Call it  “Out of Africa” — only this isn’t the cinematic version. The republic of Chad has called for American troops to leave an army base in the central African country, even as jihadist threats swirl in the heart of Sahelian Africa and Russia eyes the region hungrily. 

The demand comes only a month after neighboring Niger essentially did the same, suspending a security agreement with Washington following a coup d’état in that strategic country. While the motivation for Chad’s decision was not immediately clear, the message was.

In a letter sent to the American defense attaché, as first reported by Bloomberg, Chad’s air force chief of staff, Idriss Amine Ahmed, instructed Americans “to stop their activity at the base.” The Sun reached out to the American ambassador to Chad, Alexander Laskaris, for comment but did not receive a response as of Tuesday. 

In a speech last year, Mr. Laskaris said that “the Republic of Chad has been dominated by armed men since independence and has been in a kind of rebellion since the year I was born. The results are clear; Chad has become one of the poorest countries in the world, much poorer than it should be given the talent and dedication of its people. I think Chad can do better.”

Those words were prescient, as it turns out. The Department of State appears to be downplaying the impact of Chad’s decision. “The U.S. and Chad have agreed that the period following the upcoming Chadian presidential election is an appropriate time to review our security cooperation,” a spokesman at Foggy Bottom said.

Yet the “domination by armed men” evoked by Mr. Laskaris is what’s really at play here. Three years ago the former French colony’s interim president, Mahamat Deby, seized power following his father’s death. Prior to that the Deby family had a hold on power for nearly three decades.  As for the elections scheduled for May 6, there is little doubt as to the outcome.  

A former Chadian prime minister who will be a candidate, Albert Pahimi Padacké, told Radio France Internationale, “We cannot guarantee the transparency of this election” and more to the point, “We know that this system means that if you express an opinion contrary to what those in power want, you are hunted down.”

In January Mr. Deby flew to Moscow for a meeting with the Russ strongman, Vladimir Putin. That same month, Russia announced that it had agreed to “intensify” its military cooperation with Niger. Before that, in December, a Russian delegation traveled to Niamey to meet with officials from the  junta. The two parties signed at least one agreement about strengthening military cooperation.

All this came before the news last month that, as the Sun has reported, the political parvenus at Niamey branded the presence of Americans in Niger “illegal” and ordered the approximately 1,000 American troops there to get out. Also, this was before the French ambassador there basically had to cut and run. 

What is really happening, despite state department attempts to deny it, is chaos nimbly co-managed by Mr. Putin, and mismanaged by Biden administration officials who seem fixated on castigating Israel while much of Africa embarks on a dark tango with Moscow.

Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso have been facing chronic jihadist violence for years, perpetrated by groups affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic State.  Since 2020, in all three countries civilian governments have been overthrown by military coups, with backing from the Kremlin. One after the other, they have also cut security ties with former Western allies, France and America chief among them. 

Judging by the eviction notice Washington just received, Chad is next on the list. That does not necessarily mean Russia will automatically move in soon after the likely-rigged elections next month — but there is change in the air. 

This week Mr. Deby told France24 that “Chad is an independent and free country,” adding that “we’re not a slave looking to change his master. We intend to work with all the nations that respect us.”

There is no indication that Washington showed Chad any disrespect, and the threat to evict the troops stationed there — said to number no more than about a hundred — may be an attempt to exert soft pressure on Washington to extract a better deal.

If alliances between neighbors in Africa can shift faster than sand dunes in the Sahara, what is more concerning is how little some of their credibility-deficient leaders understand the extent to which they are pawns in somebody else’s chess game. The aptly named Central African Republic, which like Niger is rich in uranium deposits and also has significant reserves of cobalt and gold, will soon be hosting a new Russian military base. 

Russia’s Wagner mercenary group already has a sizable footprint in a number of developing African countries, and the CAF looks to be one of them. Farther east, Sudan continues to be a battleground after more than a year of civil war that Secretary Blinken seems to remember once in a while.

In March, an American Marine officer, General Langley, head of America’s Africa Command, told the House Armed Services Committee as much. He said then that a number of African countries “are at the tipping point of actually being captured by the Russian Federation as they are spreading some of their false narratives” across Libya and the  Maghreb.
For some diplomats like Mr. Blinken, America’s strategic interests in the African arena may appear to be expendable, but the Kremlin appears to be better at capitalizing on the chaos — just as America’s strategic footprint in Chad seemingly blows away across the dunes.