AS part of his tour through four African countries this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a point of stopping over in Cote d’Ivoire, where he met with President Alassane Ouattara. The visit came just a week after it was revealed that Cote d’Ivoire was among the locations under consideration for a new US drone base in West Africa, with talks between the two sides ongoing.
The US interest in Cote d’Ivoire as a potential location for a drone base in the region is the latest fallout from last July’s military coup in Niger, whose geopolitical ramifications have gone far beyond the country’s borders.
The US currently still operates a drone base in Niger, which it uses to run surveillance and counterterrorism operations in the Sahel. France also had a sizable military presence in the country, as part of a decade-long effort to combat violent jihadist groups whose territorial control has rapidly expanded in recent years. According to a United Nations report, the government of Mali now controls as little as 15 percent of its territory, while the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, regional bloc says that only around 60 percent of Burkina Faso remains under state control.
But among the first moves Niger’s new military government made after seizing power in July was to expel the French ambassador and France’s 1,500 troops from the country, complaining that France—Niger’s former colonial power—had interfered in its internal affairs for far too long.
The sudden deterioration in Niger’s ties with its erstwhile Western partners forced Washington to consider how long its military presence in the country would be tenable. If the talks with Cote d’Ivoire bear fruit, it would provide U.S. forces with a new drone base from which they could carry out aerial surveillance of jihadist groups and provide tactical assistance to local troops during their counterterrorism operations. France has also cited Cote d’Ivoire as a country to which it hopes to relocate some of its military presence in the region.
Cote d’Ivoire’s security ties with the US and France are not new. The country hosted Flintlock, a multilateral military exercise for special operations forces sponsored by the U.S. military’s Africa Command, in 2022 and 2023. Paris has established a counterterrorism academy on the outskirts of the economic capital, Abidjan, and Cote d’Ivoire hosts a French military base as well.
Meanwhile, both French and US development assistance and commercial ties to Cote d’Ivoire have boomed in recent years. France is Cote d’Ivoire’s leading bilateral donor, and according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, U.S. exports of goods to Cote d’Ivoire in 2022 totalled $501 million, up 38.7 percent from 2021 and 166 percent from 2012.
The surging interest in Cote d’Ivoire is primarily a function of the collapse of France’s diplomatic ties in other parts of the region. Prior to being forced out of Niger last year, France had already been forced to withdraw its forces from Mali and Burkina Faso due to its toxic image in both countries. At its peak, 3,000 French troops had been stationed in the Sahel as part of Operation Barkhane, a counterterrorism mission deployed between 2014 and 2022 to tackle jihadist violence.
Anti-French sentiment is now rife in both countries, with anti-France protests occurring regularly and verbal attacks on French residents not uncommon. France is perceived negatively not just for its military involvement, considered to have been a failure, but also for the continued use of the CFA franc in much of the region. The currency is pegged to the euro and requires participating governments to keep 50 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in the French treasury. While the United States’ image is not quite as toxic as that of France, it too has become increasingly unpopular, at least partly as a result of its close association with France.
Although this anti-Western sentiment has existed for decades, it has been exacerbated by the arrival in the region of Russian military and development assistance, as well as the Russian private military company, the Wagner Group, beginning in December 2021. Moscow is seen as a more appealing partner by regional governments that had grown frustrated by France and the United States’ inability to prevent jihadist expansionism. Russia’s willingness to provide weaponry and fighters, while asking far fewer questions about their use, has provided Mali and Burkina Faso with an alternative.
While the anti-French and pro-Russian sentiment that drove France out of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger exists in Cote d’Ivoire, it is nowhere near as prevalent as in the Sahel. It helps, too, that the Ivoirian government has leaned toward the West under Ouattara.
A veteran of the International Monetary Fund, Ouattara came to power following a contested election in 2010, which Ouattara and then-President Laurent Gbagbo both claimed to have won. After months of violence, Ouattara was eventually installed in office with the assistance of UN and French troops, creating a perceived debt to France that Ouattara has appeared eager to pay off during his presidency.
Moreover, Ouattara has repeatedly expressed distaste for coups, as well as the involvement of Wagner fighters on the continent. In 2021, for instance, when the first reports of Wagner’s presence began to emerge, he claimed that countries seeking to partner with the group to defeat jihadist insurgencies were making a mistake. At the time, this was music to the ears of Western leaders who were already increasingly concerned about Russia’s involvement in the region.
Since then, divisions in West Africa have increasingly crystallised between pro-Russian governments run by coup leaders and those that remain pro-Western and—at least superficially—democracies. Against this backdrop, Cote d’Ivoire has become one of the most powerful countries remaining in the latter camp.
Cote d’Ivoire’s other significant advantage is that is relatively stable, unlike its Sahelian neighbours. After a series of jihadist attacks in northern Cote d’Ivoire in recent years, there has not been a reported incident of violence since early 2022. It therefore appears to have been more successful than any other affected country in the region, including nearby Togo and Benin, at keeping spillover jihadist violence from the Sahel at bay.
However, a deepening security partnership with the US and France could leave Cote d’Ivoire in a precarious position. After all, prior to its coup last July, Niger was the darling of the West in the Sahel. Indeed, if France had such a sizable security presence in the country at the time of the coup, it was because Paris began relocating much of its military arsenal in the region to Niger—while also establishing new development assistance deals—after having been evicted from Burkina Faso and Mali.
But in doing so, France replicated its operations in Burkina Faso and Mali, with limited genuine adjustments to policy. And the subsequent coup, though not solely the result of French involvement in Niger, underscores the fact that funnelling military and financial resources from one country to the next can exacerbate the underlying discontent with perceived Western interference that is present in much of the region.
Will the relocation of yet more Western military assets and political influence to Cote d’Ivoire exacerbate anti-Western sentiment there, as it did in Niger?
Russia will likely be hoping so and has already begun seeking to make inroads in the country. The Wagner group recruited in Cote d’Ivoire for the war in Ukraine and has spread numerous propaganda videos in the country. And in March 2023, the Russian ambassador to Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso claimed Moscow was seeking to expand the presence of Russian products in the Ivoirian economy.
While Cote d’Ivoire is shielded to a certain extent from greater Russian or Wagner involvement because of its current relative stability and limited exposure to jihadist violence, this situation could change over the coming years.
In 2025, Cote d’Ivoire is due to hold an election, which could represent the region’s next geopolitical watershed. Ouattara is constitutionally prohibited from running, but he already sought and won a controversial third term in 2020, arguing that the adoption of a new constitution in 2016 had reset the clock on his two-term limit. Violence after that election, though brief and limited, revived memories of the fighting following the contested 2010 election.
If Ouattara opts to seek a fourth term, significant public outcry is almost certain, and a limited Western response to such a democratic violation would also likely spark considerable outrage. At the same time, if he opts to leave office, there is no guarantee that his replacement will prefer a partnership with the West over the benefits of closer ties with Russia.
For the time being, Cote d’Ivoire may not be in danger of becoming the next West African country to fall to a coup or to Russia’s charms. But in the longer term, there is a risk that bolstering the West’s military footprint in the country, at a time when the region is experiencing a broader revolt against Western influence, will not help to restore democracy or defeat jihadism in the Sahel and West Africa.
Jessica Moody is a peacebuilding and political risk consultant focusing on West Africa. She is the author of “Life After War: Lessons in Human-Centred Peacebuilding from Cote d’Ivoire” (forthcoming), and has a doctorate in post-conflict peacebuilding in Cote d’Ivoire from the War Studies department at King’s College London. You can follow her on Twitter at @JessMoody89.
This article first appeared on worldpoliticsreview.com. Click here to read the original article