The Biden Administration's Unbalanced Approach to the Junta in Burkina Faso

It should be a fairly easy call to refuse to support a junta that commits such atrocities.

The Washington Post reports on the Biden administration’s attempt to have things both ways in how it deals with the junta in Burkina Faso:

The Biden administration faces a dilemma in West Africa: Should the United States help a country run by a military junta with a troubling record on human rights or risk the country’s losing territory to Islamic extremists and partnering with Russian mercenaries?

The administration’s answer has been that it will choose to help the junta. The article frames this choice as part of a tough but necessary balancing act, but in doing so it lets the administration off the hook for making sketchy compromises that don’t even deliver on the security front. The U.S. should not be cooperating with the junta at all, and the belief it “has to” do this is based on several flawed assumptions about the interests that the U.S. has in the region. Whether it is tied to old “war on terror” thinking or the new “great power competition” approach, the U.S. is not advancing its interests by helping African states to militarize further.

U.S. policies helped to create the instability and violence in the Sahel by backing local militaries and encouraging them to wage counterinsurgencies against their own people. Now that Washington is faced with the failure of this approach, it finds itself reaching for the same useless tools. The government always has excuses for why backing some abusive authoritarian government is “necessary,” but the truth is that the U.S. chooses to throw in its lot with brutal regimes because it prizes influence with them over everything else.