The Bankruptcy of 'Hegemonic Engagement'

Obama’s refusal to call a coup in Egypt a coup is a cautionary tale of how stupid and ultimately self-defeating this stuff is. It is not a license to do it again in Niger.

Andreas Kluth is very concerned that the U.S. government takes military coups too seriously:

I happen to be in the hegemonic engagement camp, but I admit the decision in each case is hard. That, however, points to a different problem with American foreign policy: the damage that ensues from the naive messianism [bold mine-DL] that drives daft provisions such as Section 7008 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which proscribes financial assistance to regimes that seized power in a coup.

Congress does the US and the world a disservice by legislating foreign policy in such Manichean terms [bold mine-DL]. All that does is to force the executive branch to torture the thesaurus in search of euphemisms and then resort to hypocrisy. A decade ago, when a junta overthrew the government of Egypt, another important African country, the administration of Barack Obama also wriggled out of using the word “coup,” to keep working with Cairo.

Kluth’s responses to the coup in Niger have been more than a little bizarre. Whether he has been fretting about the possible start of WWIII (no, really) or explaining why cutting off aid to military juntas is “daft,” he has managed to come up with takes on the situation that few others have managed. This is odd because the coup in Niger doesn’t matter that much in terms of U.S. interests or what happens in much of the rest of the world. The coup in Niger matters very much for that country and for its neighbors, and it is worth covering and discussing for that reason, but the U.S. could—and should—withdraw its troops from Niger as soon as possible and it wouldn’t be that much of a problem.