigeria and Ivory Coast.
As the U.S. was withdrawing from Agadez, the security environment was deteriorating. Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaida affiliate, expanded across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Violence has worsened around the border areas of Niger, which continues to face a significant threat from JNIM, Boko Haram and two branches of the Islamic State group. The Sahel now accounts for an outsize share of global deaths from terrorism, and the withdrawal of foreign counterterrorism missions has reduced the ability of external partners to monitor the movement of fighters, weapons, fuel and hostages, enabling these groups to grow virtually unchallenged.
Russia was supposed to fill the vacuum left by Western partners. Wagner and then the Africa Corps, the latter of which was established by the Russian Defense Ministry, gave Sahelian juntas a politically useful partner that did not care about elections, human rights or civilian oversight. Moscow offered weapons, advisers, disinformation support and a pro-sovereignty narrative that aligned neatly with the Alliance of Sahel States’ messaging. It also helped Mali retake Kidal in 2023, giving Bamako a rare symbolic victory. However, Russia’s assistance has not reversed the insurgent trend. The coordinated April 2026 offensive in Mali by JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front exposed serious intelligence and military failures, demonstrated the insurgents’ growing reach and strength and raised significant doubts about the effectiveness of Mali’s partnership with Russia.
Access for Assistance
Other states have offered assistance, but now the U.S. is attempting to return with the asset it can still provide better than competitors: high-quality intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. In addition, its outreach this time is directly connected to Washington’s broader push to secure access to critical minerals. Mali is a gold producer with growing lithium potential. Niger has uranium, lithium, rare earths and oil. And the wider Sahel contains manganese and other critical minerals, as well as potential rare earths relevant to energy, industrial and defense supply chains.
U.S. re-engagement is not only attributable to minerals. Washington still has an interest in counterterrorism (as demonstrated by its strikes on jihadist groups in Nigeria earlier this year), preventing jihadist spillover into coastal West Africa and competing with Russia. But the region’s mineral wealth does change the terms and incentives for engagement. AES capitals are harder to ignore, even when they are politically repressive and strategically unreliable. Seeking an off-ramp from Russia, Bamako, Niamey and Ouagadougou are bargaining with their natural resources in exchange for intelligence cooperation and logistics support, all while requesting that they be treated as sovereign counterparts rather than facing sanctions.
The U.S. seems increasingly willing to explore what it can secure in exchange for limited assistance. This is a harder-edged form of engagement, less concerned with transforming partner governance and more concerned with gaining leverage. It is also a pattern not limited to the Sahel. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Washington has pursued a minerals-for-security bargain in which U.S.-backed investment, diplomacy and security support are tied to access to cobalt, copper, lithium and other strategic minerals. The U.S.-backed DRC-Rwanda peace framework was linked to an economic framework opening the DRC’s copper, cobalt, lithium and gold reserves to Western investors. Kinshasa has also offered state-owned manganese, copper-cobalt, gold and lithium assets to U.S. investors under a minerals pact.
However, the DRC case shows the hidden costs and limits of this model. The U.S. has been drawn deeper into the DRC’s affairs, including discussions around mining assets, rail infrastructure, supply chain transparency and applying pressure on Rwanda-backed M23. Kinshasa has also tried to fold mine security into its U.S.-linked minerals agenda, including a proposed mining guard, though Washington denies that it has funded any mine security units. Despite this diplomatic outreach, the DRC continues to battle M23, which controls much of eastern DRC. Permitting disputes, contested licenses and other compliance burdens all further slow U.S. progress.
Replicating this transactional approach in the Sahel will face similar constraints. Drone flights and intelligence can help governments identify militant movements, but the juntas still face questions about their legitimacy. Abusive security forces, predatory local governance and ethnic divisions – even within counterinsurgency groups – remain fundamental long-term problems. Resource deals are easier to sign than they are to implement in highly insecure environments. And there is still an underlying anger at Western assistance that has been promoted by Russia and that will be hard to break when the relationship is even more explicitly focused on resource extraction. This creates a risk for Washington that an access-for-assistance model may secure short-term benefits while helping to accelerate the political issues that the jihadist groups have exploited.
The New Playing Field
Europe has hesitated to re-engage with the Sahel juntas largely for these reasons. EU member states are divided on the issue but overall are reluctant to legitimize juntas that repress civil society, journalists and political opposition. They remain focused on political dialogue and socio-economic opportunities and condemn military rule, repression and expanding jihadist violence, which poses long-term security and migration threats to Europe. Brussels has flirted with some level of re-engagement, but local resistance to European involvement is still high, as evidenced by Burkina Faso’s severance of diplomatic relations with France in late June. The risk is that Europe’s focus on preserving its normative credibility will leave it with little influence over the regimes, the battlefield or the resource negotiations shaping the Sahel’s future.
Aside from the U.S., other players have shown a willingness to play the game. First and foremost is Turkey. Ankara has offered drones, training, infrastructure, logistics and commercial engagement without the same political costs typically attached to Western support. Turkey is already a major drone supplier in Africa, including for AES states, through sales of its Bayraktar TB2, and Turkish instructors and paramilitary SADAT are reportedly present to provide training and maintenance support. Separately, the Gulf states have offered financing and, in some cases, security assistance. But interestingly, China has mostly disengaged due to the risks of delayed returns and disputes with the juntas over existing contracts.
The AES juntas will keep exploiting this gap. They will take Russian protection, Turkish drones, Chinese infrastructure, Gulf money and American intelligence if each can be compartmentalized. Their foreign policy makes little distinction between West and East and is predominantly focused on regime survival, whatever the cost.
Washington’s return to the Sahel should be read as part of a wider shift in U.S. policy. As the U.S. faces growing pressure to secure long-term supply chains, governance reform has taken a back seat to transactional security and geoeconomic competition. Counterterrorism is still important, but minerals, logistics and influence are the priority. Russia’s failures have created an opening, but the U.S. is not returning to rebuild its old Sahel model. It is returning to secure what it can, where it can, from regimes that now understand the value of making every external partner pay for access.
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