<\/p>\n
The U.S. attack<\/span> on Venezuela and abduction<\/a> of its president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was proof that after months of threats, the Trump administration\u2019s talk of hemispheric hegemony isn\u2019t just bluster. The administration is clearly reorienting the U.S. military toward power projection in the Western Hemisphere, as it plots a reorganization that would make it easier to launch strikes across the Americas.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump has touted the \u201cDonroe Doctrine<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Whereas President James Monroe\u2019s policy sought to prevent Europe from colonizing and meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump views his as license for America to do exactly that<\/a>. The new U.S. National Security Strategy, released last month, decrees the \u201cTrump Corollary\u201d to the Monroe Doctrine a \u201cpotent restoration of American power and priorities,\u201d rooted in the \u201creadjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere \u2026 and away from theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined in recent decades or years.\u201d<\/p>\n With this reshuffling of American military priorities in mind, senior War Department officials have developed a plan to downgrade several of the U.S. military\u2019s major overseas combatant commands and curtail the power of their commanders. The revised Unified Command Plan would shrink the number of geographic combatant commands, combining Northern and Southern Commands into a single American Command, or AMERICOM, and would merge the European, Central, and African Commands into a single International Command, according to three government sources. Indo-Pacific Command would remain a standalone command. (The proposed reorganization was first reported by the Washington Post<\/a>.)<\/p>\n One of the government officials said that the new plan would \u201cstreamline\u201d U.S. military efforts abroad while \u201creorienting\u201d U.S. combat power to bring it into line with the new National Security Strategy, which makes clear that the U.S. will be \u201cavoiding any long-term American presence or commitments\u201d in Africa and \u201cavoiding the \u2018forever wars\u2019 that bogged us down in\u201d in the Middle East.<\/p>\n After 9\/11, as the U.S. fought brutal and costly wars<\/a> in Iraq and Afghanistan, it also ramped up military efforts across the African continent. The number of troops, programs<\/a>, operations, exercises,\u00a0bases<\/a>,\u00a0low-profile Special Operations missions<\/a>, deployments of commandos<\/a>,\u00a0drone strikes<\/a>, proxy wars<\/a>, and almost every other military activity in Africa\u00a0jumped exponentially<\/a>. At the same time, terrorism took firmer root and spread across the continent, with fatalities caused by terror groups jumping nearly 100,000 percent over two decades, according to the Pentagon.<\/p>\n In the wake of this abject failure, experts told The Intercept that reconfiguring America\u2019s military posture and swapping interventions in Africa for those in the Western Hemisphere is likely to result in the same types of setbacks, stalemates, and failures due to what Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, termed \u201cWashington\u2019s persistent disinterest in understanding the societies it purports to protect and its reliance on a one-size-fits-all, militarized approach.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The U.S. military<\/span> has a dismal record in Africa.<\/p>\n The Intercept has\u00a0been\u00a0chronicling\u00a0its futile <\/a>counterterrorism\u00a0efforts<\/a>\u00a0on the\u00a0African continent<\/a>\u00a0for the\u00a0last decade<\/a>, including increases in the\u00a0number<\/a> and\u00a0reach<\/a>\u00a0of terror groups, rising\u00a0militant attacks<\/a>, spikes in\u00a0fatalities<\/a>,\u00a0destabilizing<\/a> blowback from U.S. operations<\/a>, humanitarian<\/a>\u00a0disasters<\/a>,\u00a0failed<\/a>\u00a0secret wars<\/a>,\u00a0coups<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0U.S. trainees<\/a>,\u00a0human rights abuses<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0allies<\/a>,\u00a0massacres<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0executions<\/a>\u00a0of civilians by\u00a0partner forces<\/a>,\u00a0civilians killed<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0drone strikes<\/a>, and a litany of other\u00a0fiascos<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0failures<\/a>.<\/p>\n Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in\u00a02002 and 2003<\/a>,?as U.S. counterterrorism efforts began to ramp up on the continent. By 2010, two years after AFRICOM began operations, fatalities from attacks by militant Islamists had already spiked to 2,674,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. The situation only continued to deteriorate. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement \u2014 Somalia and the West African Sahel \u2014 suffering the worst outcomes.<\/p>\n \u201cAfrica has experienced roughly 155,000 militant Islamist group-linked deaths over the past decade,\u201d reads a report<\/a> issued in July by the Africa Center. \u201cSomalia and the Sahel have now experienced more militant Islamist-related fatalities over the past decade (each over 49,000) than any other region.\u201d<\/p>\n A separate Africa Center report<\/a> found that the \u201cSahel has held the designation of the\u00a0most lethal theater of militant Islamist violence in Africa\u00a0for 4 years in a row,\u201d accounting for an estimated 67 percent of all noncombatants killed by militant Islamist groups in Africa.\u00a0The report also found that \u201csecurity has deteriorated under each of the military juntas\u00a0that seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.\u201d Left unsaid was at least\u00a015 officers who benefited<\/a> from U.S. security assistance\u00a0were key leaders in a dozen coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel, including Burkina Faso (in\u00a02014, 2015, and twice in?2022<\/a>), Mali (in\u00a02012<\/a>,?2020, and 2021<\/a>), and Niger (in\u00a02023<\/a>), according to a series of reports by The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIn West Africa, the U.S. \u2018war on terror\u2019 model \u2014 and the military training, funding, and equipment for foreign forces that went with it \u2014 only intensified the spiral of violence in the region,\u201d said Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University\u2019s Costs of War Project who has conducted extensive research on U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel. \u201cAmidst all the complexities, one thing is resoundingly clear: A war paradigm does not provide an effective solution to the problem of terror attacks. It leads to blowback and fails to address any of the root causes, including poverty. And it has a tremendous human and financial toll.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA war paradigm does not provide an effective solution to the problem of terror attacks. It leads to blowback and fails to address any of the root causes, including poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The Africa Center report also found that the \u201cexpansion of militant Islamist violence in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger has resulted in an increased number of attacks along and beyond the borders of coastal West African countries, from Mauritania to Nigeria.\u201d\u00a0The possible role of U.S. counterterrorism failures was also ignored by Trump\u00a0when he announced<\/a> Christmas Day airstrikes in Nigeria<\/a> by Africa Command against those he called \u201cISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!\u201d<\/p>\n AFRICOM claimed to have struck targets in \u201cSoboto state<\/a>,\u201d an apparent reference to Sokoto state, on December 25. The Africa Center report noted that \u201cmilitant Islamist cells\u201d have moved into Sokoto state in recent years and that the \u201cemergence of violent extremist groups in northwest Nigeria implies the long-feared convergence of militant Islamist groups with organized criminal networks.\u201d<\/p>\n AFRICOM did not respond to questions about how it could be sure who it attacked when it was unclear about where it attacked.<\/p>\n On the east side of the continent, the U.S. military has been at war in Somalia for almost a quarter-century. U.S. forces began conducting airstrikes<\/a> against militants in Somalia in 2007.\u00a0That same year, the Pentagon recognized that there were\u00a0fundamental flaws<\/a>\u00a0with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia became another post-9\/11 stalemate, which AFRICOM inherited the next year.<\/p>\n U.S. airstrikes in Somalia have skyrocketed when Trump is in office. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 43 declared airstrikes in Somalia. During Trump\u2019s first term, AFRICOM conducted more than 200 air attacks against members of al-Shabab and the Islamic State.<\/p>\n Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. military conducted 39 declared strikes in Somalia over four years. The U.S. conducted more than 125 airstrikes<\/a> in Somalia in 2025, according to the New America Foundation. (This includes an attack in Somalia that one top U.S. commander called the \u201clargest airstrike in the history of the world<\/a>.\u201d) Previously, the highest number of strikes in the command\u2019s history was 63, under Trump in 2019.<\/p>\n The massive number of airstrikes under Trump during his first term and the record number this year have not translated into success in America\u2019s longest African forever war. The metrics are, in fact, more dismal than ever. A December Africa Center report found that Somalia had the second-highest number of fatalities <\/a>linked to militant Islamist violence, accounting for 28 percent of the continental total. The 6,224 fatalities linked to al-Shabab over the past year are double that of 2022. In fact, an al-Shabab offensive this year saw militants push within 32 miles of the capital, Mogadishu.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n